• Gear
• Recording¹
• Mixing
• Mastering
• Distribution
• Copyrights
• Domain/Webhosting
• Payments to Other Musicians²
• Advertising/Promotion
• Bulk Merch Purchases³
• Gas⁴

This is light-years away from being an all-inclusive list, but this post is really going to focus on the first item: Gear.

I’m going to be completely honest with you. I love buying gear. Not just instruments, but all of it. I got excited the last time I bought new patch cables for my pedalboard, for crying out loud.⁵ I like things that make my life a little bit easier, be it while I’m actively performing, loading in/out, setting up, or tearing down. Most importantly, though, I like things that sound good.

Gear, though, isn’t cheap. Let’s say you book a gig at a local bar. They don’t have a PA, so you have to provide your own sound. Let’s assume you sing and play the guitar. At minimum, you’ll need a microphone, an XLR cable for the mic, a mic stand, your guitar, an instrument cable, a guitar stand, speakers, speaker cables, and a mixer. All of that together can get well into the thousands of dollars, and, like I said, that’s at minimum, so it doesn’t include guitar pedals, patch cables, a cable to get from your pedalboard to the mixer, a monitor, a cable for the monitor, a power strip, or anything else you want or need to play your music the way you want to play it.

See what I’m saying? It’s a lot.⁶

Most of us who run from venue to venue playing music for people night after night do it because, in a way, we have to. We can’t not do it.⁷ So, we boldly go, gigging with the best gear we can manage to get our hands on within the limits of our budget.

This leads to a debate I’ve heard for a long time. Go to any musician message board and you’ll find at least one thread that features an argument about whether or not you need expensive “pro” gear to be a gigging musician or not. As is usually the case in online discussions, there isn’t a lot of nuance, but I think the answer to the question “Do you need professional gear to be a gigging musician?” absolutely cannot be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.”

As musicians, we deal in sound. Everything else is secondary. We work very hard on our craft and then step on stage, or into the studio, to share what we’ve done with others. We’ve created not only the songs themselves, but also an overall sound that defines us as artists. We have an idea in our head of what we want our work to sound like, and the ultimate goal is to present that work in such a way as to honor our artistic vision.

So, my answer to the question of whether you need expensive, pro gear to be a gigging musician is: As long as what is reaching your audience sounds the way you want it to, it doesn’t matter how you got there.

I’ve heard people play incredibly expensive guitars on stage and they sounded incredible. I’ve heard people step on stage with old guitars found at pawn shops and they sounded incredible, too. I’m not saying that an old pawn shop guitar is going to be as clear, balanced, and full as a Taylor or Martin, but, for some artists, the way that old, beat-up pawn shop guitar plays contributes to the overall sound they’re going for. It works. They’re satisfied with it. It doesn’t matter what you or I think about it.

Here’s the rub, though. If you have some cheap gear that you managed to get your hands on that doesn’t really sound the way you want it to, it’s worth finding ways to improve it, incrementally, as best you can.

You can be the best singer around, but if the sound of your voice coming out of your PA is muffled or staticky, it doesn’t matter what your range is or how well you can hit those runs, because people aren’t really going to get the full impact of the work you’re doing. Your audience will be hearing static and muffled vocals, burying those lyrics on which you worked so hard underneath all that noise as well. Further, you can be a prodigy guitarist who has spent years honing your craft, but if you’re playing on a cheap guitar that’s hard to play or sounds thin, or if your amplifier isn’t up to the job, the audience isn’t really going to get to appreciate the full experience of your playing.

If you don’t like what’s coming through the speakers, you owe it to yourself as an artist to improve it. I’m not recommending bankruptcy in the interest of buying the best gear around, but you can, at the very least, take steps to find equipment that more effectively does what you need it to do, and acquire it one piece at a time.

I’ve had several PA systems throughout the years, from hand-me-down systems, makeshift Frankenstein systems, and one that I bought really cheap at a certain big box musical instrument store a couple of decades ago.⁸ Most of them didn’t sound great, either because they simply weren’t that great to begin with or they were just old and beat-up.

This limited my ability to play out, as what was coming through the speakers really didn’t sound good, and I wasn’t comfortable with my music sounding like that. As a result, I started focusing more on venues that had their own PA systems, which led to a lot of lost opportunities. I knew I needed to get my hands on a decent PA so that I could go play my songs the way I want them to sound in more places and with fewer limitations.

Finally, seven or eight years ago, I purchased a Bose L1 system. It’s not a cheap piece of equipment by any stretch, but it’s easy to transport, has a small footprint, and, most importantly, it sounds amazing. I’ve played hundreds of gigs with it and, as far as the price tag goes, it’s paid for itself many times over.⁹

The features, convenience, and quality of this PA have made an incalculable difference to me as a gigging musician. It’s opened doors for me, enabling me to play regularly and in a greater selection of venues. Also, the features and overall convenience of it have facilitated my creativity in a lot of ways.¹⁰

Again, I’m not recommending you break the bank to get something that you really can’t afford, but I would encourage you to start to piece together an equipment ecosystem that allows you to create in such a way as to honor the integrity of your art.

People who are just starting out on the guitar will often ask me what kind of guitar to get. Most folks, understandably, don’t want to spend a lot of money on something that they may possibly lose interest in. Will a cheap starter kit guitar be good enough if you’re learning how to play?

The answer to this question is, unfortunately, probably not.

