It’s the classic turning point in any music biopic: the rising star, having just triumphantly signed their first recording contract, storms into their place of work and hands in their resignation. Maybe they have a stinging one-liner to go with it – something along the lines of, “Put that in your pipe and smoke it” – or maybe they simply smile, the twinkle in their eye just about catching their pupil aflame.
Reaching a place of such significant financial security that one is able to give up their day job is often regarded as the end of the creative road. What could be better than having all day, every day to shape one’s work? To be able to tour when you want to tour? To be free of irritating bosses and demanding schedules?
But despite the allure of giving it all up and embracing life on the road, it’s not entirely clear whether the majority of musicians actually want to dedicate their whole lives to their craft – or if it would bring them happiness if they did. And more than ever it seems as though we are melting down this complex, multi-part issue into one easily digestible series of happy endings, desperate to transform a rich story into a cartoon.
Not that it’s difficult to see why we love the simpler version of the story. There is something almost fairy tale-esque about the lives of those musicians who have managed to trade in their crummy nine-to-fives for a life of sex and excess. We adore the transformation of folks like Kurt Cobain, a one-time janitor who became one of the most popular musicians on the planet, or David ‘Bowie’ Jones, a creative chameleon who once earned his cash working as a butcher’s assistant.
We see these stories as being uplifting in the most primal, satisfying sense of the word: they are tales of human beings conquering the shitty odds they have been served; vanquishing opposition and realising their perfect self. They’re taking destiny into their own hands. They are awakening, as from a dream, like some Disney princess, and living the life they have always wanted to live.
The question remains: what happens to you after you get your happy ending?
Of course, the question remains: what happens to you after you get your happy ending? And sadly, for some musicians, the answer is that you start to decline. Losing the drive to stand out and impress the world means losing the vicious edge to one’s work – losing the sense of competition; the part of you that never shuts up; always wants more.
“Maybe it’s not for everyone, but I use my day-to-day working experiences to write my lyrics,” explains Morgan Anthony, lead singer of the Sydney-based band Zeahorse. “It’s when I’m working that I am most absorbent of the world.”
It is certainly true that success and fame has its own insulating effect. You can become horribly disconnected from your audience – from the real world – if all you do is sit in a studio getting pissed and tinkering around on a guitar. Before you know it, you’re not writing about struggling to pay bills, or finding a steady pay cheque – all of a sudden your work is about wealth, about privilege. And even if your fans pretend to love what you’re doing, they’ll still call out for your early work at your shows; still want the version of you that had it hard, that found no success.
That’s why critics so love to get their knives out when they see any signs of the dreaded sophomore slump. It’s a story they know well, one they have seen so many times before: good band works hard to make a great first album, rests on its laurels, at first loves but then grows bored of its fans, then finally, years too late, delivers a stunningly dismal follow-up.
In that way, the sag between American Football’s debut self-titled record and 2016’s self-titled follow-up isn’t the exception to the rule as much as it is the rule itself. The Rolling Stones evolving from a rag-tag band of genre punks singing about being unsatisfied into a pack of pop princes crooning that you can’t always get what you want is in itself the story of mainstream rock. Bands go soft too easy, and the best way to kill your favourite act is to give them the money they need to give up their day job.
It’s not necessarily true that all bands suffer in this way, or that an excess of free time should be flat-out treated by creatives like the plague. Albums don’t write themselves, tours are time-consuming, and rehearsals are even more so, so juggling some unrewarding job and the thing you actually want to be doing – the thing that consumes your every waking thought – is at best a losing proposition and at worst a fucking nightmare.
When you’re trying to make ends meet with a gig as a hospital porter, à la Mick Jagger, or as a cinema attendant, à la Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke, your art is only ever going to suffer. Music won’t pay your bills, but the thing that does fulfil that purpose takes up so much of your time and energy that you end up stuck, trapped between the rock of your awful job and the hard place of your demanding creative urges.
“Sometimes it’s pretty exhausting trying to balance making enough money each week and having time for rehearsals, gigs, and all that,” says Ainsley Farrell, a local singer-songwriter. “I’m finding it pretty hard to save any money at the moment. It’s all being poured into music. I’m not the best juggler.”
So what, to put it bluntly, are you meant to fucking do? As with so much else when it comes to making music, there is no one simple answer. Working sucks, not working sucks, and a combination of the two is often even worse.
To that end, rather than trying to trace some overhead, topographical outline that might not even exist, we’ve instead reached out to four of our favourite local musicians in the hope of understanding how they manage to keep the lights on and keep the music pouring out – how they stay true to the demands of both their art and their wallet.
