I gave up on a musical career after 15 years broke. It was painful at the time, but now I'm a happy software engineer
Inside Llewyn Davis, the latest film from the Coen brothers, tells the story of a musician struggling to climb one of life's hardest ladders. Anyone who has essayed a career in music will sympathise with Davis, even if they don't warm to his spiky persona. But while Hollywood has dealt extensively over the years with the blossoming of talent, it has been less penetrating in its analysis of the many careers that never flower, a lacuna that the Coens' film tries to fill.
When I was about 15, I discovered that I could write music. Worse than that, I found that I enjoyed it. Thus my academic fate was sealed – no longer was I going to drift rudderless through sixth form and university and become a second-rate solicitor; I was going to be a musician. Various people with my best interests at heart pointed out that I ought to have a contingency plan, so I decided that, if I weren't making a proper living by the age of 30, I would give it up and do something remunerative instead. As if I'd ever fail or, even less likely, reach 30.
I joined and unjoined a series of bands, some of which nearly made it. At one point, in the mid-1980s, I had a recording contract, a publishing contract and three singles under my belt. Unfortunately, I also had a very empty belly.
I never desired fame and I wasn't bothered about fortune – what I really wanted to do was to write film music. In the meantime I supplemented my almost non-existent record and publishing royalties with poorly paying gigs and better-paying session work.
To my horror, one day I stopped being 29 and became 30. I still hadn't been on Top of the Pops, nor the Old Grey Whistle Test, and my bank balance could still be comfortably pocketed in £1 coins.
I remember the night I made the decision to jack it all in. I sat on a bed in a room in my brother's flat, which I was living in more or less rent-free. I felt utterly dejected: not only was I going to have to do something else, it was likely to be something I desperately didn't want to do. Worse, I was a failure. No one wanted to listen to my music.
You hear it on talent shows such as The X Factor all the time – if you want something enough, you will succeed. It's a lie, or at least, if it's true then it's true for hardly anyone. Most of us spend our days doing what we have to, in order to spend our nights and weekends doing what we want to.
In any case, success in the music business is as much a question of luck, timing and making good choices as it is of talent and determination. For example, I was asked to join a band whose music I didn't much care for, a band that later went on to enjoy worldwide success. The jury's still out on whether that was a good decision.
When Llewyn Davis angrily tells his sister that he's not going to return to his former career in the merchant navy, which he regards as mere "existence", he's articulating the disjunction between dreams and reality. Most of us accept early on that we'll never be an astronaut, then proceed seamlessly into a life of varying degrees of drudgery. Some of us look wistfully at our contemporaries who "made it", but even for them, much of life is also mere "existence".
The truth is that it is better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all. What's more, instead of being a miserable solicitor, I'm a happy software engineer.
Hollywood stories are inevitably most often about those who succeed, with the implication that the rest of us have failed, but it's difficult to see why this narrative applies only in the arts. We never speak of failed solicitors or, for that matter, software engineers, although not everyone who attempts those careers succeeds in them either. Former aspiring members of these professions move on with their lives … and so, of course, did I.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/27/llewyn-davis-musician-life
Alexander Korda Alexander Mackendrick Alexander Payne Alexandra Quinn
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