constant yearning

These days, when the sun is blazing like it's competing with July, the birds are chirping at the top of their lungs and the first magnolias are budding a fleshy pink (alas, a state of affairs that is officially coming to an end tonight: the forecast calls for rain and then a marked cooling off from a high of 27 today to a more seasonal 10 degrees) - anyway, these days it's hard to concentrate on work. All I want to do is spend time outside. But work I must and as I type or make calls or email or search the net and all my other office tasks, thoughts occur to me about the nature of my work. See, the thing is, I am musician. In other words, I pay the mortgage by playing music to paying audiences. But in recent months and years, increasingly I am a musician only at night, when actually playing! During the day, there is no time to practice my guitar, no time to write tunes and precious little time even for the horn arrangements that I must write for my band. During the day, I am an office stiff: I spend every available minute in front of the computer and the fax machine and on the phone. Granted, there is no boss breathing down my neck, I can take my lunch breaks when I please and I don't have to commute to work on the subway with an army of desperate zombies. Nevertheless, there is very little in my day that has to do with music. Gone are the days when I would just pick up my guitar and write a tune, when I would dream about my tune being bought by a big time publisher and sung by a big time star. Gone are, in a word, the days of constant yearning, replaced by days of constant churning.

I guess many musicians solve this dilemma by hiring an agent. I've never had a full time agent working for me but I have been working with one part-time. This actually works out fine, except I don't receive a sufficient number of bookings this way to make ends meet. Also, my own bookings tend to be better "career" gigs - i.e. concerts and such, whereas agency bookings are usually long and exhausting bar gigs.

The startling thing is that, although alarmed by this development at first, I have grown accustomed to it. Sure, I'd love to have a manager and a full time agent, people to take care of the business business so that I can take care of the music making business practice. Yet, I have now been doing the administrative side of things for so long that I wouldn't be able to let go. No new songs get written but the mortgage is getting paid.