July
14
So I took the advice of my brother to finally set up a blog and talk about my journey to become a successful musician in
Los Angeles. Here goes…
Around this time two years ago, I had just arrived in L.A full of optimism (or perhaps romanticism). As a singer/songwriter/guitarist, the goal was to put together a strong band, work our asses off to write great music, build a fan base, start touring locally and then…
Well, needless to say, I hit a few bumps along the way…
I thought it would be easy to gather together a bunch of kick-ass musicians as hungry as I was. I set about putting up advertisements on musician sites and Craig’s list and then scoped out music stores to pin up posters.
After many weeks with no responses, I was somewhat daunted. “What the hell?” I felt I was being open-minded about age, influences, writing collaboration, etc. Finally, I got a few responses looking for a female vocalist with the specific request that I NOT be a songwriter and NOT play an instrument. I was allowed to sing though. I suppose 1 out of 3 ain’t bad…???
I passed.
After a few more weeks, a response caught my eye, and I got together with this bassist chap. We talked and had a jam session and things seemed good.
However on our second meeting he kept asking if there was a bar or liquor store close by. There wasn’t but I offered him some wine just so we could get started.
After 20 min and a very large glass of wine he asked if I had more. I obliged, but made a comment when he drank the second glass down like it was juice. His angry response to my “Wow you drank that fast” was enough to give me my answer about future jam sessions.
I passed.
New tactic. I started to go to open mics and blues jams with the hope I might get to mingle with some fellow musicians…Finally, I met a young guy at one of the jams, who was a good guitarist and around the same age as myself…
We got together to work on some of my songs, he had a good ear and played around with some nice parts but his influences sat him more on the jazz side and so we focused on one of my more jazzy ballads to begin with.
We got on fairly well and on one of our breaks we sat in my kitchen and I asked him what he thought about our combo.
He told me flat out (and in the nicest possible way) that if we were to play out shows in the future he would not invite his friends to see us play because he didn’t feel that my songs were good enough to warrant letting his chums hear. It was really shocking to hear someone say something like that about my music and in the hours that followed I had an array of emotions. Shock, misery, outrage, anger, stubbornness and finally settled on what I really do believe and that is, that yes, my songs were not been ready to play in front of 50.000 screaming fans( although there are plenty of people with no talent playing in front of even more people than that) But they were a good beginning to honing my skills as a writer and I would continue to build upon them, throw some out and begin new ones.
I take his comments with me as a way of pushing myself to get the best of a song. So what seemed like a kick in the teeth at the time, did actually turned out to have a positive effect on me.
As for getting together for another practice with him.
I passed