3 Things They Don’t Tell You About The Creative Life

From a creative lifer who learned his lessons the hard way.

Hello. You’ve reached Time & Temperature.

More and more I find myself teaching, mentoring and allowing younger artists to “pick my brain,” the latter of which proves rarely to be as unpleasant as the phrase suggests. I guess it goes with having survived and thrived for over four decades as a professional entertainer. I’m recently, finally beginning to feel qualified in the role of elder statesman. I have, after all, kept up with a mortgage for twenty-plus years exclusively through writing, recording and performing, all while helping to shepherd two kids to adulthood. And while I acknowledge that I don’t know everything, I have learned a few things, and I’m thrilled to be able to share them with you.

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1. WHEN THEY SAY THEY HAVE YOUR BEST INTERESTS AT HEART IT’S NOT ALWAYS TRUE

I hate to start with a negative, but it’s important to acknowledge that we artists tend to be overly trusting and often too eager to please. It’s crucial that we cultivate our skills of self-advocacy and boundary-drawing.

Ask yourself:

How do they even know what your best interests are?

Why would they prioritize your interests over their own?

Do they have a clear idea what you’re going for as an artist?

What if their taste doesn’t match up with yours?

This last one is most frequently the case. They’re not evil, but they’re not the one with the vision—your vision.

I learned this lesson the hard way the first time I ever did a photo spread for a magazine. I was 17-years-old and the Detour Magazine hair stylist had convinced the photographer that my collar-length hair would look amazing in cornrows. I balked of course. I told them that cornrows didn’t fit my image, that the hairstyle would make me look like I was trying to be someone I’m not, that it would maybe make me look stupid. Never fear, they said. We have your best interests at heart, we would never do anything to make you look stupid. They pressured me, and we eventually compromised. We would shoot a few with the cornrows and then take them out and shoot a bunch more without cornrows. I looked like an idiot and I knew it, but, eager to please, I went along with the plan. Only thing is, when they undid the cornrows my hair was crimped to the point where it looked like I might be on my way to a Def Leppard concert in 1983. So the second half of the photo shoot was unusable and Detour went with the cornrows. Shockingly, they never had my best interests at heart, they just wanted to do the thing they wanted to do, and they were willing to provide whatever reassurance, however false, that it took to convince me to go along with it.

2. YOUR ENVY IS YOUR ENEMY—YOUR COMPETITION IS YOUR FRIEND

We can’t help but look at others in our scene/town/genre and want what they seem to have. Their chart position, sales numbers, festival booking, high-profile collaborations, fancy houses, famous friends, etc all serve to underscore our own shortcomings. And no matter how successful we have been, a part of us will always feel the temptation to begrudge another their own success. This comes from the same place as the dreaded inner critic that tells you that you’re not good enough. We all have some version of it. Youth exacerbates the phenomenon but it’s a lifelong struggle, believe me.

We are only seeing the curated bits of their life and career that they or their team choose to present on the feeds. We know nothing of their inner life, their human experience. And even if their situation actually approaches whatever ideal we might imagine, their success comes at no cost to us. In fact, the rising tide doesn’t belong to their ship alone. We are lifted by the success of any one of our peers. To use another hackneyed analogy, success is not doled out as slices of a pie, finite and ever-dwindling. Rather, success begets success. Breathe deep and celebrate your peers.

I’ve found that the more we lift each other up, the more we ourselves are lifted. What we give away comes back to us tenfold. If you’re a band’s primary songwriter for instance, and you decide to share songwriting credit with your non-songwriting band members, you would likely avoid the bitterness that might arise from any potential lopsided payouts once the publishing royalties started rolling in. My band Old 97’s did this exact thing at the very beginning of our career, and that communal approach is a large part of why we just entered our fourth decade as a band—with all four original members no less!

And don’t stop there. Such generosity will keep your support team (from road crew to management) happy and hard-working. Pay your people what they are worth and they will stand by you and give you the best version of themselves. A hard working tour-manager, guitar tech, manager or booking agent will always be more valuable than a high-powered one. Especially in today’s industry, we need to approach our collective creative endeavors as if we are a family, sharing the burden and the reward.

Extend this generosity to your peers and see what happens. The baby band you lift up now may someday be the arena act that presents your work to a new younger audience. And when you are in a position to be the younger artist paying homage to those who influenced you on your way up you’ll find that you’re building a continuum that reinforces the whole structure, providing context not only for your audience but for yourself. That sense of a larger community with a shared history will serve you well during the darker moments which will inevitably visit you.

[Me joining Turnpike Troubadors onstage for their version of my song “Doreen” a few years back.]

Let the collaboration at the heart of the creative life be your guide. We are all bandmates. We are all in this scene together, sharing the bill that is this moment, this life. Let’s love each other and lift each other up.

3. THERE IS NO FINISH LINE—THE HUSTLE GOES ON FOREVER

And if this bums you out, you’re in the wrong profession.

In the music industry’s olden days, like the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, there was a brass ring to be grabbed, a pot of gold to discover at the end of a rock and roll rainbow. Nowadays, there’s just a merry-go-round, just a rainbow. The nice thing about the removal of the lottery aspect from the music industry is that those who choose to make a life out of rock and roll are the ones who have no other choice. The underfunding of the arts in our country is a disaster, but hunger is fuel. I’ve never not felt hungry. Even when things are cooking with gas for the Old 97’s, I’ve never felt content to rest on my laurels.

[Old 97’s cooking with gas.]

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My favorite artists are those who do their work independent of commercial success or failure. Outcomes are distortions. We can’t control how the marketplace responds to the gifts we offer up. And make no mistake, the creative output you deliver to the world is a gift. There’s nobility in using your art to make sense of the human experience, to build a bridge between self and other. Making and partaking in art brings us all closer to the truth that “self” and “other” are false constructs. We are all one, a roomful of people singing together.

yrs,

Rhett