You Can Live Your Life Right Now by Spencer Grimes
For some, being in a band is a full time job. For others it’s a part time hobby or fun activity for nights and weekends. As for the guys in Whosah, we treat music making and performing as if it were a full time job that we do in half the time. What this really means is that we end up giving as much of our time, effort, sweat and brain power towards our music as physically possible while still remaining afloat in the rest of our lives. And we’re not alone in this pursuit: for many independent musicians much more time than we’d like is spent fulfilling life’s daily requirements and paying bills by other means: working day jobs, going to school, and giving our bodily fluids to science.When I talk to musicians leading these doubles lives like us, there’s a commonly held belief that these non-musical endeavors are just temporary, mere placeholders to get by until they find a big record deal, get discovered, or make it big. But I don’t want to live my life that way. Not to be misunderstood, I have mad respect for people who joyfully endure tough situations that are outside of their control, but for me, I want to be a man of action. I’m not interested in working a job I don’t care about, writing songs in my basement, and hoping that some grand powers that be in the music industry stumble upon my band’s Facebook page. I don’t want to sit and wait for my life’s engine to turn over; I want to go out and push my car uphill through 4 feet of snow, even if there’s no promise of ever getting it to run on it’s own.As kids, we used to talk about what we wanted to be when we grew up: I wanted to be a pilot, an astronaut, and a teacher, but these dreams just stayed imagined until eventually they faded out into things I used to dream about. While I’ve graduated from college now, I still wouldn’t say I’m a grown up. Instead I’ve decided to stop waiting to grow up before being who I want, and start being it. I want to make music with my friends, travel to places I’ve never been, and connect with people in a way that encourages both them and me to live fully alive right now. I don’t know all the details around how I’m going to do that or what it’s going to look like in the future; details can’t all fall into place until someone starts putting them together. But I do know that I can take steps right now to get there. We can’t book a national tour with Walk the Moon, we don’t know those guys, but we can call every venue and band in the state of Wisconsin until we find a place that will let us play and some local bands to join. And once we’ve done that, we can do the same in Illinois. Then the rest of the Midwest, then all the other states. And that process is the life I want. I don’t need to wait for a national tour to enjoy making music with my friends and traveling to places I’ve never been.Very little of that process sounds glamorous and all of it sounds like a lot of work. Figuring out how to find time to write songs, practice, book shows (and still be a good friend, brother, and son) while making enough money to eat takes some serious work –but what good thing doesn’t take work? And that’s the life I want to live. I want to live a life where I work as hard as I can on the things I care the most about. Perhaps someday I will go on a national tour where people know the words to my songs, and perhaps I won’t. Right now it doesn’t matter. An uncertain future doesn’t need to keep anyone from living the life they want right now.
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Admin at Beyond The Stage Magazine
Beyond The Stage Magazine is a digital music publication based out of the United States. With more than 25 issues, the publication has covered artists like Noah Cyrus, Logan Henderson and more.
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