The Comfort of Moving On (When to Quit)

A few years ago, I heard former professional gambler and author Annie Duke on the marvelous podcast, “People I (Mostly) Admire,” hosted by economist Steve Levitt of the Freakonomics franchise. In Duke’s book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, she discusses the art of quitting, and how many of us wait too long to walk away. After all, if there’s one thing a good gambler knows how to do, it’s “when to fold ‘em,” as the song goes. It’s important not to stick with a poker hand when the odds are telling you to quit.

Similarly, it’s important in life not to stick with a job, a pursuit, or a partner when every fiber of your being is telling you to get out. Steve Levitt summarizes Annie Duke’s book this way: “People stick with bad things almost always for too long, and we’d be better off if we quit things sooner.” Waiting too long causes us to stop progressing, to stop gaining ground toward our goals.

How often have you waited to quit an unfulfilling job out of fear and uncertainty, only to find that after doing so, you wound up telling yourself, “I should have done this years ago”?

Getting yourself to quit on time can be tricky. There’s an emotional pull in our society that makes quitting sound weak. We hear accolades for people’s “stick-to-itiveness.” We hear aphorisms like “quitters never win, winners never quit.” But what we might not hear is that a successful person who you admire might have quit three other goals before finding the one that worked, that an entrepreneur had two failed businesses before finding the one that succeeded, that a person left three romantic relationships before finding the one that clicked.

In order to grow, we have to allow ourselves to quit aspects of our lives that aren’t working.

Over the last year, I quit my two main music activities: I stopped playing at a church where I’d worked almost every Sunday for twelve years, and then last week I played my last concert with a local yacht rock band that I’d performed with for three years. In both cases I was playing with good musicians who were nice people. There was nothing awful happening in either scenario. Both allowed me to do what I do fairly well: play the keyboards. Both paid me a little cash that gave me a sense of contributing to my family (albeit, minimally). There were reasons to stay.

But neither musical act was fulfilling. I wasn’t inspired. I wasn’t stretching myself as a player. I was showing up, playing, collecting a check, and going home. That’s not what I want out of music. I think of drummer Bill Bruford quitting Yes, Gregg Rollie leaving Journey, or Sting pulling out of The Police, each at a point when those bands were at their creative peaks. There were all sorts of reasons to stay, but they each decided it was time to walk away.

Now, leaving a church gig and local yacht rock band pales in comparison to the above examples, but despite a multitude of reasons to stay, I quit both of them, and if I’m honest with myself, later than I should have. You know you’ve made the right decision when after quitting you feel a little lighter, a little freer, and that’s how I feel now.

Now it’s up to me to put that new energy into action, and to proudly carry the mantel and say, “Yeah, I’m a quitter.”

The Challenges of Staying in Shape

I see them, people not so much older than I, struggling to get in and out of their cars, or to walk from their car to the front door of a Kohl’s or Target. I see motorized wheelchairs, oxygen masks, and walkers. I see labored breathing after a flight of stairs. And I know that not only do none of us get out of here alive, but most of us are going to have significant physical limitations before our bodies finally call it a day.

Still, I’d like to take steps to at least give my body a chance to avoid the worst of it, to recover after an accident or an illness or a surgery. When my wife had an accident last winter and broke six (or was it seven?) ribs, it was a wake-up call to both of us. Neither of us was in as good of shape as we should have been, and it was painfully clear that events are inevitably going to happen to our bodies that require recovery. The better shape we’re in now, the better chance we’ll have to recover quickly and successfully. Something as simple as getting out of a chair can be a terrible burden after an accident, but even more if your muscles aren’t in good working order. Physical fitness matters. For years, I’ve watched guys in workout facilities pump iron like their lives depended on it, and I’ve finally started to realize…they’re lives might depend on it!

And so my wife and I started seeing a personal trainer twice a week. My plan was to see him for three or four months, get a good routine established, and continue the workouts at home. I worked diligently last winter and spring, expanding my repertoire, purchasing mat flooring, a workout bench, some bands and dumbbells, and after a few months, I felt stronger: my movements had become more fluid, I had increased my confidence in exercises like hinges and squats and lunges, and my left knee – for decades the source of on-again, off-again piercing pain – finally got over its persnicketiness. All it took was one additional step up onto a 20-inch plyo box – one that had me groan audibly in pain – and as if my magic, all the knee pain that had plagued me since I was in my 20s disappeared. I can now step up onto 20-inch box without a thought.

Yay for the human body!

I was going along just fine, feeling rather smug about how much by body was improving, continuing my workouts at home plus an occasional check-in with my trainer, when suddenly my neck – also a source of on-again, off-again piercing pain for the past several decades – cried uncle, immobilizing my head to the point where it could barely turn.

Back to the drawing board. I began a three-month period of virtually no working out; that is, not unless you include the dozens of physical therapy sessions I attended at a well-run local clinic. I worked as diligently on my assigned “necksercises” as I had on my normal workout routine, and after months of pain and frustration, my neck began to relax, allowing me to increase my head movement significantly. It’ll probably never be “normal,” but it is much better. It’s at a point where if I can maintain my level of mobility for the rest of my life, I’ll be a happy man.

Yay for the human body!

But then I returned to the gym. It was as if I’d never started working out to begin with. After my first session, I could barely walk for the next two days.

So the journey begins again, trying to establish a functioning human body that has a fighting chance to recover after a fall or a car accident or a surgery. I’m trying. But now I’m proceeding with more caution than last winter. I’m lifting, but not as much. I’m allowed to do overhead pulls, but no longer overhead presses. I have to recognize that as much as I want to get stronger and achieve more fluidity, I also want to be able to move my head. It’s a balancing act, a variation of which I suspect all of us will be navigating for the remainder of our lives.

