Jan 13, 20227 min read

Can you be a professional musician if you have a 9-5?

Yes, you can be a professional musician if you have a 9-5.

When I started down the path of becoming a classroom teacher, one of my biggest fears was that it would majorly interfere with my music career. I'd no longer be considered a musician. After all, I was starting grad school, working full time, trying to be a good dog-dad, and a good partner.

--This post is intended to show those struggling with similar fears how very possible it is maintain your artistry, even if you have another career.

You and I are not the only ones who have tried this. Danielle Ponder, a public defender by day and musician by night based in Rochester, NY, worked as a lawyer for years before eventually leaving that career to work as a full-time musician.

During her time as a public defender, NPR's All Songs Considered agreed. She was a legitimate, extremely talented, professional musician, saying she had a “sound that serves as the perfect voice of a movement: anthemic while compassionate; soulful while bold and strong. She reverberates with a goose bump-inducing passion."

In this post, I'll walk through some of the ways I've been able to maintain my own music career while I go through graduate school and teach high-school algebra full time:

Set SMART goals
Dedicate time just for music
Dedicate a space for music/creativity
Legitimize yourself

Set SMART goals

You've heard of SMART goals right? Setting SMART goals are a way to make sure your goals are coherent and precise. SMART is an acronym for:

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time bound

For example, let's look at one of my goals for this upcoming year: releasing a full-length album next winter.

Specific

In order for this goal to be specific, I needed to make some decisions to define what a full-length album was for me. What is my message? How many songs will it be? For this project, the album will be 10 songs. Those 10 songs are based on a songs I wrote over the past year with a common theme: maintaining optimism while going through major life changes.

Measurable

How will I know I've achieved my goal? It's not enough to just write the music and record the album. To me, measuring the release means making sure the album is available on all streaming platforms. What do I need to do in order to make this possible? Will I release with CD Baby or another indie-musician distributor?

Achievable

Based on my busy grad-school, teacher schedule, it would have been unattainable to release an album this spring. It also would have been a different story if I hadn't written enough songs. Releasing an 10-song album with over 12 months of time to put it together is very attainable for me.*

I actually think long term goals can be a bit more "unachievable", more ambitious. We often underestimate what we are capable of over long periods of time. However, over shorter periods of time, we need something within our grasp, something that takes into account our day-to-day lives, responsibilities and commitments.

Relevant

Making sure goals are relevant feels like one of the most important things to consider to me. I could have chosen a number of relevant goals: make a music video, start a virtual musician showcase show, play more shows, etc. However, releasing a full-length album felt the most relevant to what makes me feel the most passion: creative recording. It's worth asking, why is this goal your goal? -- and then being honest with yourself about the answer (which admittedly, is easier said than done).

Time bound

Setting my goal with a due date next winter is really important. If I set the time too short, the goal becomes unachievable. If I don't set a time at all, there's no sense of urgency (or at least no guide as to how much work I should be doing toward that goal any given week). Setting my goal with a timeframe helps me keep myself on track to reach it.

Dedicate time just for music

Dedicating time just for music means looking at your schedule, and blocking off recurring hours of time you can spend just on your music craft. Dedicating this time has been super helpful for balancing my busy schedule for a couple reasons:

It has helped me plan my time for other important priorities, like having enough time to finish homework.
It has helped me feel comfortable and confident focusing my attention on music, even if I know there is other work still to be done.

If there is one thing I've learned in becoming a teacher, it is that work is NEVER done. There is always more to do, more to plan, more to grade, more to brainstorm. If I didn't dedicate time to music, I would never spend any time doing it because all my extra time would go toward taking cupfuls out of the ocean, hoping I would empty it one day.

The way I dedicate time just for music looks like this:

I wake up an extra hour early in the morning. While I drink my coffee, I work on music career admin stuff (fixing my website, scheduling social media posts, updating upcoming shows, etc).
Every Monday and/or Wednesday evening, I work on music. Even if it feels like I'm not in the mood or I'm tired from work, I go to my studio space and carve out those hours to be able to spend time with my instrument, record, write, whatever!
Over the weekend, I can finish my homework and lesson plan for the first half of the week so that when Monday comes, I'm caught up and ready to focus on something else other than school.

