Cheryl B. Engelhardt » On a Personal Note

The Starving Artist’s Silver Lining

Cheryl — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 19:06:57 +0000

(as first published in Discmakers’ blog, The DIY Musician)
(I was also going to title this article “Why Our Job is Better Than Theirs” or “Why Being a Musician is the Sh%t” but decided against it.)

There have been many times when I’ve caught myself in what I call P.P.P. (the Predictable Paycheck Predicament): being jealous of my roommate as she left the apartment at her regular time to go to her regular job to get her regular paycheck. (Definition of “regular,” by the way: arranged in or constituting a constant or definite pattern.)

But then I went back to sleep. And when I woke up, I probably went for a run, got some groceries, replied to emails, worked on a song, set up a pitch meeting or two on the subject of composing for a new film or licensing my last record, then I might have grabbed coffee with a friend in town, came home, called some venues for my summer tour, had a glass of wine while watching the latest episode of NCIS online, then researched publishing companies for my new indie artist E-course. Or something like that.

P.P.P. is really just another grass-is-greener complex, and once I get myself present to my reality, PPP becomes a thing of the past. I pretend my roommate is there and I sing, “My job is better than yours!” Then I calmly think of my reasons why having a musician’s life rocks:

1. Freedom! We musicians get to create our own days. I have freedom to go to the gym or write a song or book a tour. I don’t have anyone breathing down my neck and I can take off at any time, eat any time, and work when I am inspired to work. (Side note- inspiration isn’t something that happens to you; you have to create it, which usually just means sitting your butt down in a chair and writing.)

Don’t get me wrong- my calendar is not blank and I still have obligations and requirements to bring home the bacon, but these are usually on my terms and are situations I have chosen, like finishing up creating a song for a CollegeHumor.com video, getting on a sponsorship conference call, or arriving at a gig on time. But these “obligations” are what I spend my days working on achieving. And the key is I can use my day for whatever it is I truly want in my life. That day. This freedom is wonderful and I never take it for granted.

2. Responsibility! I know people shy away from taking on responsibility, like it’s a scary grown-up thing. But really, creating your own day, generating your own sources of income, and being the master of your own schedule is a massive lesson in responsibility. For example, after getting through customs in Zurich with

So many places to go!

3 bandmates, oversized luggages and work visas in hand, picking up a friend at the airport, still making your hair cut, and paying your phone bill on time is cake. Out of necessity, being a freelance musician taught me to be responsible, and I’m now able to handle anything with ease.

3. Passion! We are doing what we LOVE! You will never, ever, ever, ever hear me say “I wish I was ____” (fill in the blank with a verb). I’m usually already doing it. I know so many folks who are in their 9-5 job because they haven’t found their passion yet. While taking the leap to being a full-time musician seems daunting, difficult, and perhaps delusional, knowing what you are passionate about is a blessing!

4. Beating the crowds! We get to run errands when supermarkets, dry cleaning, hair cutting salons, post offices, and retail stores are least crowded. Oh, and can we say off-peak gym hours?

5. Infinite possibilities for income… not just one check every two weeks. As a music creator, we can make money in so many ways, it’s exciting, if you think about it. Live show ticket and merch sales, royalties from TV and film placements, recording demos for other artists in my home studio, co-writing and producing with other artists, creating music for websites, scoring indie films, playing house concerts, ski resorts, colleges and a whole bunch of other shows (I have a list of 19 “other gig options” in my E-course you should check out) is just the start of the list.

I also have the freedom (see #1) to take on other sources of income like teaching piano lessons, personal training, bar tending, and writing and selling an E-course. Anytime I need a “break” I can still create income by turning to many other options, like guiding a kayak trip or working with the network marketing company Referdia (yes, that’s my affiliate link. I have one for iTunes, Amazon and my E-course too!), where I help sign up customers and businesses, making money any time they buy or sell something.

In the end, although my money comes in less consistently than my roommate’s check, my possibilities for income are interestingly varied and truly limitless.

6. Not having to worry if you forgot your towel after showering since none of your neighbors or roommates are home anyway.