A cheap guitar can actually hinder your ability to learn. If a guitar is hard to play, as a lot of the cheaper “kit” guitars are, you’re more likely to get discouraged and quit before you get any traction. Learning how to play the guitar is challenging enough: your fingers are doing things they aren’t used to doing, both hands are doing different things simultaneously, and, until you build up some callouses, it hurts. It’s easy to get dispirited and lock the thing back in its case permanently if you’re learning how to play on a nice guitar, let alone if the guitar you’re using is working against you.

Please note that I’m not saying that a brand-new student guitarist needs to go out and spend a couple thousand dollars on a guitar. I am saying, though, that there are definitely quality guitars for beginners that won’t empty your wallet or get in the way of your development. They just cost a little more than a bargain-priced guitar-in-a-box.

A guitar can’t suddenly make you a better guitar player anymore than those Air Jordans I had as a kid could make me jump higher. You still have to do the work and practice.¹¹ A cheap guitar, though, can absolutely get in the way of your playing and impede your ability to learn.

A good guitar can make you sound better, though. I played a Fender Catalina for more than 20 years. I had a pickup installed in it back in the late 90s and I took that guitar everywhere. It played nicely and saw a ton of action.

At some point, though, I realized that it just wasn’t capable of creating the sound that I wanted. It was getting older, I was gigging more, and I knew it was time to upgrade. I played a Taylor 526ce at Tobias Music in Downers Grove, IL back in 2016 and fell in love with it, but I resigned myself to the fact that it was out of my price range. My wife, Lara, was there when I played that guitar for the first time. She, subsequently, snuck around behind my back and, in collusion with some friends and family, surprised me with it a couple of months later.

As sentimental as I feel towards my old Catalina, the Taylor sounds infinitely better, plugged in or not. I feel like the sound I’m getting out of the Taylor, whether I’m playing live or recording, is closer to what I hear in my head than what I was getting out of the Catalina. It inspires me to pick it up and play it, because I love the way it makes songs sound.

That’s the point of this post, really. If you love the sound your ecosystem of equipment is producing, it doesn’t matter how you got there. If you don’t, take steps to get to the point where you do. It doesn’t have to be all at once. Incremental improvements can make a big difference.

My problem with the way the debate about gear quality is generally conducted online is the assumption that someone has the right answer for everybody else.¹² It’s my opinion that you need to answer the question for yourself. I can’t decide that for you, and some random dude on the Internet definitely can’t decide that for you¹³.

Your music is yours. It’s your art. If you like the way your gear makes it sound, that’s ultimately the most important thing. If you don’t like the way it sounds, though, start upgrading. Do it in pieces.

The bottom line is this: don’t let anybody convince you that you have to spend thousands of dollars on gear to be a “professional” musician. It simply isn’t true. However, sub-par gear can certainly hinder you in several different ways. That’s the nuance missing from the debate. The answer changes from artist to artist.

OK, your turn.

Drop your thoughts on the matter in the comments here or hit me up on social media. I’m not trying to encourage some stupid Internet fight, though, so be cool. Everybody’s opinion is welcome here¹⁴.

1. Even if you record at home, which I’ve done for a couple of my tunes, you still need the proper equipment and software, which isn’t cheap. ︎
2. If you’re hiring somebody to play on your stuff, be it live or in-studio, pay them. They’re trying to afford all this crap, too. ︎
3. Generally, you buy products in bulk up-front, which can get expensive as a one-time cost. One way to offer merch for sale without the up-front cost is to use a print-on-demand (POD) service, like Printful. I set up my merch store online with them and am able to offer a wide variety of designs and colors without having to buy in bulk. Win-win. ︎
4. An appreciable percentage of time spent as a gigging musician is just driving. ︎
5. Dude, they’re flat! So freakin’ functional and low-profile. ︎
6. It’s also a lot to carry. God, I do love it when venues have their own PA. My back loves it, too. I’m not getting any younger, friends. ︎
7. I’ve tried quitting before. Never could get the hang of it. ︎
8. I don’t wanna name names, but they spent a lot of years trying to convince us that the body of an acoustic guitar looks like the letter G. ︎
9. I’d like to note here that I bought that system, and a lot of other gear since, from Zzounds. They have a “Play As You Pay” program that is an absolute godsend for musicians. ︎
10. The Bose mixers are incredible, honestly. There are preset scenes that enable me to quickly flip between a solo show to an Echo and Ransom show without a lot of knob-tweaking, and ToneMatch settings that let you specify the type of mic/guitar/etc you’re using, allowing the mixer to optimize the channel for that input. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Lots of cool and remarkably useful bells and whistles to play with. ︎
11. I’m sorry. Don’t shoot the messenger. ︎
12. Welcome to the Internet. ︎
13. I recognize the redundancy here, as, to most of you, I am a random dude on the Internet. ︎
14. On this topic, anyway. Bigots can keep their opinions to themselves. ︎

I go through long stretches without writing, and this past year has been no exception. I wrote a song back in February of 2023, and didn’t manage to write another until a couple of weeks ago. That’s a year and some change. During these long dry stretches, my internal monologue starts to run away with me: “So, is that it? Are you out of ideas? Are you even a songwriter anymore?” That’s all ridiculous, of course, but the human brain is adept at telling stories, proposing hypotheses, and filling in blanks.²

I have a pretty good idea of why I go through these droughts, though. To write songs, you need time. You simply have to have time to sit down and do it. Lately, I haven’t been giving myself that time. I’m a gigging musician who works a day job. That’s forty-plus hours a week spent working during the day and then one to three nights spent gigging. That doesn’t even factor in time with my family, other commitments, etc. A schedule like that doesn’t leave a lot of room for peaceful writing time.

