THE COST OF DOING NOTHING

The cost of doing nothing is high.

Gas prices on a long weekend high.

Romaine lettuce high.

Hotels in Toronto high.

There’s a hidden price tag hanging on the sleeve of nothing. The upfront cost might not visible, but the interest rate is just waiting to bite you in the ass.

Trust us, it hurts.

By doing nothing when we dream of doing something, we can trick ourselves into thinking we’re playing it safe and making a rational, low risk decision.

Is that what we want on our tombstone ?

Safe.

Rational.

Low risk.

To each their own when it comes to tombstone adjectives. It’s your funeral. But if you’re reading this you’re probably an artist, or you work with artists and you know as well as we do that those words don’t make good art.

They also don’t make a good career plan.

Great artists don’t play it safe. They take risks. They make irrational decisions in pursuit of the vision in their head. They don’t follow. They lead down a path they are paving themselves. That’s how you get to be great.

Doing nothing is not something great artists do. And if you wanna be great, you can’t do it either.

It’s easy to play it safe. It’s easy to get lazy, or scared, or overwhelmed. Apathetic. Discouraged. Cocky. Any of those feelings can become roadblocks to doing what you set out to do. There’s no judgment here. We’re flawed humans, easily bumped off course by the shitstorms that come with daily life. Art doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it happens smack dab in the middle of a life you’re trying to live with a ton of moving parts.

It’s hard to be an artist and still be everything else you need to be.

This isn’t meant to be critical. It’s meant to be a gentle kick in the ass in the hopes that the bite doesn’t hurt as much later. Every artist has a vision. Having the confidence and daily commitment to making it happen is what sets the great ones apart.

If you lie awake thinking about the things you want to do, don’t let the morning smack you in the face with reasons you can’t do them. You’re not gonna execute on everything all at once, but start with the things you can do. The small things. The way you think. The way you use your time. The confidence in your own decision making. Create a plan. Stick to a schedule. Take risks.

Those things will help to turn nothing into something and make you feel like you’re moving instead of standing still.

Nothing is a trap. It’s a terrible answer to ‘What have you been up to’ ? Or ‘What are you working on’ ? It’s an answer an artist can’t afford to give. The cost is just too high.

If we can be of any help turning nothing into something, reach out and let us know.

We’ve seen the price tag and it ain’t worth paying.

THE DEATH OF GENRE

This is Mark. Throwing up the devil horns while wearing a Justin Bieber shirt. Totally makes sense if you know him. Offending metal heads and Beliebers all in one go.

Except nobody’s offended, because genres don’t mean shit.

Remember mashups ? We’re living in one now, and the blender’s on high speed. The lines that used to get drawn around genre have been mostly obliterated, with artists free to incorporate the influence of any style they please.

Let’s look at country for a minute.

Pop country.

Rap country.

Rock country.

Let’s be honest, some days you gotta look hard for the actual country in country.

You can throw a banjo on a pop song and call it country, but why call it anything at all ? It’s music. And if it’s good, it’s good.

Outside of radio or DSP playlists, the adherence to strict genre guidelines is over, and even then it’s not hard to find songs being squeezed into a format where they wouldn’t traditionally belong. Because good is good. And when the fans talk, the industry listens. The biggest artists in the world are the ones crossing boundaries people told them they couldn’t cross.

This isn’t an argument for trying everything all at once. Having a style matters. Knowing what you do really well is important. But pushing yourself outside those antiquated genre lines to try something new is important too.

Banjo on your pop song doesn’t make it country. Distorted guitar on your country song doesn’t make it rock. Flute on your heavy metal song doesn’t make it chamber music, just ask Jethro Tull.

Nobody cares about genre as much as the industry tells you they do. That’s why Nickelback is headlining Boots and Hearts. On paper it doesn’t fit, but with today’s music fan, the fit makes sense.

Don’t be something you’re not. But if what you are is a product of the musical blender, don’t worry about what to call it, as long as you can call it good. Embrace the death of genre and skip the funeral. There’s a new life with less rules and a whole whack load of fans that don’t care what you call yourself as long as they love it.

FINDING THE BALANCE

Photo credit - Cody Mcivor

Work / life / balance. We’ll be the first to admit this industry can be a tough one to juggle. Sometimes it feels like if you’re not pulling double duty, you’re falling behind. Other times it feels like you’re literally bending over backwards to make shit happen. But we were never promised easy right ? The big picture view of a successful life is always going to be painted by pulling double duty or triple duty or balancing a sword on your chin while dancing and saying the alphabet backwards.

It’s more complicated than we think.

In the music industry it’s easy to measure ‘success’. That’s what metrics are for. We get to look at ourselves and other artists and managers and labels and use all the available numbers to quickly gauge how much of a ‘success’ somebody is.

Except that only measures one small part of how well we’re doing. There’s a whole bunch of stuff hiding under the numbers that says a lot more about our success than ticket sales or chart position.

Striking that balance between the things that look good to the outside world, and the things that feel good when you come home after work, is what’s really gonna define our level of happiness.

Trust us when we say when you prioritize the right things, the rest of it gets [a little] easier. Relationships matter. The time invested in them matters. The time invested in ourselves outside of our career matters. Prioritize your personal life, and your professional life will be better supported. Prioritize your health and you’ll have energy to pour into your craft. Prioritize other people, and you’ll have a reason to be proud even when things don’t go your way. Hint: “the grind” has more to do with sharpening than suffering.

Sharpen the emotional tools and the artistic ones get sharper too.

Investing in the parts of your life that don’t show up in your artist bio is actually a big time investment in your career. You need to balance the thing you do, with the people you do it for. It’s never gonna be easy, it’s hard to hit a target doing 3 things at once. But focusing on the balance instead of the bullseye means even if you miss, you’ll have a life that makes you happy.

That sounds like success to us.