Last month, when I was in Seattle, I got to play a house concert at the home of some friends. Their living room is beautiful, spacious, and inviting—in fact, it was designed specifically to accommodate house concerts. A fine Boston baby grand sits in the corner by the windows. We had an excellent turnout, between 30 and 40 people, plenty to fill the space. Around half were friends of mine; the rest were invited by the hosts. Everyone seemed to be in a fine mood. I played two sets, including a few tunes on guitar. I debuted some new originals, played some favorite old jazz standards, and covered songs by Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, and John Lennon. The host played two songs from a musical she is writing, and to wrap up the show, we all sang a Christmas song together.
This would have been a joyful and uplifting experience regardless of any money being involved, but as it happened, I was paid generously by the hosts, and most of the guests made donations as well. All told, it was among the best-paying nights of my musical career.
What a profound affirmation! To do something I absolutely love doing, and to be paid very well for it. In the days that followed, still glowing with gratitude, I kept thinking that everyone should get to have some version of this experience from time to time. I’ve also been wondering: what can I do in order to be able to have that sort of experience more often myself?
Money is messy stuff, but at its purest, it is a form of energy. We pay for what we value, what we want to bring into our lives and into the world. When someone tries to pay you as little as possible, it feels shitty, because you and your time and skills are not being valued—because the energy that person is willing to offer you does not compensate for the energy you must expend.
For utilitarian things like groceries and gas and cars, it is relatively straightforward to agree on a consistent value, even if that value is always fluctuating. For things like art and music and nature and human connection, it is much harder to find such consensus. By their very natures, these things resist the cold quantification that is required in order to assign something a price.
We have a largely unexamined cultural assumption that work should be a form of sacrifice. You do a task you don’t particularly want to do, and spend a good chunk of your day doing it, but in return for that sacrifice you receive money that, ideally, though rarely in practice, is enough to balance out your suffering. What about when the work itself is rewarding, exciting, energizing? How should we think about payment for such work?
As a working musician, I have found this territory where music and money meet to be a bit perplexing. I might play for a great crowd and make great money one night, and find myself dismissed and undervalued the next.
I’ve been planning a trip to Oregon. In Portland, I’ll be visiting a friend who works at a sweet little pub that hosts events throughout the week, including live music. I thought it would be fun to play there, so I reached out to the owner, who was glad to offer me a booking. In her email, though, she didn’t mention anything about money. When I replied, I wrote, “Music is my full-time gig. Are you able to offer any compensation?” She responded that she was “unable to pay musicians,” but that I could collect a “cover charge”—just not at the door, because she didn’t want to turn away her regulars, who might not be there for the music. Not exactly a cover charge, then. More like passing the hat. When I followed up to ask if I could at least have a tab for food and drinks, she wrote, “We usually give performers the first drink free.”
One drink? ONE DRINK!?! I was pissed. Does she have any idea who I am? (No, of course not.) Does she not realize that I routinely get paid hundreds of dollars to perform? (Again: no.) Why does she think she can get away with this? (Because she can.)
It didn’t take too long for me to realize that my wounded pride was not really about this woman or her business practices. It was about my own ongoing insecurity regarding my profession. It was about still feeling, even after many years of doing this work, even after nights like the December house concert, that I constantly have to prove my legitimacy—not just to the world, but to myself.
In truth, I felt childish. After all, she hadn’t asked me to play at her establishment—I’d asked if I could. Please, can I play at your restaurant? Please? And also, can you pay me? Pretty please? She has every right to say no, and I have every right to walk away if I don’t like it.
I dream of someday being invited to perform often enough that I never have to ask. I dream of playing regularly in beautiful theaters with gorgeous pianos for enthusiastic audiences, and being paid very well for it. But even the most accomplished working musicians I know still have to hustle for gigs.
It’s no big revelation to say that it’s hard these days to make money as a musician. It probably always has been, but to hear the older pros tell it, it’s a lot harder now. Gigs in the 70s paid as much or more, in real dollars, than the same gigs do now—adjusting for inflation, wages for musicians today are often a pitiful fraction of what they were. Over that same span, the number of venues has seemingly plummeted (along with small businesses in general), while the advent of streaming services has largely wiped out revenue from royalties.
Still, when I hear old timers complain about how things ain’t the way they used to be, I find myself getting annoyed. Okay, I think, I’m sure that’s true—but what are we going to do about it? We have to create our own opportunities—that’s always been true. We have to adapt, just like everyone else. We have to find ways to work creatively within the constraints of reality.
Artists have always had patrons. In other words, they’ve always relied on the generosity of those who have enough. I’m no exception. One thing I love about house concerts like that one in December is that I don’t have to “charge” a “fee”—I don't have to make up some arbitrary price for my music. I can, instead, rely on the generosity of those who attend. House concerts are, so far, the most promising creative response I’ve found to the problems of the modern music economy. They represent perhaps a more attainable version of that dream I outlined a few paragraphs ago. You can play house concerts without having to be famous first—you just need friends with houses and a willingness to host.
Still, I’m a long way from being able to fill my calendar with house concerts. I still rely on for-profit music venues in order to make a living. I have certainly been fortunate to find a niche within that realm that has allowed me to pay the bills. This was mostly accidental; I had no idea when I was studying jazz piano at age 10 that pianists are uniquely positioned to make a living in the music world. The main advantage is my ability to get solo gigs. Horn players and singers and drummers and bassists usually rely on bands, and bands have to split the money. My jazz education is another advantage—by being comfortable improvising and playing by ear, I can be a bit of a musical chameleon, adapting to many different styles and situations.
