My work situation has mutated a lot during the course of working on this project. For most of the first half, I worked part-time as an annotator at the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) while actively touring and playing in Grandchildren. After that, I worked full-time as a video engineer at George Blood Audio/Video/LP while still doing Grandchildren and art selection for Talking Writing. During that time, I also got married, bought a fixer-upper, and started teaching myself how to renovate. When my wife got pregnant, it was decided that I would stay home with the kid. I began focusing on remote work that I could do during the brief child care downtime, so I went back to the LDC and increased my role at Talking Writing.
Throughout all of this, I have been chipping away at Weird Music in the cracks between my other duties. While I was single and renting a room in a house, I worked on the live music every night and spent the hours until bedtime editing and working things through on the computer. During renovations, I’d set up all my gear in a room that wasn’t finished but wasn’t actively being worked on, rotating my practice space around the house while I completed each room. When I recorded the final audio version of Weird Music, I recorded most of the horns during my son’s nap times and then recorded the bass and keyboard at night.
Trying to figure out a balance between your work, personal, and artistic lives can be a huge challenge. I think part of the romanticism that people have about being an artist comes from the misconception that they just get to make art all day. In On Writing, Stephen King said that something like 5% of artists make their living off of art, which seems high from my experience. I think it’s really important to emphasize that the vast majority of artists create in addition to the same daily responsibilities that nonartists have.
I sometimes fall into thinking that this struggle is particular to our current society, but that’s totally not true. In Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks uses a quote from Memoirs by Hector Berlioz that speaks directly to this point. While he was struggling with his wife’s medical expenses, he got an idea for a symphony but resisted writing it.
I shall spend perhaps three or four months on the work (I took seven to write Romeo and Juliet), during which time I shall do no articles, or very few, and my income will diminish accordingly. When the symphony is written I shall be weak enough to let myself be persuaded by my copyist to have it copied, which will immediately put me a thousand or twelve hundred francs in debt. Once the parts exist, I shall be plagued by the temptation to have the work performed. I shall give a concert, the receipts of which will barely cover one half of the costs—that is inevitable these days. I shall lose what I haven’t got and be short of money to provide for the poor invalid, and no longer able to meet my personal expenses or pay my son’s board on the ship he will shortly be joining.
Memoirs was published in 1878 and could just as easily have taken place today. Even as I write this, I’m going through the same dilemma, only without risking the security of my family. Putting out the Weird Music album, booking and playing shows, and compiling this podcast series has all been at the expense of doing work that I could be getting paid for. And when it’s done, I need to pivot and focus on paid work in order to get back on track.
Check out the Weird Music album on Bandcamp, iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify, and all other places where you can find music.
I’ve never been paid any significant amount of money from music. Throughout my adult life I’ve worked either part time or full-time hours while also trying to keep music a priority. A cycle has repeated itself over and over again where I’ll prioritize art for a stretch of time while still working but at a lesser degree, then I’ll get sick of never having any money and prioritize my paid work until I’m solvent again. After working for a long time, I’ll start feeling like having the money isn’t worth ignoring my artistic drive and fall back into creativity until I have no money again.
This has somewhat changed since getting married and having a child. My wife has always been passionate about her work, and I’ve attained more stability because of that. For the past five years I’ve been a stay-at-home parent and my challenge has been to balance fatherhood, part-time work, and my art. In practical terms it’d make the most sense to just stop trying to make the art, but I feel like I’d be giving up a sense of meaning and purpose that would impact my mental health.
On a societal level, the lack of financial support or compensation for art means that it’s often the first thing to drop out of people’s lives as they get older and their responsibilities increase. Even though it can be difficult, I think it’s very important to continue practicing art as you age, but that can sometimes be an unpopular opinion. Or maybe it’s a popular opinion that rarely gets heeded because no one feels like they have enough time.
On the one hand, I worry that the lack of funding for and devaluation of the arts is making it a less important part of our daily lives. But on the other hand, the sheer volume of people out there making art despite the hurdles, and the fact that art is getting consumed at higher levels shows me that it’s still a necessary function of being human.
Aron Wahl: We pay our practice space rent and we pay for gas. Usually. {laugh}
John Atkinson: So we’re not losing money.
Aron Wahl: It’s the only hobby I’ve ever had that’s not losing money. But it means more than a hobby.
Josh Bonati: Yeah, if you’re going to call it a hobby, it’s probably a serious hobby. But it’s in that nice middle position where no one takes home any money from the band, but the band sustains itself for the most part. The band can pay its overhead essentially, which is pretty nice.
