Well now, someone remarked on here that I am writing self righteous babble.
My oh my, the sting of that assumption!
Let me answer that with a tempered and succinct, please forgive me.

Unfortunately for you, your trail went somewhere else.
Fortunately for me, luck decided to intervene a few times.

Self righteous? No.
Just telling a story. One you don’t have to read.
I know yours, and have seen it far too often, in a business that discards once the heat goes cold.

I was asked to write here, and I have no problem doing so. Do I have an ego? Of course I do.
Do I think I’m terrific? Not so much. I think I am lucky beyond words and blessed beyond reason.

You see my intial goal was simple; make enough money to buy a Les Paul. That was the real goal, nothing more.
Did I know I would be fortunate enough to ride many meteors and find more than a Les Paul at the end of the ride? Hell, no!

Once we take this journey from passion to business, man the shit flies. It’s a very difficult adjustment for most, and that adjustment is paramount to maintaining sanity.
I never understood why people confuse art for arts sake and business. If you don’t want to deal with the nonsense and sundry bullshit of this game called the music business, then merely make your music for yourself, your family and friends.

Once you put it out there, into the great cosmos, as a commodity, it becomes an entirely new entity.

Whenever you dance in a theatre of war, you have to play by the rules of that war, or get eaten alive. You enter the battlefield and then have to be prepared to fight. Pure and simple.
Is it discouraging? Absofuckinglutely.

You make the choice, you go in or you stay out.
I tell people all the time, if the music business was based on just talent, there’d be a lot of poor, rich people and a lot of rich, poor people.

It’s based on so many variables and so many things that aren’t even in the realm of tangible.

I like to use the an analogy; there are 4 tires on the car: the artist, label, management and luck. We can’t control the 4th tire, so we’d better be sure the other 3 are spinning in synchronicity. On 3 tires, we can get home, on 4 we are flying down the street, blasting the speed limit into oblivion. On 2, we can’t make it out of the driveway. If we have only 1, well, we’re fucked.

Make sure you have those 3 tires working, in the event you are insane enough to enter this business as a business. Once you have the 3, movement happens, then when the last one catches, it’s a ride. A big, giant explosion of a ride.

I really wish it were all about talent and talent alone, but them again, if it were, I would maybe be working at the mall selling pretzels, spewing my self righteous observations into a crowd of angry shoppers.

If you want to dance the dance, understand the elements that you need to address. Get your tires rocking on all 3.
Make sure your team is correct, and let the ball fly.

Oh yeah, avoid any of us old timers, who want to offer you advice or consultation, if it comes with an invoice. Myself included.