Photo credit: Shawn Poynter Photography
Tell us about your tour vehicle. Any notable breakdown stories?
My first tour vehicle was a Chevy Malibu classic & it was delightful and only broke down once right outside of Nashville. It was expensive and I had to move back in with my parents for a while because of it. Yay!
How do you eat cheaply and/or healthy while on tour?
I really love bananas & yogurt & granola. I’ve also got some omega-3 trail mix riding shotgun and, of course, gotta drink a lot of water. I also swipe all them granola bars and shit from the green room. Gobble gobble.
How many strings do you break in a typical year? How much does it cost to replace them?
I don’t break many strings because I’m a lot better these days at gauging the miles on them. I worked on ships for a while and would need to swap strings twice a week. Nowadays I use lighter strings actually and I change them every 10-15 gigs probably? Wiping them down with a cloth to get the acidic sweat off adds a lot of time to them but, ultimately, I just monitor the color and tone of the strings. I used to buy in bulk but now I usually just buy a handful of packs. I use D’Addario 80/20 phosphor bronze strings & they’re usually around $10 I think?
Where do you rehearse?
I am a solo artist so the world is my rehearsal space. I do have a room in my house that is a dedicated studio space where I tinker & work through songs. The only crazy experience I’ve had there really is probably conjuring the ghost of Janis Joplin but it was a mistake and we all had a nice laugh about it.
What was the title and a sample lyric from the first song that you wrote?
The first song I wrote is difficult to nail down? But the first one I charted out and wrote with proper chords and everything was called “Never Seen” and it was basically just a worship song. “I’ve never seen love that never ends like this and I want to show the world the way it feels.” And, yes, I had a bit of a fake British accent.
Describe your first gig.
My first gig was for a church coffeehouse in Mexico, NY. It was a “coffee house” in that we played live music and billed it as a concert and not a service? I don’t understand this cultural moment but I don’t think it’s happening anymore.
What was your last day job? What was your favorite day job?
I parted ways with my last day job about a month ago. Prior to the pandemic I was a full time musician but when Covid hit, I ended up getting a job with some friends of mine who own a small business in Knoxville called ScanStore. Coincidentally, that was easily my favorite straight job I’ve ever had. Really considerate and respectful people who have consistently been so supportive and warm. I miss them—actually, my first week off I kept hitting folks up in the company chat, totally refusing to move on.
How has your music-related income changed over the past 5-10 years? What do you expect it to look like 5-10 years from now?
For years, music was just kind of a barely break even or in the red situation. Like… 10+ years haha. I worked cruise ships sometimes and made decent money at that but I blew it quick too.
In 2018, soon after my kid was born, I quit my straight job at US Bank and went into doing odd construction jobs with my buddy Jason Hanna. He taught me a lot of little stuff and that made me fairly handy—though I’m sure he’d consider me one of the worst hired hands he’s had!
About four or five months before the pandemic hit, I moved over into full time music for the first time in a while. I was playing 4 shows a week or so at $150-$200 a pop so it wasn’t amazing but it also was more than I could make with no degree in this economy.
$15 an hour goes a lot less far than people think. They were paying me $125 a day to paint houses, though, and I hated it. Really changed the way I thought about music. I built a radius around Knoxville of 3 hour drives. I figured If I could make $150 plus tips 3 hours away, then that’d be about an 8-9 hour work day for more pay than I’d make painting houses and I’d rather drive 6 hours.
That’s the best way to make a living at this… to frame it against the cost of labor and keep reminding yourself that it’s labor. Tough to say what the next 5-10 years will look like but I don’t have a straight job anymore so I guess I’ll keep using a little of my creative energy to figure out where to make $150 for a day’s labor.
What one thing do you know now that you had wished you knew when you started your career in music?
Songwriting is a strange kind of magic and when you start at it—especially when you get your first big idea—it’s easy to think that you’ve caught something from beyond the veil—AND YOU HAVE.
But the visceral response to that is frequently “this is whole and perfect and must be preserved.” I guarded against revision & toiling at the song for years because I found it to be dishonoring the magic.
What I’ve learned is that the magic strikes when the magic strikes but a good magician takes it and learns to hold it and how to use it. Being able to competently control the magic and shape it, to help it find its voice, to build a vehicle with the craft to bring the magic to people… that’s worthwhile and it takes work.
Another thing—related—is that IT’S ALL WORK. People say “you gotta write every single day” and I just don’t agree with that at all. You have input and output and if you aren’t drinking in, then what are you pouring out?
Read books, ABOUT ANYTHING—and pay attention to the narrative arc, to the character development, the descriptive language and the words that call to you.
Listen to music, deconstruct it, pay attention to what the instruments are doing, to what the songs are doing structurally.
Watch films—notice the way color and shade impact the emotions you feel, the way the language the characters use inform how you perceive them.
Get to know people and learn their stories and the way they tell them and the way they inhabit them.
Everything is work if you’re doing it right and it will all come out on the page when the magic hits. The more creative hacks you have in your pallet, the quicker & easier it will be to build a stronger body for that magic to live inside of.