The Music Teacher: Mark Spence
“We’re going places,” smirks Mark Spence across the chorus of ‘Dick Move’, the 2015 song he released with his band Royal Chant. “We’re motivated. We’re making big plans.” It certainly sounds like he’s joking, firmly taking the piss out of both himself and the arrogant wankers living their life as though it is one big pep talk. And that sense of self-depreciation is only enhanced when one pairs the song with its music video, a deliciously lo-fi clip that sees his band superimposed onto shuffling cans of Tsingtao beer. The three-piece might be moving forward, but they’re doing so while trapped in cheap beer; moving like the hallucinations dancing in front of a wino desperately trying to go sober.
Yet whether the lines are designed as barbs or not, there is, in fact, some truth to them. Royal Chant are going places; they have been slowly solidifying their reputation as one of the local scene’s best acts over the last few years, winning awards and admirers by the armful. Back in 2009, their song ‘Somedays’ picked up the top gong in triple j Unearthed music video competition, and their latest single, ‘Sight For Sore Eyes’, has all the bristling, blissed-out alt pop stylings fans have come to expect.
Not that it’s been easy. Royal Chant have not yet cracked the kind of market that allow bands to retire from their day jobs and spend the rest of their lives tinkering around in a studio, so Spence has long had to juggle the pressures of music-making with the pressures of, well, music-making. “I teach drums and percussion five days a week,” Spence says, “spread out between three private schools in Port Macquarie.
“They pay me a salary to run the drum line and various percussion ensembles, plus I teach privately on campus. I also teach private lessons at my own drum studio three days a week after school. I started teaching in Port Mac very part-time about nine years ago, and then it’s just grown from there. I’ve sort of created my own job over the years.”
On paper, it certainly sounds like Spence has got it made – the job that pays his bills is just another version of the ‘job’ that allows him to stand up and belt out his frenetic, fuzzed-out songs every night. But those too quick to envy Spence’s nine-to-five might do well to remember what a roomful of young, undisciplined musicians sounds like.
“Because I’m surrounded by one type and one aspect of music for hours every day, that means I’m not free to daydream, ruminate, and create the music I want to make. After hearing drums from 7:30am until 6:30pm, all I want to hear is silence. Hell, I can barely be bothered to talk, to say nothing of being coherent.”
One wonders how Spence finds the time to record his band’s copious output, let alone tour it. Royal Chant are an accomplished, experienced live act, and they have spent the better part of a decade polishing and improving performative skills.
So how does Spence do it? How does he spend five days a week banging out drum lines with kids, and then spend the weekends on the road? The answer is: by fucking up and then learning from those fuck-ups; by tearing everything all down only to start again afresh. (Emphasis on the fucking up, though.)
“I’ve laid out my schedule to accommodate touring. The only slightly bad thing is when you do consecutive weekends and you get pretty burned out from the non-stop grind of travel, shows, and work without taking a breather. But that doesn’t happen as much, mostly because we figured out that it’s not that hard to take weekends off in between weekends away. It only took me 15 years to learn that lesson.”
Applying a blue-collar work ethic to being in an indie band is not the worst thing in the world.
Ultimately, Spence knows he is pretty lucky. He could be working in a factory, or in an office, either of which seem to be the absolute antithesis of his dreams. He might sometimes get burnt out from the stress of all his juggling, but it never breaks him, and for the most part he loves what he does.
“I have it better than most,” he admits. “I maintain a lot of freedom. Absolutely. Also, it hopefully keeps me humble and grateful, and reminds me that teaching music is all part of the same big musical food chain. Applying a blue-collar work ethic to being in an indie band is not the worst thing in the world.”
Not that he’s hoping his work situation will stay as it is forever. Spence might not be holding on to the deus ex machina that so many musicians starting out in the business obsess over – “Maybe I’ll score the support slot for an international band!” “Maybe some ultra-rich, ultra-passionate music exec will turn up to one of our gigs!” “Maybe my song will get sampled by a major hip hop artist!” – but he has his hopes, and his wants.
“I’m pretty content with the situation, but wouldn’t mind if I had the playing/teaching ratio flipped,” he says. “Or if I didn’t have to teach, but only did so at my leisure.” He laughs. “But that’s bloody dreaming, isn’t it? I guess that’s a roundabout way of saying I don’t have any idea at all what I’m working towards. I’m just working.”
The Music Writer: David James Young
If David James Young’s name sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because you’ve encountered it in print, maybe even in the pages of this magazine: he is one of the Australian music scene’s most accomplished critics, an unstoppable creative force who has seen more gigs than you have had hot dinners. But, in his typically humble way, he doesn’t even necessarily think that his work writing for a bevy of local publications counts as a day job.