Additionally, you need moments that are quiet and still enough for you to be able to hear the song in your head without life drowning it out. It’s hard to write a song when you’re surrounded by noise and bustle.

Songwriting, for me, isn’t formulaic. I can’t just carve out some time to sit down and write a song. Well, let me clarify that: I can just carve out some time to sit down and write a song. I’ve done it. The problem is that, when I do, the songs aren’t usually very good. I need to find some kind of inspiration, be it musical or lyrical, to get the process started. Otherwise, whatever comes out just ends up feeling forced and clunky.

I’m far more likely to find that catalytic inspiration when I have some quiet time in which to work.

I’ve often compared songwriting to a faucet, and if the faucet is on, or, at the very least, dripping, the songs come easier. For example, I spent several hours one afternoon working on writing Vibration, an Echo and Ransom song. As I was putting my guitar away I strummed a progression in G and realized that I potentially had something else. Half an hour later, I had written Carrying On. It felt more like something happening to me rather than something I was doing.

The faucet was already on, the water was warmed up, and a song poured out.

Getting two good songs in an afternoon is pretty great, but I’ve had other experiences where I’ve written songs that I liked after writing a song that I ended up shelving. I’ve written many songs through the years that just didn’t really resonate with me for whatever reason, so they never see the light of day. I tuck songs like that away and, maybe, strip them for parts later on. I’ve used pieces of shelved songs in other songs: chord progressions, melody, lyrics, or whatever else I can scavenge.

Even when songs don’t work, though, the act of simply going through the process of writing them has occasionally directly led to songs that did. Sometimes it happens on the same day, sometimes it’s a few days later, but when I’m in that writing headspace it’s just easier to find a song.

It’s not just songs, though. I find that, for me, writing anything helps get the wheels turning.

Lately, I’ve been grabbing a journal and writing whatever comes to mind: lyric ideas, random thoughts, or just a recap of my day. I don’t do it every day, but I believe this practice contributed to the song I wrote the other week.

Some of what I had written in these journaling sessions over the past couple of weeks were actual, word-for-word lyrics that ended up in this new song,³ although some of it was just whatever I happened to be thinking about at the moment. The content of the writing, in my experience, doesn’t matter. It’s the writing itself that’s significant. Letting thoughts, feelings, and ideas crystallize on paper gets the faucet running.

Writing begets writing.

My intention is to develop the habit of writing, or, rather, re-develop it, as I wrote quite a bit more when I was younger. I’m not necessarily committing to writing a blog post every week or to journal every day, but I’d like to do some kind of writing on a daily basis. Even if it’s just a few sentences about my day or a lyric idea.

I’m also not committing to writing a certain number of songs over the course of the year or anything like that. I want to write for the sake of writing. If it produces some new songs, that’s great, but if it doesn’t, it’s still something that serves me and is, therefore, a worthy pursuit.

It’s easy to get swept up in the idea that you need to be more productive as a songwriter. All the gigging musicians I know are familiar with the various ways to trigger an algorithm, and constantly creating new content is a way to get streaming service and social media algorithms to take note. It’s not hard to fall into this trap, but the problem with trying to keep up with the demands of the almighty algorithm is that art just doesn’t work that way. Quantity should never take precedence over quality.

As I mentioned earlier, I could get my guitar and write a song right now, but I can’t guarantee it would be any good. You can tell when aspects of a song are forced: clunky phrasing, clichés, unnecessary bridges.⁴ Songs have to, in a way, write themselves. The more you try to control the process, the less likely you’ll be able to follow their twists, turns, curves, and corners.

Create for your own sake and on your own timeline. Art isn’t a product. Don’t let this manufactured need to constantly create content get in the way of your art, because if you do, you’re well along your way to exhaustion and burnout.

I’m setting an intention to write, in whatever form that takes, in order to get myself in the habit of writing more. I’m not doing this because I feel like I need to create more content, but, rather, because writing is actually good for me. I feel better when I do it.

I’ve been intentionally gigging less this year. I have a tendency to do too much, and I’ve found that having more quiet time not only gives me more energy, creative and otherwise, to write, but it also gives me more time for self-care. I burn myself out regularly, and I can’t write when I’m burned out. Like I said earlier, to write songs you need time and you need quiet. Lately, I’ve been doing my best to give myself both of those things.

In addition, I’ve been spending more time with other songwriters. I’ve done some live shows accompanying fellow local singer-songwriters, and I’ve also been doing some studio work. I enjoy playing on other songwriters’ songs because it really gives me an opportunity to crawl inside what they wrote and help them tell their story. I feel like the act of seeing their song from their perspective and, subsequently, being creative from within that perspective, makes me a better songwriter. It gets me out of ruts and it lets me play in someone else’s sandbox. I learn and I get new ideas. No matter who you are or how long you’ve been writing songs, everybody you meet has something to teach you.

I’ve also played quite a few writers’ rounds, song swaps, and other shows where songwriters have the opportunity to talk about their songs and their overall process as a songwriter. I love being a part of shows like this, not only because hearing great songs makes me want to write great songs, but also because hearing how other writers approach their craft can give me a brand new way of looking at the act of songwriting and, potentially, provide me with new tools to store in my toolbox. If one of those tools can help me overcome a bout with writer’s block, even better.⁵

Being around my brilliant friends and hearing them sing their songs inspires me in so many ways. I can’t really put into words what having that kind of community can do for both your art and your mental health.⁶

Songwriting is, in a very real way, sacred to me. It’s a spiritual practice. It’s mystical.

