Honest letter 2

This isn't for the faint of heart.

This will strain relationships, make girlfriends resent you, make friends disappear - then magically reappear should some amount of success come your way - it will make family members tell you to "get a real job" instead of supporting you more when they see you struggling, it will make family members suddenly notice college brochures and "think of you", make you late on bills, relegate you to boring jobs that you hate working just so you can be late on said bills, get you fired from that boring job and leave you to spend hours on sites like Craigslist trying to find another boring job you're just going to hate to keep paying those bills.

It will make you question everything you were told you were supposed to do like: finding happiness is the key to life and pursue your dreams when your dream and your happiness are often the same thing making you far more broke than you appear and will have you eating junk like a 19 year old college kid.

But we still keep going. We still keep playing. We still keep writing. We still keep recording. All for that moment when that one fan tells you that your art, your creation, your dedication poured into 3 or 4 minutes of synchronized madness and emotion touched them in a special way. For the dream of kids lined up to see you play live and seeing your name with the words "SOLD OUT" underneath on the reader board. For the vision of having kids lined up at your merch booth at that show. 

This isn't the type of entrepreneurship that will be written about in Forbes or Fortune. There is no Silicon Valley. There is no VC firms waiting to dump millions of dollars into our unproven, wildly utopian idea. All we have is the hope that somewhere theres a kid (or 1000 kids) who would like our stuff and maybe feel inclined to share it. All we have is the dreams in our hearts, the music on a disc and passion lighting a fire under our asses. 

But we're here. In shithole bars getting screwed over by the venue on the money. Repairing our own instruments. Packaging CDs and spending our last dime at the post office hoping that the radio station we sent it to would play it and oh yea, going to that boring job the following morning for a company that would rather pay someone less to do your job but they can't because you're already only making minimum wage. 

We are your independent musicians. You probably know one, love one, are one, are married to one, fired one, hired one, enjoy one or are close to one. And you probably don't support them like you should because you don't know how bad they're hurting. So it just comes out in the music. 

There is no happy ending. The cycle just repeats itself. Yet and still we remain as a divine order of m.a.d. (motivated and determined) rebels.