TBP Sessions: Music Industry Relationships - Are They Destined to Fail or Is It Timing?

Music Industry Relationships - Are they Destined to Fail or is it Timing?

In this installment of The Busker Project Sessions, we’re talking about inspiration, relationships, and advice. The subject for this session is a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist in the folk/pop genre. We’re going to call him Jim. 

I wanted to do something different with this session, more prose versus the usual dry interview-style transcripts we share, which I’m hoping will provide a better understanding of the setting, the conversation, and the topic. 

Sitting there, lit by the embers of the dying fire we lit during the infancy of our session, Jim rocks backward in his seat, inhaling courage to answer the question I’d just asked. “Does the feeling fade over time as you sing a song repeatedly throughout a tour or string of concerts?” And I couldn’t help but notice the extra sip of whiskey before confirming what I meant. 

“You mean, do I still feel the same way I did when I wrote it?” he asks. My nod washes in some kind of ill-repressed memory that swallows Jim’s attention, leaving him gazing at the remnants of what used to be flames in the firebox, which had long since turned to ash. “We need more logs,” he says, darting out to the porch behind me to gather some and get the fire going again. I could tell, though, that the question marred him; or better said, the topic had been with him for longer than he cared to admit. I half-expected what I was about to hear, but it was the rawness of the answer that brought this session into the list of publishable sessions. 

“No,” he confessed, caressing his ring finger over his forehead while searching for the words he needed. “Some songs, like the stupid chorus-forward ‘hits’ that are in part inspired by breakups for relationships that wouldn’t have lasted past the year anyway, don’t really carry much feeling after we perform them live a few times and get them recorded. But other songs still bite. These are the ones that seem like they took just a couple of hours to write because everything I wanted to say was already there. I mean, the experiences that led me to write each one were huge pieces of my life, what makes me who I am.”

“Do life’s changes affect how these songs make you feel when you sing them?” I ask, not meaning to pry but wanting very much to understand his perspective. And it took a little coaxing to get the right words into play, but Jim eventually asked if by “life’s changes” I meant marriage, new love, or the addition of kids or something to that effect, and that’s exactly what I meant.

“Some of the deepest songs I ever written are about the same person.” 

“Never losing an ounce of nuance over the years?” I asked, intrigued. 

“No. Actually, I think I’ve approached it by writing from different perspectives of the same events. Like, one song might cover how I felt when she left for the last time. If you haven’t noticed by now, it’s a woman I’m referring to. Another song might cover how it felt to know that I couldn’t get her to even answer the phone for me anymore. Like my importance in her life had faded. And yet another song might cover the absolute devastation I felt to find out that she had moved on with someone else. Granted, I believe wholly that I wasn’t the right person for her, and I never gave her the things she needed from me. I’m simultaneously aware of the fact that someone else can and does love her better but not okay with that either.”  

“So, every time you sing one of those songs—?” I chime in. 

“I feel it,” Jim confirms. “I hurt all over again. I don’t know. Maybe I like torture and that’s why I keep writing them. You like miserable songs?”

"The funny thing is that I absolutely love tragic love stories. Those make up my favorite classic books, and breakup songs really do inspire a lot of my writing. I guess I'm just drawn to the idea of what if. What if it had worked out? What if all these obstacles weren't there?" 

Music Industry Relationships - Are They Destined to Fail or Is It Timing

It’s true what they say, humans can communicate with each other without ever saying a word. I believe all living beings can. This was the case right then, alone in that amber room with nothing but whiskey sours between us and the deafening silence of life experience that led me to confirm that new or long love can’t erase the shadow of love lost when such a love was enough to break the surface of the soul and cement itself on paper. I wondered. How much influence does a music career have over relationships? Are some just destined to fail by their very nature of pairing an expectant person with one stretched so thin? Or is it timing? 

Throughout The Busker Project, I learned a common fact. The beginning of a successful music career is the worst time to lay a foundation for a relationship that began prior. By beginning, I’m referring to the sphere of time after signing a contract, when you’re focused on recording either a much-anticipated debut album or a second album designed to make up for an underperforming first album. Why? I’ll let Jim explain it from his point of view, which is almost identical to everyone else’s to whom I’ve posed the question. 

“It takes a little while to understand that you can define yourself. Signing that contract sometimes feels like signing away your life and your rights. You don’t control all aspects of the music you make or are allowed to make. You don’t control where you’re going to be or on what days, who your circle will be comprised of, or even when you have a day off. You are, in essence, a product that is owned outright by everyone who manages you. Your job is to just show up wherever they tell you to, whenever they tell you to. In the beginning, you feel like you have to please everyone to keep that momentum going and not jeopardize your career. You don’t realize until years later, when you have some value under your belt, that these people will run you until you’ve got no go left in you if you let them.”  

“How does that affect your relationships?” I followup. 