Perhaps that’s because he’s been doing it for a long, long time. Young has honed his skills as a writer over almost a decade of work, and yet has somehow also managed to fit in a career as a musician as well.
He’s the man behind the Nothing Rhymes With David moniker, a performer whose work memorably combines a whole bevy of disparate genres and tones – his latest record, Things Work Out For People Like You, touches on everything from country to folk rock, and he is a master at making impossible emotional mash-ups work.
Yet once again he has a distinctly matter-of-fact approach to his work as a musician, and slightly undersells his range of creative skills. “I’m not really successful or popular enough to go on tour, if I’m being completely honest,” he says when asked if the pressures of his day job ever keep him from playing as many shows as he can. “It’s definitely stressful trying to book shows and keep on some sort of deadline, though. Definitely.”
But no matter what he might tell you, Young has managed to find success on both sides of the stage – as both a dedicated reviewer oft seen pressed up against the barrier at just about any Sydney gig you can name, and as the man behind the mic.
It hasn’t been easy. There is a common stereotype floating about that freelancers have nothing but spare time; that they are free to pick up whatever opportunity takes their fancy, and to spend their days following whims. But the truth is almost the opposite. Freelancers might be able to do whatever they want to do whenever they want to do it, but that only leaves them with unstructured, challenging schedules. Their life is constantly in flux: they can’t rely on anything, and they rarely know which direction the next bill is going to come flying in from.
My schedule barely allows for me to work on both – it’s always an imbalance.
Perhaps then it’s unsurprising that Young describes juggling passions and paycheques as an “absolute” challenge. “My schedule barely allows for me to work on both – it’s always an imbalance.” For him, finding the time for both jobs is a case of diminishing returns – he has to put in a whole lot of effort only to receive the most ephemeral of rewards in return.
He doesn’t care, though. He loves what he does – both the writing and the music-making. They might both wrestle for his attention, but they’re not two passions at war with one another. They do not compete.
“A lot of people write songs about hating their job or whatever, but that’s not really my experience,” Young says. “I want to do everything that I’m interested in, really. I want to make music. I want to make podcasts. I want to go to shows. I want to write. I just fill my days doing all of that.”
The All-Rounder: Spencer Scott
It is almost no exaggeration to suggest that Spencer Scott is to Newcastle as Andy Warhol was to New York in the ’60s and ’70s – though Scott certainly trumps Warhol in the WWE and punk knowledge department. Scott has spent the last few years working tirelessly to share the hidden gems of Newcastle’s local musical community, and he has an exhaustive knowledge of his scene’s ins and outs. If you want to know something about a band that lives and plays in Newcastle, ask Spencer – he will tell you what you need to know and more.
He also so happens to be in a band himself. Though he cemented his reputation as a singer-songwriter, performing acoustic, cathartic numbers about life and loss, he is now the lead singer of punk act Paper Thin. And although only newly formed, they have been relentlessly prolific since their conception, releasing singles and supporting acts as diverse as American legends Revivr and garage punkers Japandroids.
Indeed, Paper Thin are the very epitome of a do-it-yourself band. They have tirelessly fought to carve their own space in the industry, releasing homemade music videos, whip-smart singles, and playing shows that combine equal parts raucous, unbridled energy and controlled musicianship. Nothing has been handed to them, and everything they have achieved has come as a result of hard work.
It might be a cliché that any band can get where it is thanks to nothing but a combination of skill, luck and perspiration, but it’s hard to explain the Paper Thin phenomenon otherwise.
Given all that, it would be amazing if Scott managed to juggle music-making with just a single job, perhaps a nine-to-five at a local record store. But Scott doesn’t limit himself to one occupation: he works a whole host of them, cramming his week with a variety of tasks he has picked up over the years.
“I work a few different day jobs,” he says. “My main one is working at a local music venue in Newcastle as the entertainment coordinator – which pretty much covers everything from bookings bands, to making posters and running an open mic night. When I am not doing that, I am a freelance writer, primarily writing for a local music website. One day a week I also work at an independent record store.”
The common thread, of course, is music. But luckily for Scott, his jobs also all offer him a kind of occupational flexibility; a freedom to tour when he wants; record when he wants. Even though he might not be as unfettered as he likes, he knows that he has it easier than some, and he relishes the liberty his myriad of odd jobs affords him.
“Making music is easily something that can take up the time of a full-time job – and then some – but I’m fortunate that the majority of my work isn’t in set nine-to-five hours, which lets me have a bit of freedom to work on music when the creativity strikes.”