Martin Schmidt: The terrible thing about trying to make your living or making your living from doing your art is that you start changing your art to make a living better. Because we’re all practical animals, human beings, and it’s like, “If I’m trying to live better by doing this, I should do this in a way that enables me to live better.” It’s just simple logic, and I’m not sure that that produces the best art. If I took that to its extreme, if you are successful at it, it would produce more popular art. “I need to make something that appeals to more people.” But then you wind of with Dave Matthews.
Drew Daniel: It’s so individual. I think Michael Jackson didn’t wake up wishing he could sound like Merzbow and then realizing, “No, no! I need to sell records. What can I do?” I think he just happened to have an aesthetic that really did tap into something truly popular. I think, though, if you wake up and you’re Merzbow, you should be Merzbow. You shouldn’t worry about trying. And in fact he’s made a great living out of being that thing. So you get further in the long run by being quite selfish and pleasing yourself. Because if you try to second guess what you think people want, inevitably you get it wrong and there’s nothing sadder than trying to sell out and failing.
Martin Schmidt: Yeah, the road is littered with people who tried to sell out and—
Drew Daniel: It didn’t work.
Martin Schmidt: Ouch.
Josh Bonati: We’ve had times where we’ve built up a little lump in the band fund and it just sits there. We don’t ever think, “We built up a couple thousand bucks let’s pay it out.” Usually there’s always bills to pay.
John Atkinson: I would like to do more car commercial-y music in a non-Aa project. I think that’s totally the way people make money.
Josh Bonati: The licensing stuff.
Aron Wahl: That’s going to be the only way.
John Atkinson: Aa should be something that’s apart from that because I hate the reality of music now where a lot of bands have to be sponsored by cars and liquor.
Josh Bonati: Because they’re taking up the void where the label used to be.
John Atkinson: And that’s totally fine. People have to make a living with this shit—or some people do—but it’s a privilege to not be in a situation where you have to do that. We’re all 90’s babies where at least I grew up with the idea that whenever I hear a song on a commercial or see some band’s sponsored by Mountain Dew or Ikea, the music should be something that’s apart, that’s a realm of transcendence and a realm of a special experience. It’s a part of the culture now that you have to be sponsored, which is totally fine, but it’s a privilege and a goal to make something that stands apart from that. Something that can take you out of that mindset and not something that’s reminding you of a car commercial.
Josh Bonati: And there’s never been any pressure to seek out some sort of commercial endorsement to pay the bills of the band. It’s a pretty cheap operation. So that’s really really nice to not have to do that. Like, “Fuck, I guess we’re going to have to sign that Bacardi contract because I live in the East Village and my rent’s $1800.”
John Atkinson: Or, “I don’t have a graduate degree.”
Drew Daniel: A lot rides here on how you’re going to cash out success. Do you mean popularity or do you mean artistic success? Because there are people who are popular artists who can bracket these questions and there are people who are popular artists who make their best work because they’re accountable to a marketplace.
Shakespeare is the ultimate example. Absolutely popular artist whose greatest works were done when he had the most economically at stake. The up-and-coming young Shakespeare who hasn’t yet tasted success is a much more derivative, much less interesting writer than the writer who’s truly counting the box office receipts, who’s a shareholder in his company. This is a middle class businessman.
So I think Shakespeare’s a great example of the idea that commerce can make art better, but for every Shakespeare there’s 99.9999 percent of the schmucks who make garbage precisely because they think that’s what people want. So perhaps he’s the exception that proves the rule.
Steve Touchton: If you want to be a musician and you want to keep your head above water and not drown, it seems to me—unless you’re lucky or an exception—there’s sort of two ways to do it. One is to get a job with a good salary and have that be what you spend most of your time doing and then have your music be a vanity project that’s funded by this outside thing. That’s one way to do it. But then the other one is you just gotta have lots of small streams of things that add up to enough to get by, because it’s just a logistical thing.
A solo project has obvious advantages and disadvantages as far as being able to go on tour and things like that compared to being in a band, juggling multiple schedules and that type of thing. So I think it’s just kind of a practical thing for us because at least right now none of us have proper career jobs that can fund our music. So we just gotta try to survive and find as many ways to be creative.
Greg Jamie: Everyone [in O’Death] has something else going on in their lives. I guess David is trying to just do music and he’s finding different ways to just be a living musician. So that’s challenging and I think for me it would feel like business too much or something. I think it’s really good for the band that we’re not going constantly. It’s possible, and if we never stopped and played two hundred shows a year every single year, I think we could be feeding ourselves, have a place to live, and probably wouldn’t be pocketing much. But it would drive us all crazy, drive the project crazy. And it could probably stifle the musical output, too.