7. Weekday deals! Did you know ski lift-tickets are sooooo much cheaper on weekdays? Welp, they are.

8. Having a half glass of wine in the middle of the day, just because.

9. I am NEVER bored. If you didn’t get that from #5, it’s true. I’m never bored. There’s really not that much to say about this. Not being bored, however, does require a certain amount of discipline and responsibility (see #2). I wouldn’t make money if I just got up and wrote songs all day long. I need to wear many hats to make an income, and that is what keeps me from being bored.

From booking tours to writing music to pitching my composer skills to getting out on the road, my life as a musician is something I create. I take breaks, for sure. Heck, I’m Netflix’s #1 streaming customer. But seriously, each of my days is never the same as the one before it, by design.

10. Staying in your pj’s all day (not advised, just possible).

11. Community! Being a full time artist automatically makes you part of a community, one that has a mutual lifestyle understanding and one that is supportive of the pursuit of passions of others. You other freelance musicians get that, right? What are your favorite reasons for living the life of a musician? (Comment below or tweet @CBE using hashtag #myjobisbetterthanyours)

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Are you looking to be a full time musician? Would like support in your transition? Three suggestions for you: the first is to download my E-course, “In The Key Of Success: The Five Week Jump-Start Strategy” for a start-to-finish guide of figuring out your purpose, learning about how to get paid as a musician, creating your own money-making opportunities, and putting a structure in place so you keep seeing results, long term. It will make a difference for you, plus there’s a 100% money-back guarantee! http://www.cbemusic.com/ecourse. My second suggestion is to work with me one-on-one in pursuing your passion. My email is on the E-course page. Third suggestion: make like Nike and just do it.

The Baby Committment

Cheryl — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:13:52 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve written. You’ve heard this before, right? From other artists whose mailing lists you are on. Maybe you’ve heard it from a friend over email. Or perhaps you’ve written it yourself. The cause of such a hiatus, I have observed, is usually due to the creation of something that takes all of one’s energy and attention. I’ve heard it from my friends who just had a baby. And I’ve heard it from friends who were looking, and then finally bought a house. And I’m writing it now, to you, because I released a record.

For the past year and a half I felt like I was at war. Or at least in a very intense wrestling match… With myself, with my bank account, with my loved ones, with my music, my lyrics, with everything. It felt dramatic, pressurized, urgent, as if this was IT, the last chance, the final statement. Very theatrical, I know. Really, what was happening, is that I was making an album. That’s all.

I’ll have another post soon about my exact process of raising $25,000 from fans and sponsors to fund the record, and the process of selling the demo versions on my site via a pay-what-you-want model prior to the record being released. For now, I’m writing to you to transition back into the world of touring, record-promotion, music supervisor-pitching, fan-gathering, and whatever it is this blog does for you.

I’m in San Francisco, staying with a friend and her baby. It’s funny. I’m not a big fan of babies, in general. (This one is particularly cute and chill, and doesn’t scream and cry, so I approve.) I’m not a fan, yet I’m constantly comparing my new records, songs and creative process to them. The analogy is sort of obvious, with all the preparation and care and love and nausea, then the post-birth nursing and tending and trying to get into the best nursery school / licensing library so it can flourish and be successful. But the sentiment is there for both: undying love and passion for the thing you created, tied up with attachment.

This is where the baby analogy and I part ways. I’ve learned that the word attachment is something to be wary of. Being attached to my record, and how “successful” it needs to be has, in the past, put blinders on me. I came up with what it’s supposed to look like, what I should be doing by now, who I should be touring with, how much money I should have made off of it by now, which cuts off any possibility that something else can come in and work. (By the way, should is the cousin of attachment. Caution: use with care, or not at all.) Just being committed to my record’s success keeps me moving forward and taking the appropriate actions, yet without the desperation, urgency, feeling of constant need, and pressure that being attached was producing.

To put this in reality: I am open to have my record’s success come from anywhere. I take on all opportunities, from providing a song to a blog’s video project and helping edit the video, to calling up my favorite clothing store and asking them if i can get my music in their store’s library. I visit friends in far away cities, and look up every licensing company and music-related company in the area. Today I have a meeting with 2 music supervision companies. Tomorrow I’m getting a private tour of Pandora Radio. I have no idea what will come out of any of it, but taking action, being open-minded, and just immersing myself in the industry, the companies that are making things happen, and in relationships that are positive, progressive and supportive will yield some sort of fruit, I’m sure. Whether it’s apples or oranges doesn’t matter. Like most parents-to-be say when asked “do you want a boy or a girl?” I just want it to be healthy.