Making music is easily something that can take up the time of a full-time job – and then some.
That’s a double-edged sword, though. Having no fixed hours leaves Scott in the same place as Young, and both only ever have themselves to rely on for motivation and for guidance. For Scott, that means that he can’t always leave work at the door when he heads off on tour. There is always work to be done, particularly considering the varied, demanding nature of what he does.
“I’m still in contact with the venue when I am away, so there have been a few nights spent on tour spent sitting out the back, talking to people at the venue trying to organize things,” he explains. “Other members of my band have a more rigid nine-to-five job, which means touring for weeks at a time isn’t an option, but we always work around that.”
Like Spence, Scott isn’t necessarily happy staying where he is forever. He needs growth – wants things to change in the way we all do; in the way we all follow some kind of dream, desperately snapping at the carrot dangled ahead of us. He’s just not deluding himself about it. “I would say that I am working towards a full-time music career, but with a crippling awareness that it might not happen,” he laughs. “I think I have a pretty fulfilling work/music balance at the moment. So I’m more than happy to keep doing what I am doing.”
The (Other) Music Teacher: Rachel Maria Cox
When I reach out to Rachel Maria Cox, the Newcastle-based singer-songwriter behind 2016’s excellent four-track EP I Just Have A Lot Of Feelings and ask if they’d be interested in conducting an interview about the work/life balance, it takes a while for them to reply. Finally, after a few hours, they make contact – “Aptly I didn’t get back to this sooner because I was at work,” Cox says.
So it goes for Cox. The Novocastrian might have spent the last two solid years cultivating admirers and supporters, both for their anthemic, punk-pop singles – songs about sadness, and isolation, and the strange, messy kind of love that attracts and repels us in equal measure – but they still have a day job to keep them occupied.
“I work full-time for the National Music Academy,” Cox explains. “We’re a private music tuition provider based in the Newcastle/Hunter region. I work in the admin and management team as well as working as a vocal teacher, keys teacher, songwriting teacher and artist mentor, so between all those roles I am kept employed five days a week.
“I’ve been working for NMA for just over three years now and have been full-time for the entirety of this year. I was also teaching full-time for a while back in 2015 but had to cut back hours due to mental health/physical health complications.”
It’s been a busy few months for Cox. A little while ago, they launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise the money to record a new album, a blistering collection of raw secrets and rawer still riffs. As a result, Cox’s life has suddenly become busier than ever before – the demands of the five-day-a-week slog have been matched by the demands of a nascent record beginning to take shape – and thanks to the crowdfunding process, for the first time in their career Cox has had a deadline to work against.
Given all that, one wouldn’t necessarily begrudge Cox for having nothing but bad words to say about their job: if they just wanted to let loose about the drudgery keeping them from dedicating all the time that their emerging album so desperately needs. But Cox is not as bitter as one might think, and sees the work they do reaching out to young musicians as an integral part of their own process.
“My day job definitely brings me a heap of joy the same way making music does, plus it’s also helped me improve at making music and really supported my career in a lot of ways,” Cox says. “Time is always an issue though. It does make it hard to book shows because of the hours I work and it’s hard financially sometimes, but I think overall my day job has made my music better.”
It’s hard financially sometimes, but I think overall my day job has made my music better.
In fact, as far as Cox is concerned, the hours they have spent slaving at work have directly bolstered their career. This isn’t a case of juggling two separate plates – for Cox, the work they do at NMA and the work they do onstage is ultimately one and the same.
“I’m a better musician and a better manager thanks to my job. Plus I have way more connections and experience than I would otherwise have. There’s definitely perks of having a day job in the music industry. I get financial security, and my regular hours makes it easier to plan.”
There is, of course, touring to complicate things. Unlike Scott, for example, it isn’t necessarily easy for Cox to take time off and hit the road whenever they want to.
“It’s hard because I know I have to be at work set hours every week, and so I can’t just take a few days off like you can with a casual job,” Cox says. “It really does restrict the amount I can tour and the days I can play shows. But I much prefer having the stability that my job brings in the long term. Because I book our tours it means I can work around my own schedule too, which is a plus.”
Certainly, Cox has done a better job than many when it comes to fitting in as many shows per year as they can. The singer has a packed schedule, one that is set to only become more harried when the new album comes out. Perhaps that explains why they are so happy with their lot; so content to sit back and enjoy the next few months.
“I’d love to be able to make music full-time and work in management full-time with my current business – but I’ll just see where it all takes me.”
Main photo: David James Young by Hazel Chan