It is the most effective way that I have found to truly express myself. That applies to music in general, but especially to songwriting as an aspect of that whole. I don’t take it for granted.

The times when I don’t allow myself the space to write are often long and usually frustrating. Writing songs is a steam valve. Even if the song I’m writing is purely fiction, writing still levels me out. When I finished this most recent song, I could immediately feel the impact the act of writing it had on me. It was like waking up from a good night’s sleep. It felt like I just had a good conversation with a friend.

I’ve set an intention to give myself a little more room to breathe, be, and write. If this leads to a bunch of new songs, that’s great, but that would be a happy side effect, really. The direct, appreciable benefit of writing more will be the impact it has on my mental health.

It’s not about productivity for me. Ultimately, it’s about self-care.

I have some questions for all of you writers out there:

1. What kinds of things do you do to make space for yourself to get words on paper?
2. What do you do to combat writer’s block?
3. What has writing done for your mental health?

This is not limited to songwriters. I want to hear from anybody who writes anything, even if you what you write is for your eyes only. Drop your answers here in the comments or reach out on social media. I’d love to hear your perspective.

Happy Writing!

1. Which I’ve also done, incidentally. ︎
2. In other words: the human brain is adept at running away with you and making stuff up. ︎
3. This type of thing has happened to me before; Lay Low, for example, was written after a freewriting session back in 2019, using some of what I had jotted down in my journal. ︎
4. Not every song needs a bridge. Seriously. If you’ve said everything you need to say, you’re done with the song. Now, if you feel like you need something in there to break up a repetitive chord progression, but you don’t think you have anything else to say lyrically, make it an instrumental bridge. It’s better than forcing something for the sake of it. ︎
5. Again: Everybody has something to teach you. ︎
6. I wrote a blog post last year about this. I can’t stress this enough: Community > Competition. ︎

I wrote my first song when I was about fifteen years old and the floodgates opened. I wrote constantly. Not all of it was good, of course. Nobody bats a thousand, after all. I was learning the craft. I was finding my voice and figuring out who I was as a writer, even though I wasn’t necessarily conscious of that at the time. To me, I was just writing. I broke through with that first song and the faucet stayed on.

I spent much of my early adulthood interested in strictly performing my own music. I just wanted to be on stage playing the songs that I had written. I would play covers, sure, but I tried to book shows that would let me showcase my material.

I had, during this time, a boundary drawn up that kept two concepts separate in my mind: Art and Entertainment. I thought that I was an artist, not an entertainer. The two were and should remain apart. Separation of church and state. Never the twain shall meet.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to showcase your art, of course. You should want to showcase what you’ve created. The world is a better place with your unique perspective and voice in it. We want to hear what you have to say.

Thanks to a couple of decades of hindsight, though, I’ve realized that my dogmatic, binary approach to the Art versus Entertainment discussion was too rigid and not nearly nuanced enough. It just doesn’t work that way and, frankly, making music is a richer, more fulfilling experience if you can tear down the wall between the two. In music, art, and, well, life in general: balance is everything.

I was a member of the Illinois Country Music Association back in the Aughts. In 2010, Janet Durham, a country singer from Central Illinois and fellow ICMA member, asked me to be a part of the PrimeTime Country Opry. There are a number of Opry shows in Illinois, and I had been a special guest at many of them, but this was an opportunity to be a part of an Opry band. I accepted her invitation.

The format of these shows is pretty straightforward: members of the house band will take turns singing songs, and there’s often a guest who does six songs or so, usually three at the end of each set. As a guest, I would usually get to do a mix of originals and covers. As a member of the band, I would be able to select a handful of songs per show that I wanted to do, but I would also be learning and playing everyone else’s songs. That amounted to upwards of thirty songs every couple of weeks with one rehearsal the afternoon of show day.

I was a part of the PrimeTime Opry until Echo and Ransom and my solo work really started taking off. It’s a two and a half hour drive for me to and from the PTO, and I was booking gigs every weekend a little closer to home, so it just wasn’t cost or time-efficient to keep heading downstate. I was, however, able to get back and sit in with them a couple of months ago, and it was good to play with my friends again.

Being a member of the PTO Band was a turning point for me as a musician. It was an opportunity to learn and grow which I could have easily missed. As I mentioned in another post, I’m an introvert, so my inclination is to say no to things like this. Further, I was used to playing originals, and any covers that I played were usually songs that really spoke to and inspired me. In this setting, I’d be playing whatever songs the other band members or guests picked.

Looking back, I can see some of the ways the Opry made me a better musician:

• I got to play with very talented musicians. Playing with talented people makes you a better musician, period. You’ll learn from them and you’ll get better. They’ll learn from you, too. That’s a pretty cool give-and-take.
• I learned songs I never would have learned otherwise. I was only in control of a small portion of the set list, so I ended up learning songs that I wouldn’t have picked for myself to play, either because they didn’t necessarily speak to me or I simply didn’t know them. Learning songs you don’t know or even songs you don’t particularly like makes you a better musician. There’s something to be gleaned from any song and, honestly, any genre. You just need to step out of whatever box you’ve locked yourself in and put yourself in a position to learn it once in a while.
• I became a more flexible musician. Regularly, band members or guests, myself included, will pick a song and find out in rehearsal that it’s just out of their vocal range that day, or maybe it’s easier to play in a different key. Being able to adjust to that on the fly is an invaluable skill for a musician to develop.
  • Side note: If you’re a musician, learn the Nashville Number System. It’s an incredibly efficient way to chart and, honestly, think about music. It allows you to be more effective when you’re communicating and more agile when you’re transposing. Trust me.
• I learned how to be an entertainer. But wait! That’s a dirty word, right? I was an artist, after all. Well, that’s sort of what I’m getting at.