The Task of Asking

Cheryl — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 18:23:20 +0000

When I was little I got to hamster-sit. It was thrilling. I watched the little guy run around on that wheel like his little life depended on it. I had the idea that he may have a lot more fun running around in my room. He was not interested. I’m guessing that my room, filled with new experiences, textures, sights and sounds, was too scary. Obviously, this hamster hadn’t met the two mice from “Who Ate My Cheese?”.

I sat down to write an article about taking action through making requests, and this hamster was the first thing that popped into my head. Instead of figuring that out, I’ll just assume that my life has been a little bit like his. I feel busy. I run on that wheel like my life depends on it. I stay busy. But busy in the way that keeps me from getting big. The big that I know I have the potential to be. The logistics of staying small are quite voluminous.

We all know this type of busy… Booking small tours at coffee shops and ski resorts, making calls to get on-air radio performances at community colleges near my gigs, sending useless emails to labels and management companies, trying to enroll people in my awesomeness, or at least, the potential I have for making a profit because of my awesomeness, spending hours editing my live videos, thinking that a good edit will get me my next big gig. Spending hours perfecting charts that don’t need perfecting, vacuuming (too often), organizing, stressing, facebooking, day jobs, part time jobs. Need I go on? All of it is busy for the sake of being busy. Even being a perfectionist is a form of procrastination. This busy isn’t really going to make a difference, in the long run. When have I ever gotten a big gig from someone watching my video?

What this kind of work does for me is it makes me feel productive, but in the end I feel empty, unsuccessful and lazy. Yes, lazy. Because what I have figured out over the past few years is that I, like the hamster, am avoiding what is really out there for me to do. The comfort of “being a starving artist” is overwhelmingly powerful. I don’t know anything else. Who would I be if I actually did succeed? That is scarier than struggling with paying rent each month. It sounds stupider than anything I’ve ever written before, but it’s true.

Living into my potential has been a goal for as long as I can remember. The first line of my first song off my first album is “orphaned by potential”. Get good grades, go to a good college so you can stand on your own two feet. Well, mom, does standing on my feet count when I’m standing on a melting iceberg?

Before this thing melts for good, I’m determined to take the leap I needed to take years ago. The thing about leaps… it’s not a process, it’s a complete 180 degree shift that happens now. And now. And now. I have started closing the deals, asking for specific results, being effective in my requests. Not just inspiring people and getting them “very interested” in my and my music so that over time we’ll build a relationship, but actually getting them to sign the deal, have the meeting, show me the money. Instead of just calling the management company and say “I’m a good artist and I work my butt off”, I call them and say, “when can we meet”? I send my composing reel to ad agencies and film directors and ask them when they anticipate their next project to come in and what is the easiest way for me to get them my music. I ask my fans to help me make my music, specifically through monetary donations. I keep an organized database of people I’ve met at music conferences and every six months, I get in contact with them and ask if they any projects I could collaborate on with them. This kind of “asking” has resulted in my music playing on 10 different TV show episodes, editors placing my music on nationally-airing ads, and invitations to perform on tours that are already booked. The real result? I’m doing less work for more rewards.

I’m becoming [gasp] successful.

The breakthrough was when it registered in my little hamster brain that if I kept spinning my wheels, nothing would change. I would continue to miss opportunities, feel left out, frustrated, underpaid, under stimulated, overworked, and generally uninspired. As a sense of urgency for change crept in, I got clear that I had to create a context of fearlessness, creativity and freedom for myself and let this new context propel my next actions.

That wheel was really getting boring, and getting me nowhere.

Freedom Flyers

Cheryl — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 17:29:43 +0000

I remember a few years ago when the kinks of American Airlines’ on-flight Wi-Fi were being worked out and I was lucky to be on a flight where the internet was free. Today, not so much. And while I’m disappointed by the teasing Wi-Fi signs that mention nothing of the $12.00 fee, I figure I’ve got my computer out and booted up, so I may as well write something. So here are some thoughts on this particular voyage. I’m 30,000 feet above sea level with intention of landing at 6500 feet above sea level and remaining there for a week. I didn’t have to take time off work. I didn’t have to email my boss. I didn’t have to move things around. I just booked a flight.

