Watering Your Roots

What to do when inspiration dries up?

One of my sticker designs.

Usually, I aim to make these blog posts serve some greater purpose: to share an important lesson we might all learn by telling a story from my life in music.

I like to feel that I’m not wasting your time reading something that lacks a clear, useful, and actionable point.

But really, the whole point of this blog was share the entire experience of being a professional musician, good and bad, and sometimes there’s no obvious takeaway, just a lot of questions and fewer answers.

So today, I’m just going to share from the heart and trust that whoever is meant to connect with it will, and those who aren’t will delete it and go back to watching cat memes.

I’ve been feeling pretty musically lost for the last year.

I haven’t felt inspired to pick up a bass unless someone was paying me, and I’ve wondered if I even care about performing music anymore.

For well over two decades, I’ve been passionately driven to pursue music at the cost of everything else in my life, so it’s been a very strange and disconcerting feeling to think maybe that drive is simply… gone.

I’ve simultaneously been dipping my toes out of the music industry and running two retail businesses with my partner.

Along with managing our teams and building internal systems, I’ve been diving deeper into creative design work and feeling inspired to hone my Illustrator and Photoshop skills further. I’ve been feeling very creatively fulfilled designing stickers, t-shirts, posters, and print ads, all of which have served as a reminder of the graphic design I loved doing in high school until music took over every last shred of my time and passion.

I've been sitting in the middle of all these emotions and wondering if it’s time to hang up my bass and try on this new life full-time. Because maybe 25 years in a profession is enough?

Lots of questions, no answers.

(This is also why I stopped posting on this blog for the last 4 months; who wants to read a blog filled with existential questions and no hope?)

I’m on the road right now with Brandy Clark and have been spending a tonne of time with some of my favorite humans in the world, my bandmates Cy Winstanley and Ellen Angelico.

(Side note: my big takeaway from this summer is that the people you’re with are the make or break for everything in life, whether it’s a touring gig or a retail job. I’ve been incredibly lucky this summer in both our retail businesses and on tour to be surrounded by some of the most incredible humans. I’m a lucky duck.)

Yesterday, Ellen recommended the Israeli rapper Noga Erez (who is phenomenal by the way), and while I was working out this morning and listening to her, I had an epiphany.

I miss the music I grew up playing. I miss jazz, hip hop, and quirky creative projects that feel like you’re creating something no one has ever even dreamed of before. Music you simply must make whether anyone else cares or not.

I love the music I’m playing now, and I’ve worked hard to get to a place where I have a touring gig that checks all the boxes: with people I adore, that pays well, and playing songs I love.

But listening to groove-heavy improvised music in high school sparked the inferno of passion for bass that fueled the next 20 years of my music career, yet I haven’t played anything even vaguely in that realm for years now.

I became so focused on building the career part of this life and then trying to have a life alongside that career that I forgot to nurture the inspiration side.

Then one day, I turned around and discovered that the initial blaze that had lit my path for so long was finally dwindling and threatening to go dark.

Lots of questions, maybe the slightest shred of an answer brewing.

True to my generally impatient nature, 10 minutes after this epiphany, I text my friend and fantastic drummer, Jordan Perlson, sharing my thoughts and asking for his advice.

He’s very much in the creative music scene I want to return to, so I was hoping he could suggest a path for me.

Because the thing is, if I were still living in Nashville full-time, I would throw some fuel on the hustle fire and throw myself back into the scene of people playing the music I wanted a slice of.

But I’m living in the North Woods of Wisconsin, and the problem is - I really, really like it. My life is markedly healthier and happier, and I don’t want to give that up.

So I contacted him thinking I wanted his advice on how to “dangle” myself in front of the right bandleaders from afar.

But the advice he actually gave me was both incredibly simple and something that had never occurred to me.

“Why don’t you book a gig and hire the players you want to play with?”

I laughed and said, “Wow, that never even occurred to me!”.

Which is doubly crazy given the central theme of all my coaching is: Whatever you want to happen in your career, don’t wait for someone to offer it to you; build it yourself.

So that’s what I’m going to do.

Less questions, some answers.

I’ve realized that I’m not generally uninspired by music. I’m just not getting a fix of the music from which my well of inspiration flows.

I love playing Americana, folk, country, and pop, and I want to keep doing it. But my musical roots are sunk deeply in jazz and groove, and they need a good, solid watering!

I’m already thinking about the players I want to hire, the songs I’ll sing, the kinds of tunes that would be fun to jam on, and I’m feeling that sparkly, magic excitement that started me on this music path in the first place. The feeling we all know is incredible!

So, even though I promised no advice or takeaways from this post, I guess I can’t help myself.

My suggestion to anyone out there feeling uninspired or directionless in their music career is to think about where you started.

What inspired this crazy music journey in the first place?

Maybe you need to go back there for a while and soak up some of the magic that inspired you in the first place, so you can find your way forward again.