Back when I was colorblind to shades of gray on this issue (and many other, non-musical issues, actually), I saw entertainers as people who would do whatever the audience wanted or expected them to do. Artists, on the other hand, did whatever they wanted and presented it to the audience with the hope that they’ll like it. My little worldview back then was simple, black-and-white, and entirely, extraordinarily wrong.

All of this would have been easily disproven if I would have simply asked myself if there were any artists out there who I found entertaining. The age-old story of a person in their forties cringing in hindsight.

Being an artist requires authenticity. If you are being authentically you when you make your art, then you are an artist. Period.

Working at the Opry, I learned how to better engage with an audience. Prior to that, I had a tendency to let my introvert nature relegate me to a set staring at my shoes. I discovered that engaging with an audience makes the whole experience more fulfilling. The shared energy in the room is palpable, powerful, and it makes the whole experience a lot more fun.

It sounds obvious, but if you can connect with an audience, they’ll be more receptive to your work. It’s sometimes hard to be heard over all the noise (I mean that literally and figuratively), and if you’re more engaging or, dare I say, entertaining, people are more likely to listen.

I’ve experienced this firsthand. I’ve found that people are more receptive to my original music in recent years. People pay more attention, I get a bigger response for my originals, and folks will even come up after a set and comment on specific lyrics. That last point is kind of a big deal, because it’s really hard to get people to listen to lyrics (as we learn every time people tell the members of Rage Against the Machine to stay out of politics or they’ll stop listening to their music).

Playing live is a skillset, and it takes time and experience to develop that skill. Learning how to take command of the stage and engage an audience is important as an artist, and it pays off.

Art can be entertaining. As long as it’s authentic, it’s no less artistic just because it’s entertaining. But, if you cover someone else’s song, can it be art? Absofreakinglutely.

I’ll lead with the evidence:

You can, without a doubt, take someone else’s words and music, crawl inside them, and make them “your own.” You can be unapologetically authentic playing a song that someone else wrote.

Covering a song is, in a way, like acting. An actor can become a character in a script that someone else wrote, bringing them to life. Another actor can go through the same process with the same character and interpret that character in an entirely different way. Actors are artists, taking words on a page and using their own authentic viewpoint to interpret the character and create them in the flesh.

When you cover a song that you didn’t write, you’re doing the same thing. You interpret the song and, like an actor, work on finding yourself in it. You inhabit it like a character in a script. You crawl in it, become it, and fill it with life. That’s authenticity. That’s art.

I vehemently believe that you can be an artist even if you’re playing someone else’s music. I play a lot of shows that are almost exclusively covers, and I know plenty of brilliant musicians who don’t write their own songs at all. They play full cover shows and, whenever I hear them, I’m engaged, inspired, and entertained. They own every song they play just like they wrote it themselves. They are, undeniably, artists.

You may be reading this thinking, “So what’s not art?” My thesis here is that authenticity is the key ingredient of art, so, by that logic, anything that isn’t authentic isn’t art.

There’s plenty of inauthentic music out there, especially if we’re talking about lyrics. Songs are often written formulaically, and you can tell that when you hear them. Just squeeze in all the requisite genre buzzwords, throw together a bridge, and call it a day (Side note: not every song needs a bridge, but that’s another discussion). Also, as I mentioned in a previous post, complexity for the sake of complexity isn’t art, either. Making a song hard to play doesn’t make it more artistic than a more simple song, especially if that simple song comes from a place of authenticity. Some of the most powerful songs ever written have three chords in them.

Not everything is art, but I feel strongly that everyone is an artist. We all have the capacity to create something that is of ourselves. We can all reach inside to find something true and authentic, and use that to create art.

Authenticity is the key ingredient. Whatever you do, be it writing and performing original songs, or playing someone else’s, be authentic. Be vulnerable. Climb inside the song and experience it while you’re writing or performing it. That’s art.

I’ve been meditating a lot on the idea of authenticity in general. I’m learning how necessary it is if you intend to really live your life in a full, wholehearted way, and I can see how being authentic as an artist makes your work more fulfilling to you as the creator and more impactful to the audience.

Everyone has the capacity to be an artist as long as they’re willing to dig in, be vulnerable, and create authentically.

Regarding entertainment, as far as I’m concerned helping people have a memorable Saturday night is a noble thing.

Be authentic and be you. Create that way. Entertain that way. Live that way.

I plant a seed of myself in every song I write, but that doesn’t make them all autobiographical, or even true. Sometimes they’re completely fictional, sometimes they’re partially true, and sometimes they’re not even a linear narrative at all. Those seeds that I plant, though, make every song personal to me. I feel them all when I sing them, but I still can’t always provide a simple answer when I’m asked what a given song is about.

I think songwriting is a unique artform. It’s left-brain and right-brain. It’s poetry, rhythm, melody, and emotion. You can feel something just listening to a song, regardless of what the lyrics are about. Additionally, two people can read the same lyrics and come away with two very different interpretations.

So, to avoid just completely copping out altogether and saying “sometimes songs aren’t really about anything” (making this a very short blog post that would have been better deployed as a Tweet) I’m going to attempt to break down my thoughts on this topic and offer a bit of my songwriting philosophy in the process.

Also worth noting: I’m focusing, primarily, on songs with lyrics throughout this post.

Sometimes songs are true stories. Something happened to me and I wrote a song about it. I was feeling something and I wrote a song about it. I heard about something that happened to somebody else and I wrote a song about it. Simple. Straightforward.

