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the side hustle.
I’m no Einstein, but I might have been onto something when I started a blog in 2010. Approaching my third year of a publishing deal with zero cuts to my name, I—for no rational reason—committed to vlogging every day for 365 days. The premise was that I had to take a short video clip of something (anything!) for a year and write something about it. Every. Dang. Day. For a year. This was before I had hits before I had kids, and before I had any hope of actually having a morsel of success in this business.
On some days—like the 4th of July or my birthday—the thesis of the day was obvious. But on the most mundane of Tuesdays, I had to pay such close attention to the details that I learned to find meaning in how much snow was in the rain gauge or how virtuous it is to wander around a grocery store. When I read back on those entries, I can see that they made me grateful, attentive, and zoomed in, not out of necessity but out of pure, senseless creativity. I woke up every day for a year, forced to pay closer attention to the ordinary than ever before. And not when I felt like it. Sounds a lot like songwriting, doesn’t it?
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I didn’t know it at the time, but that blog was making me a better writer. Not because I was actually writing. But because I had given myself permission to have a side hustle. We all know what it’s like to have a side hustle that supplements that very humble first publishing deal draw. Twenty-four thousand dollars a year doesn’t go far. The nannying. The valeting. The singing demos on songs we despise for a few hundred bucks. But in songwriting, the most effective side hustle isn’t the one that pays the utility bill. It’s the one that makes you forget that you are a songwriter at all. This is nothing new.
Einstein knew all of this long before me. And he called this kind of side hustle ‘combinatory play.’ The act of doing something unrelated to what you are trying to do in order to do it better. It has been said that he came up with many of his most notable theories when he would take breaks to play the violin. These creative breakthroughs are not coincidence. And these hobbies are not just pastimes. They are a pathway to the subconscious. And it makes so much sense for songwriters and our longevity.
The catalysts for most of us attempting to write our first songs are the virtues of humanity. Curiosity. Emotion. Heartbreak. Nostalgia. Creativity. And if we are good enough, we end up showing those songs to other people. Then, they tell us how they feel about them. And it undoubtedly hurts our feelings from time to time. And no one wants to record them. Then, humanity starts taking a backseat to the bigger driver, which is now our ego. Our ego is on both our sleeves as the industry and our friends and family watch—as the clock ticks—as we try to prove ourselves through what is supposed to be a job. And through it all, what used to feel like an open backroad to ideas and songs now feels like a traffic jam on the interstate going nowhere fast. Do you see how we get lost? That’s where I was in 2010. Writing the most songs I ever had in my life, and none of them going anywhere. So I needed to take the next exit to a dirt road. A road that went where no one was watching, and no money was to be made. So, I did a vlog. That no one saw. And I remembered how to have fun again. And for a few hours every night, I forgot I was a songwriter.
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A few years ago, when I learned about Einstein’s strategy for greatness, I started connecting more dots between the moments that pulled my ego out of the driver’s seat and the ones that brought me the biggest career breakthroughs. I wrote my first No. 1 right around the time I had been away for months as a failed reality TV show candidate. Yes, I am a The Voice alum. I wrote my second No. 1 weeks after I had my first baby and had absolutely no footing. I wrote three more in January, which is the month when I always do Whole 30 and spend most of my time in the kitchen trying to focus on health and not music. While hindsight can be a convenient narrative, I can assure you the moments I started loving something else more (a new baby, summer in California, playing rec league volleyball), my songs started writing themselves.
And it’s not just me. Over the years, I’ve become fascinated with the arc of successful writers, and I think the secret sauce isn’t actually writing. It’s hunting. It’s fishing. It’s photography. It’s running a marathon. It’s learning to quilt. It’s restoring an old truck. It’s starting a non-profit or a podcast. Lately, for me, it’s been baking cakes and playing rec league volleyball. The secret to the side hustle is remembering how to play when no one is playing your songs. And maybe that’s the reason someone eventually will.
Photo by Claire Schaper
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