The pre-flight anxiety I felt yesterday explains to me that I do, in fact, have someone to report to: myself. Not the self that Seth Godin and Steven Pressfield call the “Resistance”, the part of me that loves random trips to Wyoming, procrastination, and anything that leads me away from putting myself on the line and continuing to pursue a precariously unconventional career in music. Nope, I report to my creative entrepreneur, the part of me that knows I have music to write, gigs to book and a mark to make. This part of me gets anxious before my trips and says things like “have you worked hard enough to deserve this?” and “you will be missing so many opportunities while you are away, are you crazzzzy?”. This part of me is almost as bad as the Resistance, although not quite as self-destructive. It stresses me out to the core only because I don’t know the answers to its questions. That, and it is drenched in irony. I mean, this double-checking, schedule-following “artistic” part of me was the one who craved freedom in the first place, right? The side of me that became so overwhelming visionary I couldn’t do anything but create? The part of me that woke up and chose what would happen that day? So why is it now the thing that makes me uneasy when exercising my freedom?

Sometimes I think it’s all about money. If I had some great source of passive income that would be deposited into my bank account no matter what I did, perhaps the voices in my head would pipe down and get along. If I had that financial freedom, I often wonder if I would be able to live my life guilt-free. (Though, knowing my drama-driven neurosis, I’d probably create some other upset.) The only freedom I feel these days is that from gluten. So if my hypocritically creative side would sit back, enjoy the flight, and remember that IT got me here in the first place, I’d much appreciate it. Thank you for sharing, I’d like some more peanuts please.

Extraordinary Fences: Hosting the Circle

Cheryl — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 20:54:59 +0000

as written for Song Circle Music

When I got the email from Tina Shafer (New York Songwriter’s Circle founder) asking me to guest host the Circle at New York’s famous Bitter End, I was beyond honored. This is the thing… I’ve played the Bitter End a dozen times, and performed in both the New York and Philly Circles several times. What made this Circle so special to me was that I didn’t feel I did anything extraordinary to warrant such an invitation. For years, I was a fairly normal indie artist on one side of the fence. The people on the other side were those who choose contest winners, picked singers for publishing deals, got musicians on commercials.

Let me explain. It’s not that I don’t think I AM extraordinary. Clearly, I’m fabulous. But I didn’t win any contests, get any major record deal, or have anyone dance to a song of mine on So You Think You Can Dance. I was a finalist in the first year of the Songwriter’s Circle contest back in 2006, but I didn’t even get top three. Since then, I’ve just been a familiar face, popping up in a Circle every half year, stopping by the Bitter End on the occasional Monday night to say hi. Something about this led to being a part of the new version of the Songwriter’s Circle: Song Circle. I’ve been a very small part of helping the company in various ways, including sharing my thoughts on this crazy industry on their website’s blog. Now I can’t enter my tunes to their annual contest, but I am able to judge others’, if I want. Again, feeling mildly unworthy. Yeah, I write a lot of songs, I collaborate a fair amount, and I think I understand mainstream pop, acoustic and rock music more than the average Joe. Still, I doubt my extraordinariness… Maybe being on the other side of the fence is where I am supposed to be eventually, and transitioning there is tricky… I sometimes feel like I am just about to successfully climb over the top when my pants get caught up in the picket stakes making said fence. Awkward.

Before I arrived at the Bitter End to host my first Circle, I gave myself a pep talk…. Okay Cheryl, NO awkward. You’re here for a reason.

And this is what I realized- there is no fence. That’s what’s special about Song Circle. It’s made up of people like me, artists who tour and record and are passionate and working many angles of the industry, trying to “make it”, whatever that means to them. I am the fence. I’m an example of the Song Circle community as a whole- that without even winning a contest, by merely entering, I was given the opportunity to host a world-famous event. Extraordinary.

Cheryl (on left, standing, with other Song Circle artist 8/2/2010) graduated from Cornell University and is now a singer/songwriter and film and commercial composer. She’s recorded two records and is working on a third project, “One Up”, releasing monthly songs all year. Cheryl has been featured in Keyboard and Performer magazines, toured through America and Europe, performed on ABC, NBC and FOX news, spoken at SXSW, and has had her music placed on soap operas, PBS and MTV shows. More info at www.cbemusic.com.