Lay Low, which I released back in December of 2021, is an autobiographical song based on something that actually happened. I was sitting at my kitchen table on a December afternoon, looking out at our backyard and drinking a cup of coffee. I was thinking about how quiet it was and about how the snow came early that year. In fact, it snowed while the leaves were still on the trees and we had broken branches all over the backyard. I felt relaxed and content, which, for someone who struggles with anxiety, is saying something. It was a good day.

Lara recommended that we take some time to journal, so I free-wrote for about fifteen minutes. It was pure stream-of-consciousness writing, and I wasn’t intending to write a song. However, when I was finished, I read through it and felt like there was one hiding in there. Most of the lyrics in Lay Low were excavated, more or less verbatim, from that exercise.

Sometimes the autobiographical songs come from big life events, positive or negative. In the case of negative events, the song can serve as a cathartic experience when it’s written and performed. It’s therapy, really. It feels good to get it on paper or sing it out. Occasionally, though, songs come from something simple, like a cup of coffee in December on a cold, gray afternoon.

Sometimes songs are fictional. Maybe there’s an element of truth that inspired it, or maybe they’re completely fabricated. Either way, they can be just as impactful as a song based on real events.

I wrote Angelina about twenty years ago, and I’ve been asked many times about it, usually by people wearing solemn expressions, as it’s heavily implied, although not explicitly stated, in the lyrics that the narrator of the song is struggling with the death of the woman he loves.

This never happened to me.

That said, there’s still a piece of me in that song. Novelists will, in a way, write themselves into their story as one of the characters (and not necessarily the protagonist). I do that, too. When I write a fictional song I’m still reaching inward to tell the story. I’m putting myself in a thought (or, I suppose, emotion) experiment and extrapolating it out: What would I do if this were me? or, maybe more interestingly, What could I possibly see myself being driven to do if this were me? When I sing Angelina twenty years later, I still feel it. I’m still examining that emotion after all this time.

Songs like this can allow you to explore a feeling or a situation and the impact of it. The underlying story doesn’t have to be true to facilitate that exploration and, if you’re honest and authentic, the listener will be able to join you in it.

Incidentally, for those wondering, I’ve never even been to New Mexico.

Sometimes songs are narratives. These are “story” songs. Fact or fiction, these songs form something of a linear narrative. Often the narrative is very explicit: characters, plot, conflict, cause, effect, etc. Other times, though, the story may have some space for interpretation.

To clarify what I mean by that, I’d like to offer, as an example, one of my favorite songs of all time, Pancho and Lefty by Townes Van Zandt:

If you pay attention to the lyrics of this song, you’ll come away with a story about two outlaws in Mexico. Lefty sells Pancho out to the Federales and runs off to Ohio. Pancho is captured and executed. Pancho is remembered as something of a folk hero, and Lefty is forgotten. As the last verse elegantly states:

Well, the poets tell how Pancho fell
And Lefty’s living in a cheap hotel

Pancho and Lefty – Townes Van Zandt

Part of what I love about this song is the fact that a lot of what we understand about the story isn’t explicitly stated. Instead, we’re left to infer it. He never says that Lefty sold Pancho out, at least directly. Actually, he never even says that Pancho and Lefty knew one another. The beauty of the song is that we, the listeners, fill in the blanks. He leaves vital plot points up to us, and I think that’s to the benefit of the song itself as well as the overall experience of the listener.

Songs aren’t novels. You only have a matter of minutes to tell your story. When I was younger I wrote quite a few very wordy (and very long) songs. I’ve found, though, that part of the art of songwriting is elegance and efficiency. “Efficiency” is a cold, non-artistic word, admittedly, but, in this context, I’m referring to the ability to convey something complex in a very simple way.

There’s nothing wrong with complexity, but complexity for its own sake isn’t necessarily art. This type of simplicity, though, that elegantly implies something more complex and allows the listener to piece together what’s not explicitly stated, is. Say enough to kick-start the listener’s imagination, then let them fill in the blanks.

This gives the listener something of a claim to the song. They’ll connect to it, they’ll feel it, and it will belong to them.

Sometimes songs are more abstract. I’ve found myself writing like this more often lately, and it’s been an interesting experiment for me. This type of song is, as you can imagine, the hardest to explain when someone inquires about it.

If I’m being completely honest, “abstract” is an imperfect word for what I’m trying to get across, but I’m going to run with it for lack of a better one. Essentially, I’m talking about a song that doesn’t really have a cohesive narrative or an easily interpretable meaning. That doesn’t mean there isn’t an underlying meaning, of course, but it means that meaning isn’t terribly clear.

I’ve written songs over the past several years that were less about telling the listener a story and more about making them feel something. I’ve tried to play with words and images and see what they can evoke. As the writer, these songs don’t always start out with a “meaning,” but they usually end up with one, at least for me, by the time I’m done. Basically, I’m not sitting down to write a song about something, but it usually becomes about something.

I see what I think a song like this means as only my interpretation of the song, and that interpretation is no more or less valid than the listener’s interpretation. Actually, I really enjoy hearing what other people think these songs are about, because it’s often something I never would have considered.

My song Gasoline is like this. I didn’t have a story in mind when I started writing it. I came up with the line “Blood and sweat and gasoline” and built the song around it. A meaning began to take shape in my head as I wrote the song, but I’m not really spelling much of it out in the lyrics.

Gasoline‘s not a true story. There are elements of me and my experience in it, but it’s not something that happened to me, and the woman referenced in the song isn’t based on anyone. Further, there’s little in the way of an explicit plot, and it’s not necessarily a song about any specific feeling or emotion.

