It should be common knowledge at this point that the music industry is at best, unkind to the psyche, at worst, straight up soul destroying. The saving grace is really the people and those little magic moments on stage or in the studio when everything comes perfectly together. The problem lies in the freelance work lifestyle, from the outside the public will only see you performing with people, or highlight reels of studio time where you’re surrounded by musicians who look like they’re having the time of their lives. Unfortunately, this is not the norm. More often than not, you’re alone planning, practising, mixing, preparing projects, or any number of other tasks that have to be ticked off in order to maintain some semblance of a functioning life.
I had a friend in the studio last night for a cup of tea, like any proper Englishman should. We chatted about the industry and life in general, the choices we made to get to the point where we are today. The main thing that i took away from his visit, is that we may certainly work alone most of the time, we are most definitely, not alone in our problems. The weight of the work and lifestyle we choose isn’t an isolated problem resting only upon your shoulders. It’s a double edged sword that I live by, when I say “You can’t rely on anyone’, it’s not a put down of colleagues or friends, it’s to say that nobody is going to do the work for you, you have to pull up your socks and do the grind, get s**t done. The other side of that sword, if you don’t have friends and colleagues around you, you are almost certainly going to fail. You are both solely responsible and completely dependent.
So as i sit in my studio, after a day of working by myself, feeling like the studio is my Fortress of Solitude, I have to take a moment to appreciate that I most certainly am not alone, that if the shit hits the fan, I have a solid and reliable base that at the very worse, are going to have an open ear to listen to me bitch and moan for an hour. So please, next time you’re feeling like the industry has chewed you up and spat you out, remember, you are most certainly not alone and you’re only a text message away from somebody who’ll help.