Preface by Neil/Editor
Last year Mrs. Global Guitar and I traveled from Boston to New York City and back again in less than twenty-four hours in order to meet Queen Esther and see her perform. She’s an amazingly soulful and dynamic singer, a generous friend, and a budding guitar slinger in her own right that we had the pleasure to meet thru Twitter.
We rolled into the city just in time to see James Blood Ulmer and his band take the stage and were then treated to the type of blues-funk that only New York City can deliver. The music was loose & tight, old & new, and always entertaining. Queen was right up front captivating the audience and trading good natured quips with Blood. What a show.
Later Esther whisked us off to a speak easy downtown to live the cosmopolitan high life if only for a moment. It was a crazy blur of good times and laughs, and our heads were spinning the whole time. Unfortunately our visit had to be quick as Queen was heading to sing at The Lawn Party early the next morning and the Mrs. and I had to head back to Boston to relieve our babysitter.
Queen is truly living the life of a working musician in a time when that isn’t a particularly easy thing to do. When she offered to share a few lessons she’d learned on her last European tour with us, I jumped at the chance. I feel that most of these tips can easily apply to your regular day-to-day life as a musician even if you never get to tour Europe.
You can learn more about Queen Esther & her music on the web in the following places:
https://twitter.com/qenewswire
Enter Queen Esther
This list is just a few random, pithy observations I jotted down when I was running around with guitar icon James “Blood” Ulmer in Europe a few months ago. It isn’t in order, it’s hardly definitive and it certainly isn’t written in stone.
10. Make sure everything is in order before you leave home.
Be sure to do stuff like update your website and bring your business cards. Sounds pretty obvious, right? Heh. You’d be surprised how many musicians don’t have a website. Or if they do have one, they rarely update it. I know quite a few people who consider business cards to be, to quote one guitarist, corny. That may be true when you’re running around in your neck of the woods and you’re dealing with the same people you’ve known for awhile. When you’re on the other side of the world, though, business cards are essential.
If you’re an independent artist that wants to make a living at this, it’s not really a good idea to make it difficult to be found. Everything isn’t word of mouth and everyone doesn’t know who you are. So don’t use business cards, if you can’t stand them. But for cryin’ out loud — use something.
9. Don’t be the ugly American.
Dictionary.com defines “the Ugly American” as a pejorative term for Americans traveling or living abroad who remain ignorant of local culture and judge everything by American standards. They are typically loud, jingoistic, arrogant and a genuine embarrassment to other Americans who don’t behave that way. To tell you the truth, I’ve seen plenty of Europeans come off like that when they get over here – but that’s another conversation.
My suggestion? Don’t be such a self-absorbed narcissistic diva rock star that you’re somehow rendered incapable of reading up on the history and the culture of the places you’ll visit before you get there – and even though you probably won’t have to hold a lengthy conversation with any of the hoi polloi, make an effort to speak the language. When I launched into my rudimentary German, everyone lit up – probably because it was so horrible.
Trust me, it won’t kill you to learn how to say good morning in Croatian. It didn’t kill me.
8. Update social media regularly.
Not so easy when you’re in a van for hours on end, driving through the Swiss Alps with an Android. *sigh* Thankfully, I had a MacBookPro with me, so I could jump online from the hotel – if they had wifi. And yeah, sometimes they didn’t.
My last tour was a series of one-nighters that lasted for about two weeks. All of it turned into a technicolor blur of epic proportions after the first 3 days. Of course I want the world to see what I’m doing and interact with me in the process but taking pictures, blogging and tweeting all about it was for me, really. It’s the way I document what I do. Otherwise, all of it becomes more and more vague, and then one day blends seamlessly into another, and then I don’t really remember any of it — especially when I think I do.
When it’s time to write a book about all of this, these little notes will be very important.
Do your homework, constantly — because school is always in session. Which one of them is the promoter? Who does the booking for that band? What music festivals happen in this region? Who sponsors them? You get the idea. Maybe its me but I always want to know who I’m talking to and where I am and how things are pronounced and what that means and when is the next truck stop.
6. Keep in touch with everyone.
I collect business cards and take copious notes and at the end of each tour, I send everyone on my list picture postcard thank you notes. And yes, they’ll all be getting Christmas cards, too. How else will they remember me?
5. Analyze and refine your performance constantly.
Seriously, if I wanted to see you just stand there, I’d stay home and crank your CD.
I’m always surprised by how many musicians refuse to perform onstage. They don’t really make an effort to engage the audience, to entertain the crowd, to reach beyond that fourth wall and give what can only be described as good show. Or maybe they think that playing and singing is enough. It ain’t. Not if you want a live show that precedes you. And in the long run, that is what you want, because if you work it right, the record label can’t touch the money you make on the road.
Personally, I can’t stand a dead mic. Performing is just as important as everything else I’m doing while I’m up there because it gives me a chance to connect to absolutely everyone in the room. It also gives me a chance to introduce myself and let my performance sell my albums. All of that goes out the window if there’s no merchandise or CDs to sell, though.
4. MERCHANDISE = CASH MONEY
Nevermind the megatours with the jillion dollar rock stars who have signed deals with manufacturers to manage and sell their merch. Every DIY indie band or artist that ever ventured forth on the road for any length of time will testify to the fact that the CDs and t-shirts they sold on the road kept them in the black — and in many instances, it paid for the tour. No wonder major labels want a piece of that action.
Forgetting things in your hotel room or on the plane or in that limo or whatever is for millionaires and/or rock stars who behave like millionaires because they’re the only ones who can afford to replace whatever they misplace – or send the help (or the roadie) to retrace their precious self-important steps and fetch it.
I didn’t lose anything on the road. * knock on wood * I’m on a budget.
2. Always remember: Your music is brand new to someone somewhere in the world all the time.
This is the reason why it doesn’t matter when you released your album or whether it was successful initially by conventional standards. Somewhere in the world, someone is always listening and ready to embrace, as Elvis would say, the wonder of you.
Case in point? After a small amount of critical attention initially, the title track to Nick Drake’s 1972 release Pink Moon faded into obscurity – until singer-songwriters discovered him in the 80s. The song Pink Moon was used in a 1999 car commercial and after that, it skyrocketed to the top of the charts. And the rest, as they say, is history.
This is a great way to build an audience, create a body of work that represents you and grow steadily as a musician and as a songwriter. It’s also a great way to learn about the business of music. Those rose colored rock star glasses come off pretty quickly when one is faced with the reality of what it means to make an album, from start to finish.
At the end of the day, an album is a snapshot of who you are and whatever you’re going through in that particular moment in your life. It’s nice to look at every so often but you can’t be expected to live inside of that snapshot any more than you can expect a cloud you saw on a sunny blue sky day to look like a bunny whenever there’s daylight.
Leave a trail of snapshots. If you’re really lucky, someone will eventually put all of the pieces together.