The Humblemaker

Check your ego at the airport

(At The Bluebird Cafe just after I arrived in Nashville TN)

It’s said that moving to a new city is as stressful as the death of a loved one, loss of a job, getting divorced, or buying a house.

When you move somewhere new, every day you’re doing unfamiliar things, making thousands of tiny decisions about things that will - eventually - become automatic.

From determining the fastest route to work or deciding which car insurance to buy, to trying to figure out where you can get that special breakfast cereal you love (or something that is even vaguely similar).

Your brain works harder than usual each day as you learn your new environment and, without the benefit of any habitual tasks, every small thing requires more effort and energy at first. The sudden immersion in a new environment is profoundly disorienting.

It’s also one of the best things you can do to keep your ego under control.

I’ve started over three times in the last twenty years - four if you count moving back to New Zealand between the second and third relocations - and the aspect of relocation that has always struck me as a musician, is how incredibly humbling it is.

No matter how good you are, no matter how long you’ve been working in music, you arrive in a new city at the bottom of the pecking order.

Unless you arrive with a full-time gig lined up, you have to start from scratch; meeting people, jamming, building relationships, and working for little or nothing at first. If you’re already good at what you do it doesn’t take as long as someone starting out for the first time, but it still takes a while.

And it always takes longer than you think it will.

Surviving that frustrating dearth of gigs (emotionally and financially) is the ultimate humblemaker. A profound reminder of how much you want to play and that you’ll do anything to be working consistently again.

I remember in my early London days catching a train over an hour south lugging my upright bass and GK combo amp to play a 3-hour jazz gig, making a whopping £20, which was half eaten up in return train tickets. 

I’ve played many a free gig in Nashville since moving there in 2014, learning 12+ songs on bass, memorizing backing vocal parts, and doing at least one rehearsal, to sometimes walk away with nothing or barely enough to cover the cost of the beer drunk at the gig and the gas it took to get there.

I still play free gigs now, and I think it would be a tragedy if musicians only accepted big money gigs, forgetting that sometimes it’s nice just to play music for music’s sake.

But there is a distinct difference between accepting an unpaid gig because it’s something you know will bring you creative joy and accepting a low/no pay gig because you feel you’re not in a position to turn anything down.

I distinctly remember the first gig I politely refused in each of the places I’ve lived. The first time I was in a stable enough financial position to weigh the music, effort, and money and decide that it wasn’t something I wanted to do.

The first few years of life in every new city I moved to was spent saying yes to absolutely everything. Regardless of the music, despite the lack of decent money, and knowing that if I started to calculate how much time I was putting in with song preparation and travel the resulting hourly rate would make me blanch.

So the first time I was able to actually choose to say no felt like a momentous occasion. 

I still see great value in all those first gigs - they became the stepping stones of a long meandering path that has led me to some of the best music I’ve ever played, some of the most amazing people I’m lucky enough to now call friends and wonderful life experiences I will never forget.

I think complacency and entitlement are dangerous things, and maybe other people can ward them off without throwing themselves to the bottom of the heap in a new place, but I’ve needed the periodic reminder of how much I’m willing to go through just for the mere opportunity of being able to play music for a living to serve as an important ego check.

It’s healthy to remember that at the end of the day you don’t play gigs because you want X amount of dollars per night or your name in a certain size font above someone else’s on the poster - you play gigs and work as a musician because you love it and because nothing else makes you anywhere near as happy.

And if you’re having trouble remembering that, I highly recommend packing your bags and moving somewhere new. Drop yourself to the bottom of the pile and you’ll quickly remember to be grateful that you’re playing at all.

Have you started over somewhere new? What did the experience teach you about yourself?