Listen to Cheryl’s new music and click on 10 stars if you like it!!

Visit Cheryl B. Engelhardt on SongCircleMusic.com

LOST and found

Cheryl — Mon, 24 May 2010 04:23:30 +0000

It’s very hard to get people to like you. Welp, I should speak for myself. Not being the cool kid in high school taught me that early on. Fact: Being president of the drama club and starting a school recycling program does not win you an invitation to the hockey team parties. To get people to like you enough to buy your music, come to your show and donate some of their hard-earned money to support your artistic endeavor, no matter how positively inspiring and worthy, seems like the last path a socially nonchalant individual should follow. Yet here I have found myself.

For the last five months, I’ve been getting more and more excited every time the 23rd rolls around. Today, my excitement was exasperated by 3 sleepless nights in the studio mixing, stressing and cooing over a new song. And now that it’s out in the world, I feel like a fan after the series finale of LOST… empty, sad, strangely satisfied, wondering what’s next and overall just pooped.

I made a promise to myself last December that I would feel full of purpose all year long in 2010. So I created ONE UP, my project to write and release inspiring songs all year long. With some anxiety around my February 23rd birthday (which gets worse every year) I decided that these songs would be released on the 23rd of every month. So far, fans have been helping fund the production and every song, to me, is really, truly one upping the last ones. Yet the irony of today is I released “Trust Me”, one of my most rocking, anthemic tunes ever, and I feel like a hypocrite asking the world to listen to my music when we’re all crying our eyes out about the final episode of LOST. Very anti-climatic for me. Listen to the song and you’ll know what I mean. If you were a LOST fan, the feeling is pretty much identical.

Completion is final. Story lines end. Chord progressions resolve. The thing that makes endings less debilitating is the prospect of new beginnings. Or a new project, new TV series, a new song, a new interaction, a new bond. That’s what fans are to musicians and television shows- relationships. I found a relationship with the characters, the scripts and the music of LOST. I’d like to think that some people have a relationship with my music- they found it, got some sort of emotional payoff from listening to it, and perhaps come to a show or read my blog every once in a while to nurture it. And it’s highly likely that my fan has a fan. It’s a long chain, or perhaps a cycle, of seemingly one-sided involvement and admiration (the creators of LOST have no idea I exist). And at the same time, the relationship exists because there are two sides (they are, after all, writing a show to appeal to people like me). In high school, I really did want to go to those parties, but knew my interest was not reciprocated. Perhaps that is why I am writing this- to let you know that I found you and I want to connect with you, and that I value this relationship, and that whatever form it takes, it is reciprocated.

Sh!ts and Giggles From Iraq

Cheryl — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:04:18 +0000

Like many entrepreneurs, start-uppers, project initiators, and believers in the impossible, when launching my One Up project to write and release one inspiring song a month for 2010, I knew that the money to make it happen would come. I had no idea it was going to come from Iraq.

On my One Up webpage, there’s a big red button to donate to the project to help cover costs of producing the songs, in return for some fan perks like t-shirts, singing on a tune, a private house concert, etc etc. For the month of January, as my e-mail program dinged with alerts from PayPal that another fan had donated a few dollars, my heart would swell with gratitude. Last week, however, I thought it was going to explode when I got notification that a US Military Sergeant (with a mailing address that includes “Troop” and “Calvary”) nearly tripled the amount of money I had raised this year with a single donation. His note in the line labeled “Donation Purpose” read “Sh!ts and giggles.”

Luckily, PayPal gathered his email address for me and I was able to write him a sincere thank you. His light-hearted response to my thanks was that he was compensating “for all those high school days of downloading pirated songs on Napster”. Plus he said he can now call himself a “Patron of the Arts”. He politely declined the dinner certificate and free house concert that you get as part of the Thank You gifts, seeing as he will be in Iraq for the entire year. (Heart swell.) When I looked him up on Facebook, the status of this guy, who looks my age and is from a town not too far from me, read “needs a new job… another day, another incident, another buddy headed home.” (More swelling.)

I’m still trying to make sense of this, of war, of the disaster in Haiti, trying not to look at it as a tragedy though it is, and I’m trying to keep on giving. Make a donation to Haiti relief funds, then opt in at the grocery store to add a dollar to my bill to help a little more. The sympathy and the overwhelming heart swells, plus the guilt of living freely in a safe environment under my own command makes me do it. And I know it’s not nearly enough. Is it even helping?

