o t h e r t i m e

Every artist has to make tough decisions throughout the course of his career. The world isn’t what it was even fifty years ago and though the opportunities are more plentiful than ever, the restrictions we take on for a multitude of reasons remain. One of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever had to make was about The Day Job.

It’s such a cliche now. With the death of the system of patronage that Mozart lived with through the bohemian ideal and up to the artist as a Jack Keroac style wanderer there has been a thread that is tacitly accepted: the artist will take as given that his living will come from something other than his creative work.

In the 20th century, the academy took on the arts. An artist who wanted to eat was well advised to take up teaching. The success of this, with a good deal of time in the rear-view mirror, has been limited. Not all great artists are great teachers. And not all great teachers are great artists. If the aim of a university is to educate, then it might not be served by hiring a great artist who is a poor teacher. But if the aim is something deeper, such as the prestige that comes with housing a great artist and supporting the furthering of the work and research, well, that’s an entirely different story.

The time that I was making my decision about how I would feed and clothe myself was the dot com boom. I have a knack for coding and can translate from nerd to normal and back again. These are skills that were and still are in demand. Teaching was something that I truly enjoyed, but the politics surrounding something that I loved so dearly put me off. I decided to live a more explicitly dual life. I mean that in the sense that someone who is a professor and an artist is living a dual life but it doesn’t look like it. Teaching painting and painting are two different things. Someone who spends ten hours a day teaching studio classes probably isn’t making much headway with her own work. Very few people identify that split, so let’s be clear: teaching music isn’t composing in the same way that writing software isn’t composing. But at the end of the day, one of them pays better.

I enjoy software development. It tickles a part of my brain that needs attention. I really do love the challenges that come part and parcel with the industry. It’s fun, but it’s not music. It’s not love. It’s work. And it’s work in the same way that recording commercials was work and writing music for videos was work. It does pay. And it does further my goals of creating music. But why not something else? Why not suffer for my art? I mean, where’s that Byronic ideal?

I have a family.

My wife and children are my entire world. I have no idea how I lived without them and I can’t imagine doing anything that would get in the way of them having everything that they need to be happy and healthy. Are there days when I would rather be composing than sitting at work? Sure. But there are no days that I don’t want my kids to eat. There is never a time that I don’t want to have a roof over their heads. And I never want them to worry about the basics.

So how does that work? How do I satisfy the drive that I have to do something that I honestly believe I was put on the earth to do? One hour at a time.

8 PM to 9 PM is my time. I hide in my studio and record, arrange, and compose. Do I wish I had 5 or 6 hours? Of course! But there is a world of difference in the way I look at the world when I acknowledge what I have versus what I want. So I bust my butt to do as much as I can with that hour. I think about that hour in my spare cycles. On my commute. At lunch. I prepare for it so that when I get there I am all business. I set goals. I concentrate. I focus. I get things done! Amazing things can happen in sixty minutes. And instead of lamenting it as ONLY an hour I turn it around to having a WHOLE hour! The difference is staggering. For example, I wrote two songs tonight in less than an hour.

We live in a time when people are fractured. Our lives are compartmentalized and yet there is a continuity in who and what we want to be. Listening to my gut, keeping my mind on what I need, and accepting the fact that there will always be work has created a place for my music and dreams in my very real life.

My acceptance letter to NYU’s music technology graduate program was one of the most exciting letters I have ever opened. It was a unique program. There were brilliant opportunities for anyone who wanted to get involved and hustle. I was 22 and had never been to New York City. In fact, I’d never lived outside of Ohio. I was in the very small pond that was the Baldwin-Wallace Conservatory of Music. I wrote in a journal at the time that I knew I was going to be testing myself. Looking back on it now, I had no idea what I was talking about.

I got on a train in Cleveland and got off at Penn Station. I had a guitar, a duffel bag, and a suitcase. Somehow, I got a cab and made it to my student apartment on E. 26th St. My apartment was on the 22nd floor where my bedroom, such as it was, looked out on the twin towers.

In a single day my mind was completely blown.

The classes were brilliant. My teachers were all accomplished musicians, scholars, and creators. I was surrounded by art and music. I couldn’t turn my head without seeing something that I’d never seen before. It was a complete and total sensory overload. Within a week of arriving I had scheduled my classes, started school, and found two jobs. Not bad for four days work. Of the memories that come flooding back there is one that stands out above the rest:

I completely lost my ability to write music.

In the comparative safety of my dorm room in the bedroom community outside of Cleveland, I could do almost anything. Sitting down at a baby grand piano in a practice room and pounding out page after page was almost effortless. Even if what came out was garbage, sitting down to start it was easy. Somewhere I had the confidence to know that 90% of what is done is crap and finding the 10% is where the genius of a composer lies. In short, there was no risk involved. But in the center of the world where even homeless guys playing in subways had better chops than I did, the intimidation factor killed any level of confidence I might have had.

There is a powerful energy in New York. Anyone who has spent time there can feel it. It vibrates at the frequency of the soul. Every action comes alive and there is a sense of urgency to even the simplest of tasks. The darker side of that energy is the anxiety. Making rent. Eating more than one meal a day. Being in the right place at the right time. Recognizing opportunities. Not slipping into the realm of prey (on many levels). I wasn’t ready for that – not that there is a way to prepare for it.

All of this was put into relief the first time I visited home after being in the city. I tried to sleep on the couch at my mom’s house but I couldn’t fall asleep no matter how hard I tried. At about 2 AM it dawned on me that it was too quiet. Too. Quiet. To. Sleep. I was hooked on that city buzz and hadn’t yet learned to manage it.

For a year I wrote little to nothing. It felt like so much was completely lost. But in that time, there were so many new things to cram into my head. I wrote software. I learned to create things for the web – the 1995 web. Ya know, before The Web. I met people and listened to music I had never heard before. I read voraciously. After all, what’s cheaper than the library? I lived my life on the streets wandering from gallery to shop to museum to library to concert and back again. I played the part of the tourist on some days and the hardened city dweller on others. I was too poor for the subway so I saw everything on foot. My mind expanded and my world got so much larger.

If I hadn’t gone to NYU I certainly wouldn’t be sitting where I am today. There’s no path to my wife and kids that doesn’t pass through the city. And I don’t think I could have gone to the city at that time without a reason like school to support the effort. I didn’t have the courage for that. It’s impossible to measure what I gained by spending those years there. My work was influenced by people like Robert Rowe and Mark Coniglio in profound ways. Thinking about it excites whatever creative gland in my brain isn’t completely sleep deprived in these early new baby days.

New York City changes a person in a fundamental way. I don’t know how it works when one is older, but at the age of 22 it was like tossing whatever vision I had of myself into a blender and walking away a very different person. I think about my buddy Kevlar who has done essentially the same thing but without the motivation of school and I’m alternately extremely proud and mildly jealous. Experiences like that can’t be recaptured and the effect on one’s work is profound.

Sadly, I haven’t been back since I left in my buddy Chip’s purple truck heading west to Ohio and then on to Minnesota. I was fried when we emerged on the other side of the tunnel. I couldn’t live there anymore, but a good part of me never really left.