“You're a prostitute, too?”
I was
staying with the founder of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, Mitch
Podolak, an unabashed Canadian communist who has been around long
enough to have met just about everybody – and he has at least one
good story about each of them. I don't have enough fans anywhere in
Manitoba for a gig to break even on the airfare involved with getting
there from just about anyplace else, so this visit to the province
was being subsidized, as usual. Like any good communist, Mitch knows
people in the local labor movement who are sympathetic with the folk
scare, and one of my gigs was in a union hall. (During a snowstorm,
but that's normal in Manitoba.)
A
couple days into my stay, Mitch took me to the home of Nathan Rogers,
son of the late Canadian cultural icon, Stan Rogers. There in
Nathan's dining room was another well-known Canadian songwriter,
James Keelaghan, looking like a real touring musician, with a
headphones cord draped around his neck. (The cord gets tangled if
you do anything else with it.) Mitch introduced me to Nathan and
James at the same time.
“You
and David share a profession in common,” he said.
One
of them responded immediately (I don't remember which one): “Oh,
you're a prostitute, too?”
“It must be good to do what you
love for a living.”
When
I meet someone new who is not a musician, this is the response I get
a majority of the time when they find out about my profession. It's
always a slightly awkward moment for me. I always wonder which
people in which other professions get that line. I do love playing
music, and I also enjoy meeting new people and seeing new places, so
I'd say I'm well-suited for the job. But I'd enjoy life more if I
didn't necessarily have to be traveling most of the year, spending
sometimes half of my waking hours while on tour behind the wheel of a
rental car or cramped up in an airplane.
I
always want to ask these new acquaintances if they've ever seen the
movie Control
about the band, Joy Division, or the documentary about the Canadian
metal band, Anvil,
two of the best movies ever about the realities of life on the road
for working musicians. But most people have never seen those movies,
and if you complain about the difficulties of playing music for a
living, many people will understandably look at you like your an
ungrateful wretch, and will silently wonder if this prima
donna might rather work
in their cubicle for a change instead. To which my answer would be
“no.” So I just smile agreeably most of the time.
Demystifying the Price of a Song
In my post,
TaxTime: A Musician's Income, I laid out the financial realities of
being a touring musician, feeding a family, paying the rent, and how
when you do the math, after expenses, you pretty much need to do 120
gigs a year and get paid an average of $500 for each one. So that's
why traveling contract workers, like musicians, need to be well-paid
(relative to many other workers who stay in one place and have a more
predictable source of income, like a monthly paycheck).
But what about the
music itself? What is the price of a song?
When I was setting
up my Kickstarter campaign last summer (through which I raised the
money I needed to record
Meanwhile In Afghanistan,) I was trying to
think strategically about different rewards I could offer for
different levels of donations. $15 for a copy of the new CD, $25 for
a signed copy, stuff like that was pretty standard. But when I put
some thought into the idea of offering to write a song on commission
for some kind of bigger donation, it took a while first for me to
become comfortable with the concept, and then to come up with a
realistic number.
If you forget
about all the research that is often involved with good topical
songwriting, and if you forget about the years of working on your
craft that led you to be able to write a good song and deliver it
well, and you just consider the cost of making a good recording with
a bunch of good musicians in a good studio, a song costs at least
$1,000 to "make." It occurred to me that I love it when people give me
good song ideas, regardless. But if someone really thinks a song
should be written on a certain subject in the near future because
they think it could have a little impact in the world, or just
because they really want to see it happen, why not associate a price
tag with a song? Some of my best stuff, as well as some of Woody
Guthrie's best stuff, and Alistair Hulett's and many others, were
commissioned.
If a song's going
to get written, and especially if it's going to get recorded in a
form that lots of people might want to listen to (that is, in a good
studio with a good band), somebody's going to have to come up with
the money. Could be a record label, or a wealthy relative, or
hundreds of different people pre-purchasing a copy of the forthcoming
CD. It could be a government funding for the arts (haha). It could be
hundreds of people subscribing to an artist on a long-term basis, freeing them from the constraints of thinking about how to fund each new project. Or, at least partially, it could come from people or
organizations who are aware that a song is a potentially valuable
educational and motivational tool for their cause. (Two such
commissioned songs will be appearing on my next CD.)
Inevitably,
though, there is the nagging question associated with the whole idea of being paid to conduct sacred activities.
In utopia, only the purest motives would cause someone to write a
song. And in utopia, no one would have to pay to record the album,
either, I guess. It would be preferable if there were a clear way to
find the moral distinctions between, say, prostitutes, lobbyists, and songwriters. But in reality it's all a bit fuzzy.
And to be sure, most of the songs people are paid to write really
suck. Just listen to the formulaic pap that Nashville or LA excretes
on a weekly basis.
But certain facts
remain: the world is undoubtedly better off since Woody Guthrie
recorded an entire album of songs about
Sacco and Vanzetti, and he
never would have done that if it hadn't been commissioned. It's very
possible that the best song Alistair Hulett ever wrote was “
He Fades Away.” And even for a DIY musician, you'd be hard-pressed to
evaluate the cost of a song at less than $1,000. (And in Nashville
it's a hell of a lot more expensive than that.)
