Eric Jensen

Over time, pro­fes­sional musi­cians can lose their spark after years of unex­pected chal­lenges in an ever chang­ing and highly com­pet­i­tive indus­try. The pro­found love and com­mit­ment to the power of music can become tem­pered by the harsh real­i­ties of mak­ing a liv­ing. There’s an old joke: Q: How do you get a musi­cian to com­plain?A: Give them a gig. We spend years mas­ter­ing every page of Slonimsky’s The­saurus of Scales and Melodic Pat­terns, only to dis­cover a cer­tain lack of rel­e­vance in the real world. The real­ity TV guy is just look­ing for some ‘wacka-chucka-wacka’ to move the thing along, and if there is any way he can get music for free you are cut out of the deal alto­gether! Per­haps the ini­tial dis­ap­point­ment is our first ‘day job’. Or, when the glow of sup­port­ing our­selves full-time in music begins to wane, we real­ize that the chal­leng­ing and lucra­tive work we seek remains elu­sive. The way out of this box is to learn the art of sep­a­rat­ing your love of music from the real­i­ties of build­ing a career and mak­ing a liv­ing. Musi­cians have devel­oped many unique and valu­able skills that can serve them in a vari­ety of con­texts. I had a good run sup­port­ing myself com­pos­ing and play­ing, well into my for­ties. My first 9–5 job (not count­ing the stuff I did as a kid) involved defin­ing, cre­at­ing and imple­men­ta­tion com­plex, enter­prise telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions call rout­ing sys­tems. Go fig­ure. I knew noth­ing about this indus­try at the time, but was hired because of my expe­ri­ence as a…