View All Students
Desiree Holiday
The Hampster Wheel
What’s so terrible about this profession is that in order to get paid for your craft, you have to prove you can produce quality work. In order to produce quality work, you have to get paid in order to pay for the tools or to pay the people to assist in producing that quality work. Most artistic minds are inspiration driven; that is to say, they are only called to action when inspired. This comes off as a lazy to most, but to others it is understandable. We are the muses, the creators of Aw, and this creativity requires immense seclusion, time, and a sense of freedom. What took “You Are Beautiful” so long was the money. What takes any project a long time to execute in my tier of profession is the money! Unlike recognized artists and songwriters who receive healthy advances from their record labels and/or publishers, those of us still on the ground floor have to find ways to produce the same quality of work on a much lower budget. Subsequently, we are required (if so driven to do so) to get a day job. This day job must not only pay our day-to-day bills and expenses, but it also needs to be able to fund our budding careers and aspirations. This Audio sh*t is not cheap!! Even bootlegging programs like Logic or ProTools (not a confession) can be costly depending on the disposable income a person has. Even living in a place like Nashville, where I can walk into any pawn shop and find an array of old and disregarded audio equipment, I am lucky to find a decent microphone, preamp, or even compressor for under $150. That’s a huge chunk of change for my less than $30k/year salary. Because of all of this extra work we have to do to fund our careers, it leaves us little time to actually execute and complete the projects at hand. Did I forget to mention that? Yeah, it takes a lot of time to produce just one three-minute song, let alone a three-minute music video, or a 2’x2’ watercolor painting. Artists, for a lack of a better description, are lazy! We feed off of aimless, mindless downtime to in order to be able to allow the creative energies to flow into our psyche to create memorable works of art, music, or what have you (still not to mention as a creative entrepreneur, you HAVE to create multiple streams of income). So it’s an insane Hamster Wheel, at least in the beginning. I am blessed to have two steady jobs that offer sufficient downtime in order for me to create while on the clock. One is full time, as a Media Specialist at my Alma Mater, Tennessee State University, the other being part-time at iHeart Radio, 1510 WLAC as a Board Operator/Producer. Both jobs are entry level in my career field. These are two positions that The Most High has blessed me with. Before, I worked as a dispatcher for AAA, and before that as a clerk for a gas station. There was no time for creativity while on the clock, and I had little energy to complete projects off the clock. So I overstand the hardship of the working musician, and understand the choice of the starving artist, the one who wishes to make art and/or creativity their full time job, regardless if they get paid or not. At the end of the day, it takes money AND time to make money. Those of us getting our footing have little of both. The few of us with true passion, however, make a way to make it happen. Thus I have nicknamed myself: Mrs. Make It Happen.