Dedicate a space for music

Dedicating space for music is just as important as dedicating time. If you don't have a space conducive for creative work, it is difficult to let your mind be free to explore.

Your space doesn't need to be a different space from where you live. That said, I personally need it to meet some certain criteria:

Free of interruptions
Easy setup
Allows for solitude
Feels inspiring

I'll admit, dedicating a space to music is easier said than done. But the rewards of doing so have contributed greatly to my success in maintaining my career.

When you dedicate a space for music, you are sanctifying music creation, making it a priority. I've spent many years working out of my bedroom. This didn't meet all the aforementioned criteria at first, and I had to set boundaries in order to make it a reality.

First, I had to communicate with those I lived with about when I wanted to work on music. I had to have sometimes uncomfortable conversations asking for social space during those times. This accomplished two of the criteria at once: it helped to free my space of interruptions and it helped to provide myself with solitude.

Next, in order to make my space an easy setup, I needed a desk to keep my recording gear and computer. I also needed a couple feet of floor space to keep my mic stand up always. That way, I could easily hop on the mic whenever I wanted to jot down an idea. Additionally, I downloaded a tuner on my phone so I could always have access to a tuned instrument. Later I graduated to a clip-on tuner. I hung my instruments on the wall so I could grab them at any time.

(It's worth noting hanging instruments on the wall isn't always possible if you need to humidify them or if you aren't allowed to put holes in the walls. However, maybe you can keep your case close-by, easy to reach at a moment's notice.)

Lastly, I needed the space to feel inspiring. With my instruments on the wall, I constantly got to see their beauty. However, I also decorated my space with the soft lighting of Christmas lights and salt lamps. I made the space feel as warm, welcoming, and inspiring as I could given my limited budget.

However, over the past few years, I've valued the privilege to be able to rent a studio space separate from my apartment. Now I rent a studio space close to home where I can very quickly and easily enter a space completely dedicated to making music. Drums, guitars, basses, synths, mics are all set up and ready to go. The space has a aura about it, a decor conducive to creativity.

Legitimize yourself

Legitimizing yourself is having confidence in yourself as a professional. For a long time in my music career, I suffered from imposter syndrome. I felt like I needed to seek approval from other people in the music industry around me. One day, I would be a real musician.

However, after years, I learned this is actually a recipe for demotivation. The only place I could find legitimacy was by giving it to myself.

Don't get me wrong. You can't just say you're a professional musician and automatically be a legitimate, successful one. But if you've put in the time, work, practice, and dedication to music, nothing anyone else says will do your work justice. You have to learn to believe in it for yourself.

Part of accepting yourself as a legitimate musician comes from a dedication to knowing your strengths and weaknesses. Even Beyonce has weaknesses. It's why she has such a big, incredible team. By getting to know and acknowledging your strengths, you can better know when your opinion should be part of the broader conversation, contributing to your confidence and making yourself known. By getting to know your weaknesses, you know where you can grow and/or who you should seek collaboration with.

For example, one of my strengths is lyric writing. Acknowledging this strength helped me to feel more confident in online and in-person conversations about lyrics, and helped to build others' confidence in me too. On the other hand, one of my weaknesses is guitar playing. Acknowledging this to myself gave me permission to ask "stupid" questions to more experienced guitar players, to invest in learning more about guitar playing, and to hire guitar players when I wanted a particular kind of part in a song.

In addition to putting in the effort to make yourself better, be mindful about the way you put yourself out there online to help you legitimize yourself. Have you thought about your brand? Have you thought about what media you release and don't release? Have you put care into the ways your audience will perceive you online? Taking these measures can be helpful in feeling more legitimate. You have done the work to know yourself as an artist. Express its most important parts, and share those parts intentionally with your audience.

For example, I went through a rebranding period recently. I watched a bunch of youtube videos, bought an e-book about branding and music releases, and really did my homework taking notes in order to feel confident in the decisions I was making. Because I know my schedule is so packed, I've planned out how I'm going to move forward with my online presence and how to make it sustainable for when my schedule picks up. I'm prepared for what might come up, and I've done my homework to improve my confidence.

###