Ryan Kattner: That’s another tough thing that goes back to digital distribution and sales. You’re stuck in this endless hustle where if you don’t keep touring and making records then you can’t sustain this livelihood. But then if you get into a situation where you’re swamped with employment responsibilities and obligations, then you don’t have time to make music and do that. It has to become a hobby. It took a good six years before I could quit terrible day jobs, but that was only because I wasn’t living anywhere and we were touring all the time.
Martin Gibson: It takes a lot of time to have a job, especially a job that’s very labor-intensive. [Working at Mambo Movers] gives you energy and it makes you feel like you’re being productive and you’re exercising. You’re making money off of it, it’s great, but it gets to be taking away too much time.
Billy Dufala: There’s a beginning and an end to every day, which is what I loved about that job. And it allows you incredible flexibility when it comes to making art or being in a band and touring. You will always bring your work home with you as far as annoying things that you need to vent and bitch about.
Matt Gibson: Or they’ll just be literally stuck in your side.
Billy Dufala: Right, you have like a slipped disc or something.
Vice Cooler: Touring was a main income for me for years, but I haven’t been touring that much this year. I feel like money, when you’re working a lot and you’re not as worried about it, it always goes back to zero. At the end of almost every month I’m panicking, “Fuck, I gotta pay this bill, I don’t have the money.” Then a check comes in or I get asked to DJ something. A show comes up that pays okay. So I’m always at zero, I’m never above it or below it. It’s always like when I need two hundred dollars and I don’t have it, something comes up or I can sell something.
Ches Smith: I do this all day. For instance today I was spending a lot of time writing things that I know for a fact will not make me any money at all. {laugh} So, it’s just what I do all day everyday and it happens to pay the rent, usually. {laugh}
I can’t think of a time honestly where I’ve not wanted to play. Because even if I’m writing something, say for this band Xiu Xiu, I know that royalties are going to come in off that eventually, but then we go and play a gig or I play an improv gig. It’s just mixing it up so much that it keeps it fresh for me.
Ryan Kattner: I guess the key factor is low quality of life. You sacrifice things that most people have like relationships and in my case living anywhere. I know people are able to balance these two things, I just don’t know how to do it.
Matt Gibson: It’s a weird balancing act. I feel like I want to be a musical artist and performer. How do I do that? Well, I need to spend as much time as possible practicing, creating, and recording or playing or meeting with other musicians. And having any job that’s not involved in that, especially one that is just straight up lifting heavy shit all day, is not really doing that.
Other than being able to hum a tune in your head, and nowadays having a phone [that] can record, “While I was moving boxes I came up with a cool little beat. I recorded it on my phone and went home and recorded it.” Other than that kind of outlet, you can spend the entire day just wishing you were home playing music.
But if you’re at home playing music, you’re not paying rent. So what the fuck? It’s fun, but I’m constantly searching for ways to create more time outside of the job to [create]. It’s weird, I don’t consider Mambo my job, I consider music my job. Mambo’s just how I pay for everything. {laugh}
Billy Dufala: But that’s your own psychological twist on it.
Matt Gibson: Exactly, exactly. That’s not the reality.
Billy Dufala: Because Man Man’s my job. Without putting a psychological twist on it, that is how I provide myself a living. And where Mambo is what allows you to do music, Man Man more or less has made it possible for me to make a lot of the sculpture and work I do with my brother. I guess I’d be doing it through Mambo if I was never in Man Man, but I don’t think I would’ve been able to do it in the same scope that I have.
I definitely found myself in a weird situation with the industry changing. Just the simple idea that you make a certain amount to provide yourself a livelihood outside of being in a band and you get used to that. Then all of the sudden you come back from tour and you don’t have to work at the moving company or the coffee shop, so you have time to do what it is that you also want to do.
For my situation now, I got a big scare where you get off a tour and you have the money that you have, then you’re so busy and obligated with doing these other things that you don’t have the time to work those other jobs if you had to. But now all of the sudden you have to because the touring isn’t making as much money as it used to. Then all of the sudden it’s like, “Well shit. How’s this work?” And then somehow it flip flops and it makes sense again. You go on a tour and you manage to make enough money to allow yourself to have all that time off again.
But it’s not a very straight and narrow. It’s a weird way of going through a year and making ends meet, getting your projects done and meeting the needs of your creative output. But it’s very interesting and it’s exciting. Man Man definitely is the way that I make a living right now, supplemented by occasionally selling work with me and my brother [Steven], or doing another project that pays.