For me, earning a living has mostly meant playing in fancy restaurants, retirement homes, churches, and for private events. When gigs are thin, I teach lessons. None of it is glamorous, but it is doing what I love to do and getting paid for it, and it beats anything else I’ve done for money.
When I have engaged in what I think most people imagine when they think of being a musician—that is, leading a band, writing songs, recording albums, making videos, and performing original music in dedicated music venues—I’ve spent money, not made it. I know lots of people who work 9 to 5 jobs in order, at least in part, to fund their art habits. I, weirdly, commoditize my art in some situations in order to fund it in others.
The other day, on a walk with Naomi, I asked her, “do you think I should do something else for money?” This question comes up for me every once in a while. Usually, I’ll ponder it for a few days, maybe even get excited about some particular career path, and the prospect of a salary and benefits, before realizing that it would mean the end of my independence—that I couldn’t wake up on a weekday and read thirty pages of a novel, revise an essay, practice piano, work on songwriting, go for a run—all these things I’ve gotten used to being able to do as part of a “work day.” It would mean not easily being able to go out on the road for a few weeks here and a couple weeks there to play shows and see friends. So far, I haven’t been willing to give these things up.
Maybe I’m spoiled. Most of my friends have 9 to 5s. If they can handle it, why can’t I? Do I think I’m above it somehow? Or on the contrary, that I’m too fragile? (“Up, down, same thing,” says the nonagenarian Zen priestess in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.) And besides, just because I’ve gotten used to the self-employed lifestyle, does that mean it’s actually good for me? Maybe I would be holistically better off if I had a job where I made more money and interacted with more people throughout the day. It would give me structure, and if it was the right job, perhaps I’d even feel more invigorated and inspired. Maybe it would be better if I didn’t have to take as many gigs as I could get. I could take only the ones I really wanted, like that house concert in Seattle.
Like the good listener she is, Naomi didn’t advocate for one path over another; she helped me try out different ideas. Then again, she did observe that, by making my passion and my work one and the same, I had tied my identity to my ability to make money—in a field where it is notoriously difficult to do so. Perhaps doing some other job would free me up to do music purely for the love of it.
The word for such a person is amateur. Amateur is often used as a pejorative term, but that is based on a misunderstanding of the word and its etymology. Many of the finest musicians I know are amateurs. With the money pressure taken off the music, they are free to take the gigs they want and refuse the rest. There is something pure in this. Joni Mitchell captures it well in her wistful song, “For Free”: “And I play if you have the money / Or if you’re a friend to me. / But the one man band / By the quick lunch stand / He was playing real good for free.”
From her level of success, Joni Mitchell can romanticize the guy on the street corner doing it for love. Plus, he’s not cutting into anyone’s profits. Plenty of amateurs, however, are willing to play for free in for-profit establishments, feeding a situation where restaurant owners get used to having live music for free. The pub owner can get away with her practices because there are plenty of decently good musicians in the neighborhood who will jump at the chance to have their band practice in front of an audience. Who can blame them? It’s fun.
When I am in a sour mood about all this, my preferred pejorative term is not amateur but hobbyist. It’s one of those loaded terms you can’t help but say with a sneer. To be clear, it applies exclusively to oblivious male musicians who think they’re hot shit, and who have no understanding of the courtesies and conventions of the gigging world. Hobbyists play too many notes, too loud, and they want you to rehearse five times for one gig, without pay. If I tell my fellow pros that I recently played a gig with a “hobbyist,” I need not elaborate.
These folks are, thankfully, the exception. The vast majority of musicians I know, amateur or professional, are humble and generous, conscientious participants in the local musical ecosystem.
Besides, I know that when I feel mad at individuals for their behavior—whether it’s a hobbyist taking free gigs or a pub owner who doesn’t pay—I’m really mad about a system that incentivizes such behavior, and that puts me in a position to resent it. Imagine a world where all our basic needs were met without us having to hustle for them—where instead of most people specializing in one job they didn’t really want to do, sacrificing their time in exchange for money, everyone had enough. Imagine a world where instead of relying on underpaid “essential workers,” we all pitched in, doing a bit of this and a bit of that, out of a sense of responsibility and a wish to keep things running well. We'd still need highly skilled specialists, of course—surgeons, pilots, engineers, and the like. But most people could do a bunch of different kinds of work, which is what I believe most people would want. In such a world, it would be absurd to ask for money in exchange for music. If I had all the money I needed already, I would play only the music I wanted to play, when and where I wanted to play it, exactly as often as I felt like it, and I wouldn’t charge a dime.
Given how very far we are from such a world, I wouldn’t mind if amateur musicians were generally more conscientious about playing for free, and if pub owners could maybe offer dinner and a couple drinks and an email that wasn’t the dictionary definition of “curt,” even if they can’t afford to offer any money. But what I’m really mad about are the demands that force us to capitalize on every possible opportunity, that pressure us to brand ourselves and market ourselves and commoditize our gifts and say yes to things we don’t want to do, all because we need the dough.
In the end, I decided to play at the damn pub anyway. Not because I need it, and not because I expect to make much money, but because I think I’ll actually have a good time. For one thing, my friend who works there said she’d give me free drinks all night long, the owner’s policy be damned. For another, they have a piano, so I don’t have to lug all my heavy gear, which is really the only part of gigging that feels like the sacrificial kind of work. I can just show up, play some tunes on the piano, make some tips, hang out, and have a nice time.
“Somone hit the big score. / They figured it out,” sings Gillian Welch in her brilliant song, “Everything is Free.” “We’re gonna do it anyway / Even if it doesn’t pay.”