Fort Myers Florida Weekly

The MUSIC Business

Not every musician reaches the top, which is fine for some


Not every musician reaches the top, which is fine for some

Not every musician reaches the top, which is fine for some

Every year ambitious musicians eager to jumpstart their careers try to win a spot on such TV shows as “American Idol” and “The Voice,” hoping the exposure will hurl them into the music career stratosphere.

But for every Kelly Clarkson or Jennifer Hudson who breaks clear of the crowd, untold numbers of musicians give up on the dream.

Yet superstar-level success or abject failure aren’t the only options. Somewhere between the extremes are thousands who find that success in the music business doesn’t have to mean becoming a household name.

“Success for musicians comes in a lot of different forms,” says John Kim Faye, former lead singer of the Caulfields and author of the new memoir “The Yin and the Yang of It All: Rock ‘N’ Roll Memories from the Cusp, as Told By a Mixed-Up, Mixed-Race Kid.”

“There is a huge community of what I call ‘middle-class musicians’ who all play, sing, write and produce at the highest level. They go on tour, blow people’s minds when given the opportunity, and yet the general public has never heard of them. Trust me, there are a lot of us out there, just doing what we do and finding a way to keep on going.”

 

The Yin and the Yang of It All: Rock ‘N’ Roll Memories from the Cusp, as Told By a Mixed-Up, Mixed-Race Kid

About 24,000 people in the United States are employed as musicians or singers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The median income is about $30 an hour, far below the multi-million-dollar contracts young musical dreamers might imagine.

How any individual artist defines success often depends on the person’s particular talents and strengths, as well as what they want their everyday life to look like.

“Some people want to reach a certain level of financial gain and are willing to play 250 shows a year to do it,” Faye says. “Others might be focused on writing and getting their songs placed in films or on Netflix. Others might put their efforts into building an online following and spend their days creating content. There are lots of different paths you can take. It’s a mosaic, not a monolith.”

Fleeting success and one-hit wonders

Still, reaching the heights of Billboard popularity with a hit song that has the entire country singing along is enticing.

In his book, Faye mentions how much he enjoyed the song “Moonlight Feels Right,” a hit in 1976 for the group Starbuck. But Starbuck could never duplicate that success with its subsequent music, an example of how fleeting and flimsy music-industry success can be.

Faye knows because he soared to his own musical heights as lead singer for the alternative rock band the Caulfields, which recorded two albums in the 1990s for A&M Records.

“When I got my little taste of the trappings of success in the mid-’90s, I basically convinced myself that ‘this is my life now,’ ” Faye says. “My record was on the radio. I was touring all over creation. I was paid a hefty advance for my publishing. The idea that it would all go away faster than it had arrived was definitely not something I kept in the front of my mind, and my behavior would confirm that because I blew through that money pretty fast.”

Faye says that’s why it’s important for budding musicians, especially those on the brink of major success, to realize that their so-called 15 minutes of fame can’t be the main driver behind a sustained career path.

“Those opportunities in the spotlight do go away quickly,” he says. “But if you’re in it for the right reasons, you’ll gain the fortitude to put yourself in a position to learn from it, move forward, and maybe even parlay it into something more valuable down the road.”

As he looks back on his career so far, Faye says he would tell his younger self to “savor and appreciate every experience through the lens of connection.” Instead, he says, it was too easy to get caught up in the industry mindset that bigger is always better, and to think of the audience only in terms of the head count.

“But in many ways,” Faye says, “every time I got closer to the traditional idea of rock stardom, the further away I got from the true reason I started playing music in the first place, which was to use my voice and my songwriting to show people who I am. I want to be seen, and just as importantly, I want to see the people who are listening back. I want the experience to be symbiotic.” ¦

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