That’s all I wanted to let my Sergeant friend know- that he is helping make things possible for a little musician back in the states that wouldn’t have been possible before. And yet he thanks me for giving fans an opportunity to interact, and for my music. Well, in that case, Sh!ts and Giggles work for me. My inspiration-meter is wonderfully in the red.

With each cent that rolls in for this project, I am more and more humbled, grateful, and motivated. I am so lucky that I am able to capture this generosity and encouragement and turn it into something audibly tangible. I hope you hear it in the next song, for it will most certainly be there for me.

Paying Dues- The Relative Minor

Cheryl — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 02:08:14 +0000

I just finished my 5th set of the evening of the 5th day in a row of restaurant/lounge/casino gigs in Switzerland. I took these gigs to fill in the time between “real shows”- ie, performing at real venues with stages and people to listen and buy CDs and to connect with. This week’s shows were what I considered time for rehearsing, refreshing, and refunding. I got to run all my new songs with out worries that anyone was really listening. I refreshed my memory on how to play a bunch of old tunes, and, I was being paid to do this. Really not that bad. If I can look past the angry French chef who literally said “your music is not good, play Beatles” and resist the temptation to blame language barriers (that wasn’t really he meant to say), and if I can look past the unusually low CD sales, perhaps I can say this week was a good thing. In the back of my head, though, I felt like I was paying dues.

The phrase “paying dues” is what I relate to as washing the bathrooms at a recording studio seven years ago, staying late at the editing house to run a Beta tape to the color correction studio four years ago, finding a waitressing job, or keeping my personal training clients. I was “paying my dues” as a novice in the music industry because I wasn’t doing music all the time, exactly how I wanted to. Now that I am touring and composing full time (I say this even though I haven’t quite cut the umbilicord with my personal training clients- that’s another article: being authentic about what’s so), I have assumed I’m “doing it”, fully in the music industry with my music on cds and commercials and documentaries, and a tour schedule that covers thousands of miles. But this week, I think I learned a few things, the most obvious being that “paying dues” is relative. Read on.

This week, I got to know the piano better. I trained my voice to last the entire 4 hour gig. I promised myself never to write another song using a chord progression that resembles iii-VI or switches back and forth with the relative minor + major (take one listen to almost any of my songs and you’ll know what I mean…. it’s embarrassing).

There were bigger things I learned too: that maybe I created the lack of CD sales, the people not listening; I had thought dinner and craps were more deserving of my audience’s attention and thus treated my audience accordingly… I walked in with the attitude that I was there to rehearse, refresh and refund, and nowhere in my energy was the possibility of being inspiring. I walked into these shows with a grain of salt, when I could have given, and left with, a beach. In the past, I was quite good at this; back in the day, the recording studio job was not cleaning toilets, it was learning about patch cables, analog editing, Pro Tools… and all I had to do was wash the bathroom, get tooth brushes for the Bahamen’s late night session and a t-shirt for Mos Def! Easy! Where is that Cheryl?

That Cheryl had no expectations back then. She had no idea what the music industry looked like. Now that I’ve worked in many areas of the biz, perhaps this knowledge has forced me to think that I know the difference between success and paying dues.

Really, what I learned this week, is that I am only paying dues if I say so.

Eggs on the Rocks

Cheryl — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 05:41:29 +0000

It’s not even 9am in Hamburg, Germany, and the city is rocking. I can’t find eggs for shit, but bars are open and people are sipping morning beers. I really just want eggs. Heavy metal is blasting out of one window while a car passes me with two girls bouncing to a rap song. And let me mention that last night, in my tiny “hotel” room, I put my head on the skull & crossbone pillow and fell asleep to the lullabies of the punk-rock genre. I turned down the free jack daniels shot you get with your room key. I woke up and opened the blinds to see a guy puking outside my window. Yup, I’m in Hamburg, staying in a “Rock & Roll bar + hotel”, walking around, looking for eggs.

that is not my pillow. it came with the joint.

I walk by the outdoor stage where I’ll be playing tonight. It’s in a plaza surrounded by restaurants, shops and graffiti. It’s a huge stage. I’m psyched. I wish I had my band so I could rock out the way the city seems to be. And I’ll be playing at 8pm. Who KNOWS how hard the city will be rocking by then. I think I’m going to wear all black.