“It can destroy them. One thing I’ve seen, time and time again, is that some of the people who will manage your career see your significant other as a distraction. They will intentionally book you on days you specifically requested they not. They’ll slowly push the people around you out of the picture by encircling you with yes people, ‘helping hands’ that aren’t helpful at all, and bad influences that seem to always want you to not go home. They won’t deliver messages from home or pass you the phone unless you specifically request that they do so. People don’t realize this. Unless you tell them that you want to take every call from home, if they are handling your phone, those calls will go straight to voicemail. Eventually, you end up with a partner who sits at home alone a lot. If they have their own career, they have to decide between what’s best for them and keeping the relationship alive. They have to live around your schedule, which isn’t fair.” 

Jim paused, taking a second, which I interpreted as some time to further regret past mistakes, and continued. “In those early days, you’re trying to prove yourself to everyone. That your music can make money for the label and everyone involved. It’s easy to be influenced by what they want, what they need, and you start to change. Your music changes into what they think will sell better. And you don’t realize it, but that resentment and stress slowly bleeds into your relationships. You’ve got the constant pressure of making sure the first album is great and that the second surpasses it. But what if the first album bombed? And the second wasn’t much better whether because your music became detached from your initial audience or your following just isn’t as big as they want it to be? You get snipped. It’s a lot of pressure, and when you have responsibilities at home, it can seem like too much, which leads to fights and partners thinking you don’t care or don’t want to give as much.”

Boundaries, Friendships, and Shepherd's Pie

“What Advice Would You Give to Artists at This Time of Their Career?”

“Boundaries. Set them early and follow them religiously. Learn to say no. Hire your own assistants with your interests in mind. I actually hired a virtual assistant that lives thousands of miles away from me because I kept running into people who weren’t really interested in assisting. They just wanted to be part of my entourage in some way. Which is weird.”

It was around here that our conversation shifted from the living room to the kitchen where Jim and I refreshed our drinks, and we took catacorner seats at the breakfast nook and kept talking over some leftover shepherd's pie. “How does that work? I’ve been a VA before, but how does it work for you, specifically?” I revived the topic. 

“She’s great. I talk to her every day, multiple times a day. She handles my meetings, some calls, pretty much everything. She plans my whole day, sometimes, and makes sure to block off time for my family.”

“What else would you advise to newbies?” 

“Remember to keep the people who supported you close. Don’t be afraid to make new friends along the road, but pick them based on your gut. If you can relate to them, or feel like they’d be a good person to have a quiet evening with just talking, that’s the kind of friend you need. I’m not saying you can’t have friends who are wild at parties, but those are usually fairweather friends whose connection to you is always going to be based on what you can give them or good times you can show them. A real, sober friend, for days when you want nothing to do with the outside world, is gold. 

“Sober?”

“I mean people who aren’t constantly strung out. Obviously, I’ve got no problem with having drinks and such. What did you put in this?”

“Why? Do you like it?”

“Yeah. It hits the spot. You said you like tragic love stories, right? You ever write about that? Like does that interest also appear in your writing?”

"Yes. I'm afraid so. Most of the stories I've drafted are tragic indeed. There's one I'm working on that is just absolutely torture for my protagonist. And a lot of my poetry is the same. Some stories have happy endings, more or less, but most of them have at least some range of tragedy for someone involved."  

"You write poetry?" he asked me, lifting his gaze from the plate and jerking his head. 

"Sometimes. It was the first type of literature I ever wrote as a kid. You write poetry, too. Music like yours is poetry. Moving poetry that can tell a lifetime of a story in just a few minutes."

"Can I read some?" he asked. I obliged, stepping away for a minute to collect some poems I had stored in a box by my desk, most of which were not yet published. I shared some from the blog such as "How Handsome You've Grown," "The Taste of Summer," and "The Taste of You is Haunting Me," which are three short poems about love lost that I don't particularly regard as my best work, but hold a dear place in my heart.  

Our session ended about an hour later, with me packing away the rest of the shepherd’s pie leftovers in a bag for him to take at his request, and the experience led me to a full night of listening to broken-hearted music by the fire, gathering silent perspectives from vocalists who too had etched past loves onto the recorded stone known as masters. 

About The Busker Project

The Busker Project is a character development initiative designed to gather the deepest nuances surrounding the drastic changes a musician endures on the journey from a busker to a signed artist.

It also explores how those changes affect their interpersonal relationships, the people around them, and their own expectations of what success means, even when it comes with a decrease in artistic license and freedom to do what brings them joy.

The Busker Project is an integral part of the novel-writing process for the book I'm currently working on, which is based on a fictional musician. The exact details of the book are only shared with selected participants.

Read More:

Writing

Writing Short Stories: Creating Compelling Characters and Plots in Limited Space
8 Comma Rules and Uses

Reading

Classic Books About Tragic Love Stories (with Movies) - No Spoilers
Book Review: Island of the Lost by Joan Druett
May 2023 Q&A with Freya Larsen

Poetry

Poetry - How Handsome You've Grown
Poetry - The Taste of Summer
Poetry - The Taste of You is Haunting Me