Man Man, it’s always a priority, so you’re figuring out what the band needs to do and planning around that. And that’s not always easy. It can be very frightening for me because I’m the youngest out of a family of five. I’m always trying to make sure that whatever I do isn’t contradictory to what anybody else wants to do. So it’s frightening to actually be emailing somebody, “I have to take all this time off in the Spring to do the art shows, or to make this installation, so I can’t do any touring. I hope everybody’s okay with this. Woo Hoo!”
And everybody will be fine with it, but it’s weird and I don’t know how that’s going to change. We already know Spring and Fall are when bands tour and you’re doing one-offs through the summertime, but how’s that going to pan out in the future? I don’t know. I’ve been maintaining thus far, but it’s still an interesting juggle when you really do have this other thing at home that you’re trying to do. Which for me it’s another career. It’s what I want to do and what I plan on doing for the rest of my life is making work like that.
Matt Gibson: What I’d like to try to get out of creative endeavors in the future, even if I’m still spending time doing non-creative things like moving furniture, [is] to figure out a way to make concentrated schedules where you can get the most out of your time.
Because what happens, like what Billy was talking about, is that throughout your year, you have different projects. Whether it be in two completely separate worlds—like having to make a sculpture, doing art shows and then having to write, rehearse, play, and go on tour in a band, or maybe go schlep some boxes and couches for people to make ends meet—you create this really weird, random [schedule with everything] on top of each other.
There’s never a way to be like, “Well, I have an art show here at this time, so I’m going to spend this time and devote it all to this, get it done, and have the best thing happen. Then right after that we’re going to do music time. We’re going to make an album and then I’m going to be able to tour on it for a considerable amount of time and actually come home with some money. And then get home and go right back and do that.” But instead, it’s like, “We can tour for a little bit, but I gotta do this over here,” and everyone on top on that. It gets really spread out and hard to have these concentrated, really high-productive times. You have to learn how to juggle it in such a way where everything can still be productive.
Josh Bonati: If the band was a job we might start to hate it like you hate a job. So it’s nice that it’s not that. Because that might definitely influence how we do the band. And there’s a huge pile of examples of bands where you could literally listen to their output and say, “All right this is the obvious point where they started to really think about the marketing of the song.” You know, “Let’s cut that weird part off we used to do because no one’s going to buy this song.” We’ve never had to do that, so that’s a relief.
Joe Meno: My first two books were on St. Martins and my second book was on HarperCollins, which is the biggest commercial publisher. I was really just disillusioned and disappointed with my experience working with HarperCollins where they didn’t allow me to get involved with the cover design, they didn’t allow me to get involved with the marketing or the publicity.
It was almost like they were a printer you send your manuscript to, they put it out, and you’re completely divorced from this thing you spent all this time working on. I felt like, “Who knows the book better than the person who wrote it?”
Then I went with Akashic for my third book, Hairstyles, and I just felt so gratified. It was a much more enjoyable, interesting experience being involved with the cover design and the marketing and the publicity and going on tour.
As I mentioned, I grew up playing in bands, so it seemed elemental to me, you make a book, you go out on tour. When my second book came out I said to HarperCollins, “I want to go out on tour.” And they were like, “Well, no one really wants you to come.” And I said, “I don’t care. Just tell ‘em I’m coming anyway. Send them an email, or see who I have to talk to.” Because I wasn’t a big name or I was relatively unknown they just didn’t want to put in the time and energy. So because of that, the book just didn’t get as many reviews or wasn’t widely received.
And so with Hairstyles I said, “I’m going to go do a thirty-city tour.” Even if that means you go do a [sparsely attended] reading. I did a reading somewhere in Virginia and walked in—I was touring with two other writers—and I could tell like the guy behind the counter was like, “Oh, nobody’s here.” And so he calls his friends up real quick and there’s three of us on tour and four people in the audience. And I was completely happy because we ended up getting this great review in the local paper, the bookstore ends up putting the book in a certain place. You build up a great relationship with the bookstore word of mouth.
So as long as you’re not disappointed that only four people show up, it’s just like being on tour. And then over years you start seeing people. Some of the same people come and they bring their friends, and that’s what’s happened with my career.
But a big house like that, they don’t want to do anything that’s going to make them look silly and they don’t want to put money into anything that’s not a safe bet. So what I really enjoy is working with independent publishers like Akashic and Norton that are a little more willing to take risks, whether in terms of cover design or in terms of the promotion. They realize that it takes a little gamesmanship to get attention for a book. So anything you can do outside of simply, “Let’s put the book out and see what reviews come in,” which was my experience with these corporate houses, feels really gratifying and exciting.
Share this post