I have a bunch of nicer restaurant and event shows coming up next week, where a solo singer/pianist is just perfect for the venue. I am not worried about those shows (except for their length- some are 4 hours). But tonight, I will have a real audience, and one chance to connect to this city. I told myself that no matter what keyboard they give me, I will be focusing all my energies on my voice, on my words and on getting them out to people who don’t speak English. It will be my voice and the melodies I’ve written that will reach out. I’ve always considered myself a pianist before a singer, and I’ve been told it’s the singing that connect to people, not piano chops. Note to self: sing better.

When I checked in to my bar, I mean hotel, last night, I had been traveling for 30 hours straight and my braids were almost completely unraveled, my dress stretched out, and my shoulders red from my over-weight backpack. I was not feeling too cool as the hip tattooed and pierced bartender/receptionist handed me my hotel receipt and I asked to trade in my shot for a glass of wine (answer was no). I wanted to tell her that I am playing Spielbunplatz, to see if that would make me any cooler. I didn’t, and as I am walking around this morning, I am getting a bit nervous about my”cool” factor. Can my music hang in this too-cool-for-school city? Can I?

Being hooked up: Mastering Jack

Cheryl — Wed, 06 May 2009 06:35:18 +0000

I really freakin’ love hotel rooms. I feel like I’m on vacation, like I’m special, like I have no cares in the world, even if none of these are true. I am on a trip. On tour. On business. Not on vacation. Whatever you want to call it, it has, indeed, been a trip so far. I guess it’s a tour because I’m playing at least one show in every city I’m in. And it’s business because I’m networking and having meetings and setting up future work for myself. And though I’d like to call it vacation, because I am having the time of my life, I’d feel lazy calling it such. A whole month on vacation? with no pay? Impossible. Idiotic. Especially in these times…. right?

Possibly. Or not. I spent about two weeks in Los Angeles pounding the proverbial pavement, had that magical gig where some big-wig manager came up to me after demanding a meeting to discuss “signing” me. I met a famous composer who humored me by watching my composing reel and suggested we work together. I dined with a music publisher who critiqued EVERY song on “Craving The Second” from the angle of what would place well on TV and what wouldn’t. I performed “Keep” for Carol Conners (wrote the Rocky theme song, among a million other tunes) in Beverly Hills. I hung out with new friends and saw old ones, co-wrote a song and sat behind the biggest mixing console I’ve ever seen (at a movie-mixing studio).

At the movie-mixing console

And this is what I learned: I can do this.

A few months ago, I was telling a good old friend (the kind that tells the bitter truth no matter what) that one of my articles was being published in Keyboard Magazine. His response: “Now you’re a writer too? Well aren’t you the jack of all trades, master of none.” I hung up.

Then I called back and apologized and explained my initial burst of anger. It was true. At his response, I quickly became ashamed of the dozen things I do to try to pay the rent (including personal training and teaching fitness classes), sell records and write music. Shouldn’t I be the best at something, at one thing? And for a long time, I thought it was a bad thing that I wasn’t. Until last week when I heard composers and managers and publishers, all who listened to the same songs and viewed the same composing reel, tell me the same thing: that I can score picture AND write and sing my lyrics, and that being a jack of all trades is “in” now, that it’s my ticket to success. Of course, my mom’s been telling me this for years, but I guess it takes a whole bunch of unfamiliar knocks on the ole noggin for me to open the door.

Now I’m halfway through this trip, I’m sitting at a bar in an Austin music venue, waiting for a band to play. After a crazy first 2 days here, I’m laying low in my hotel, checking out the scene by night and writing music by day. (See picture below: hooked up in the hotel.)

I’ve got a commercial and documentary deadlines this week. I’m psyched. I don’t have to fight myself anymore. I don’t have to decide whether or not I should ditch the gigging to have a career as a composer, or give up potential success to write songs all my life. I can take my skills and apply them wherever I choose; as a singer/songwriter and as a composer. I choose both. “Decide” is like “homicide”, “suicide” and “genocide”, where something, some option, is killed off, forever. No more deciding. Only choosing.

I am a composer on tour. I am a performing artist composing in my hotel room. I am doing what I love. I am the best at being me.