Ultimately, I’m using words and imagery to try to make the listener feel something, and that allows them to interpret the song in a way that speaks to them. I’m letting them fill in the blanks, like Townes Van Zandt did in Pancho and Lefty, but a song like this has a lot more in the way of “blanks.”

People have come up to me after hearing this song and said “That song really spoke to me because…” The beauty of a song like this is, if you’re not presenting a detailed narrative for the listener, they will view it through the lens of their own experience and find their own unique way to connect to it.

Like I said earlier, I have a meaning in my head for Gasoline, but I think if I were to have said it more explicitly in the lyrics, or if I explain my interpretation prior to performing it, people will see it through that lens and, maybe, not feel as connected to it. My interpretation of this song is how I understand it as seen through my own lens.

Also, the meaning of a song is, sometimes, simply the way it makes you feel. Obviously that’s the case with an instrumental piece, but often the lyrics need to offer just enough imagery to let the listener write the rest of the story themselves, even if the “story” is just how it makes them feel when they hear it.

I enjoy the ambiguity of Gasoline and other songs like it. I didn’t always feel that way about songwriting, but I think this approach really gives me the opportunity to connect with the listener in a different way, and experimenting with it has been quite fulfilling to me as a songwriter.

There are a lot of people out there writing songs, which means there are a lot of songwriting processes, styles, and philosophies. Here, I’m only speaking to mine. I do believe, though, that if a song is born from an honest, authentic, and vulnerable place, the listener will connect with it. That’s a universal statement.

Before I was a songwriter, I was a listener. I’ve had so many songs resonate with me throughout the years, whether I understood the meaning of them or not. In fact, there have been times when I’ve heard the writer talk about the meaning and decided that I liked my interpretation better because it resonated with me. Connecting to a song is a powerful thing for both the writer and the listener (and I say that as both).

When somebody offers me their interpretation of a song I wrote, I don’t want to counter with “Well, actually, the song’s about…” I wouldn’t dare take that away from them. If they love the song because it speaks to them, who am I to get in the way?

So, I suppose the bottom line here, is that if you ask me what one of my songs is about, I may very well give you an ambiguous answer, but that doesn’t mean I’m being deliberately cagey. It’s also possible you won’t get a meaning as much as an explanation of how the song came about.

In fact, I may use this space to write about where some of my songs came from. A word or phrase that I hear, read, or think can often spawn a whole narrative. An afternoon sipping coffee can become a journal entry. Songwriting is wonderful like that.

I promise not to force my interpretation of any of these songs on you, though. I’m more interested in yours.

This was an opportunity to hang out with incredibly talented, warm, wonderful people who love music as much as I do. I saw folks I’ve known for years and met new people. There was spontaneous collaboration and just about every set turned into an impromptu jam session. I wish I would have made it out sooner, and I’ll definitely be going back.

I did a lot of open mics and songwriter showcases when I was younger. Those events are incredibly useful for someone who is trying to get out and get a hang of being on stage. Performing live is, in and of itself, a skill that takes practice, and any experience you get standing in front of an audience will make you that much better the next time you do it.

In the years since, gigging and stressful day jobs have made me protective of nights off, so I haven’t really been getting out to open mics as often. Lately, however, I’m trying to get back in the habit. I feel a pull towards the community of it. Being around people who love making music inspires me.

My wife, Lara, and I have been talking quite a bit recently about the importance of community in general. It’s not something we specifically discuss in the context of music, but it certainly applies. Homo sapiens aren’t built to go it alone, and I’m recognizing and respecting my instinctual need to seek out a village, despite my knee-jerk tendency to avoid it. I’m an introvert (INFJ-T for those keeping score at home), so getting out in a social setting takes some work for me. Conversely, playing a show is no big deal. It never really has been. I love being on stage regardless of how many people are in the room, and when I’m there I’m comfortable and confident. Being around a lot of people when I’m not performing, though, is an entirely different animal for me.

I can talk to all of you, but I can’t talk to any of you.

Jerry Seinfeld

Open mics end up being more of a social setting as compared to other gigs, since, at an open mic, I can’t exactly hide behind the mic for three hours. Still, though, I’ve been making an effort, and it’s paying off. Every experience reinforces the fact that being around people who love making (or listening to) music is good for me, and I need to open myself up to that more often.

We moved to Aurora about four years ago, but I’ve lived in the western suburbs for most of my adult life. The music scene in the Greater-Chicagoland area is outstanding, but I can’t say enough about the scene here in the Fox Valley, specifically. There are so many incredibly talented people and top-notch venues. The most striking thing, though, is how supportive and welcoming everyone is.

The music business can get competitive. I’ve known musicians who would refuse to help or support anyone who they viewed as direct competition, and I’ve known musicians who would be more than willing to climb over someone else to further themselves. I’ve also known some sketchy promoters and shady venues.

That said, the vast majority of people I’ve encountered in this scene are wonderful. Artists want to collaborate and split bills. If you have a release, they help spread the word. If you have a show and they’re off, they’ll show up. Venues are sanctuaries for local, original music. They encourage artists to play whatever inspires them, rather than insisting on a three-hour all-cover set (I intend to get more specific about all of this in later posts, including spotlighting some of those incredible artists and venues). I am fortunate to be a part of this community, and I treasure the relationships I’ve built with other artists and the folks at the local venues.