“Just keep moving,” is my motto these days.  And try to avoid the types of events that will test how fit (or unfit) you really are.

Touring for Today's Musician

Last month I discussed the current state of new music (conclusion: it isn’t good, not because of the music, but because of nearly everything else), and I questioned how a smaller artist can financially justify touring. More specifically, I estimated how much the artist Sammy Rae and her amazing band might have earned at a show in Milwaukee that I attended last November. I concluded very little, if anything.

Right on cue, bassist and YouTuber Adam Neely posted a video this week on how his band, Sungazer, barely broke even on their recent tour of the West Coast. Neely is far more eloquent than I am, and I highly encourage anyone who wonders about how their favorite artists survive to check out this video. In it, Neely specifies the costs associated with his tour, some of which may surprise you. Neely discusses how important the size of the band is in determining the cost-effectiveness of touring. For Sungazer’s tour, they typically played with four musicians, and the fourth was sometimes a luxury they weren’t so sure they could afford. Compare that to Sammy Rae’s six-piece backing band; I have no idea how she was able to pull this off and whether any of her band made enough to justify being away from home and, presumably, away from their other gigging or teaching jobs that pay the bills.

A few years ago, touring was challenging enough for independent artists, but Neely highlights just how precarious such an endeavor is in the age of COVID, as his band had to postpone tour dates when two of its members contracted the virus. This took away from the bottom line, as it extended lodging requirements and added costs to its van rental and gas. There’s also the issue of insurance, and Neely points to a CBC article from last September that examines this issue.

What was most illuminating about the video for me were the negative comments Neely shared about people’s perceptions of how touring musicians “should” live: to-wit, destitute, sleeping in vans, unshowered, presumably living off of nothing but the thrill of playing music. Worse, many of these vitriolic viewpoints were from fellow musicians who, as Neely states, “had sacrificed personal comfort indignities to stretch thin budgets on the behalf of those who might exploit their labor” and were now eager to chastise those who have chosen to live the way most sane human beings live.

Neely concludes (I’ve edited his remarks for smoother reading): “Musicians are expected to struggle. It is part of the narrative. The idea of a bed to sleep in seem(s) especially controversial. But this DIY ethos metastasizes quickly into anti-labor rhetoric. and (in) relentlessly questioning the necessity of fair working conditions and compensation, the argument being made, effectively, is that living expenses are shameful and the idea of paying for labor is downright offensive.

“I would argue that live music has value. It is work. And those who do it deserves to do it with dignity, like anybody who works.”

Nicely said, Adam. Please consider subscribing to his channel.

Neely also refers to several other worthy reads, including the following:

• the band Pomplamoose’s balance sheet from its 2014 tour.

• Stereogum’s article, “Why Are Musicians Expected to be Miserable on Tour Just to Break Even?”

• If you have access, you can also check out Rolling Stone’s article that references some of the above, including the band Wednesday’s tweet about it’s appearance at South by Southwest Festival, which earned the band a net of $98.39.

I’ve been writing about music for the past couple of months. Next week I’m going to start addressing some other issues that have been on my mind, starting with the importance of physical labor for one’s well-being.

Playing Music without Understanding Theory

My musical ear is decent – not great.  If you play me a complicated jazz tune or a song by King Crimson and the like, I will not be able to play along, but for most rock/folk/blues tunes, I can figure out what’s happening pretty quickly, and my ability to play the song isn’t usually beholden to a particular key.  Like many musicians, I can think of chord changes in terms of Roman numerals, which is hugely helpful when “hearing” changes and playing along.  I’m often made fun of in band practice because I’ll always ask what key a song is in before we start playing.  I can never remember.  Once I know the key, I’m good to go (usually).

What I find amazing is just how many musicians – good one, too – play their instruments without really understanding the language of music, what we often call music theory.  A friend of mine put it this way: it’s like learning a second language by memorizing a lot of sentences.  Yes, it’s impressive to learn so many sentences, and you may be able to utter hundreds of them correctly, like “I’d like my breakfast with two eggs and toast,” but if you instead want to say, “I’d like my lunch with three pickles and coleslaw,” you’ll be in a fix.

This is a great analogy for what some musicians do.  And I’m not knocking them.  I think it’s amazing.  What they do is actually harder than what I do, because they’re memorizing songs.  I’m usually not.  I’m following chord changes that I hear in my head.  I know guitar players who can play crazy difficult solos note for note but who don’t know what a C7#9 chord is.  By contrast, I can’t learn a complicated solo without a great deal of effort;  I can, however, play along to a tune and tell you that the iv minor chord that the band is playing is incorrect – that it’s a flat VII major 9 (as recently happened when my band was learning “Brass in Pocket”).  I’m relatively good at that kind of thing.  Different skill sets, I suppose, and my ear still isn’t what it should be.  A good jazz musician might wonder how I dare to call myself a musician when I don’t know what mode to play over the aforementioned C7#9 chord.  I’ve got a lot to learn, for sure.

But those among us who literally memorize their parts should be revered on some level, because it’s a huge feat to memorize parts and excel in doing so.  The problems arise when you’re trying to communicate with each other.  I’ve had bandmates who don’t know what I’m talking about when I ask them to go to a III major chord, or who can’t change song keys without a lot of preparation.  That can be problematic and, at times, limiting, just as I would be a limiting factor in a jazz combo.

But I think it’s also encouraging that there are multiple ways to approach and enjoy music, and that one can be proficient in some aspect of music but not in others. Ultimately, those differences might even be invaluable to the makeup of a band.