Community matters. When we’re surrounded by positivity and support, we flourish. When a new person is welcomed, they flourish. When we moved to Aurora, we were immediately welcomed into the community. We felt like we belonged there, and I’m not specifically talking about the music scene. That feeling of acceptance makes a person want to dive in and contribute, and be equally welcoming to those that come later.

It’s important to surround yourself with people who accept and support you. Lara has said to me many times that having friends who are there to lift you up, have your back, and point out the good things they see in you can drown out negative self-talk. I regularly find myself spiraling into the abyss of believing every bad thing I think about myself, and, since I’m an introvert, I’m often spiraling all on my own. I’m hard on me, which makes me depressed, which makes me harder on myself, lather, rinse, repeat.

When I’m with my friends, my community, they can pull me out of that cycle. That’s a powerful and necessary thing. A lot of my negative self-talk has to do with how I see myself as a musician: imposter syndrome, irrelevance, I’m not good enough to play that venue, and so on. Hanging out with fellow musicians and hearing, from them, how they feel about me, helps to calm that storm. It’s invaluable.

Being an artist is a tricky thing. You’re creating something intimate and personal, then displaying it for the world to see. It’s complete emotional vulnerability. If you start to feel like your work, this deeply personal thing that feels like an extension of you as a person, isn’t good enough, it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that you aren’t good enough.

However, when your scene is full of loving, supportive people, and you let yourself be a part of it (that’s me talking to myself), you can mitigate those feelings of inadequacy. I need to be around people who are louder than the voices in my head, probably more often than I think I do. They lift me back up.

We, as artists, are better off when we support one another. If you put out positivity in the form of kindness and support, you get it back, and, beyond that, it inspires others to do the same. When the community operates that way, everyone benefits.

I’ve seen this firsthand, and it doesn’t just apply to the music community. I play a lot of local breweries and I’ve become friends with the owners, managers, and beertenders, and our local brewery scene is just as warm and supporting as the music scene. Many of our local breweries encourage one another, work together on collaborations, and patronize one another’s establishments. It makes the scene healthier, and when the scene is healthy, everybody wins.

I don’t like the idea of music, or art in general, as competition, but it is often framed that way and The Voice and American Idol have done a bang-up job perpetuating that view. Ultimately, people do have a choice of what to listen to and where to spend their Saturday night, but the fact is, at least around here, there are no shortage of venues willing to book local artists. There’s room for all of us. There’s an audience for all of us. We don’t need to stab each other in the back to be successful. I’d argue backstabbing makes everybody less successful. If all we do is tear one another down, what’s left?

I hope that, artist or not (although, honestly, everybody is an artist), you currently have or are, ultimately, able to find a supportive community. Surrounding yourself with like-minded people who genuinely want to see you succeed means everything. If you’ve got a community like that, I’d love to hear about it. Give it a shout-out in the comments. If you don’t have a community like that, you’re welcome in mine.

I had a gaming blog (World of Warcraft, specifically) years ago. That was easy. I played the game and then wrote about the game. I shared my experiences and any tips or tricks I learned along the way. Simple. What made it so easy? If I had to distill it down, the focus of the blog, the game, basically provided the content. I did a thing and, subsequently, wrote about the thing I was doing.

Blogging about my experiences as a musician, however, was harder. I had a couple of versions of a blog that I tried to maintain, but eventually the inspiration to post dried out. My last music-related post was over ten years ago. Unlike my gaming blog, there just didn’t seem to be enough to talk about.

When I published that last blog post I was trying to regain momentum and get back into the scene after a period of inactivity (that’s a whole different post). I was gigging where I could, but it wasn’t until about 2016 when things started heating up for me. Colleen Wild, who I had worked with quite a bit back in the mid-aughts, and I reunited and starting playing shows together as a duo. In 2017 we were working so regularly we decided to make it official and name the thing. Echo and Ransom was born, and my calendar quickly filled up.

It’s now March, 2023. I’ve played a couple hundred gigs since 2016: E&R gigs, solo gigs, Matt Derda & The High Watts gigs, and various other projects.

The idea of blogging came to mind again just recently. I took to Twitter, the place where reasonable discourse goes to die, and asked if blogs were still a thing. Do people still read blogs? Are they all just written by AI now? Is it worth it?

I got a couple of responses, but I think I had already made up my mind that I was gonna try this again before I even hit the “tweet” button. I think I can do something here that’s fulfilling to me and, hopefully, beneficial to others.

I’m hopeful that, this time, blogging as myself (as opposed to blogging as a video game character) will be something I can do consistently. I think that, at this point, I’ve had enough experiences and accumulated enough (hopefully) useful tips and tricks as a musician to make this something people would be interested in reading, and something I would be inspired to keep writing. Ideally, the focus of the blog, my adventures (misadventures?) in the local music scene, will be a deep enough well to provide the content. I’m doing a thing, and I’m going to write about the thing I’m doing.

However, I don’t intend to make this all about me. I’ve made so many exceptionally talented friends in the Greater Chicago and Fox Valley music scenes that I’d like to make this a space to celebrate their work and accomplishments. I want you to hear my songs and I want you to hear their songs. I want you to come to my shows and I want you to go to their shows. I believe that the more supportive we are of one another, the more successful we can all become. Rising tide, etc.

All of that said, if this is your first time hearing about me, welcome! I was born and raised in Chicago and I currently live west of the city in Aurora, IL. I write songs, sing, play the guitar, and dabble a bit in a handful of other instruments. You can find all of my links here.

If you live in the Greater Chicago area, I’d love to see you at a show sometime! Click here to see what I’ve got coming up!

So, here I am blogging again. I’d love to have you along for the ride. Thanks for reading.