Adam Duritz – HuffPost 4.25.14
MR: What advice do you have for new artists?
AD: Music’s something you should do if you have to do it. It’s also a hobby for a lot of people, but it’s not a hobby once you start doing it for your life. Hobbies are things people do for fun and the fact is that like every other kind of work, when you choose to spend your life doing something, it is not going to be fun all the time. You have to get through arguing with band mates and fighting over things that are important to you, things that you might not want to deal with if you’re just playing on the weekends with a band. That’s a hump every real musician has to get over, the point where they realize it’s not just fun anymore. If you really want to love an arform it can’t be based on just having fun, because it’s not going to be. That’s a hard thing to do. For a lot of people, that’s not what they’re in it for.
But if you’ve got to do it, then you should do it. I don’t have any other advice than that because the truth is everybody who needs to express themselves should express themselves but most people expressing themselves will get no recognition, no monetary success, no public recognition because the truth is, and this is historically true, 99.999% of the time, no one notices. Which is not to say that you shouldn’t still do it. In his lifetime absolutely no one bought a single painting that Van Gogh painted, but I’d hate to have been the guy who told him to stop painting, and thank god he didn’t stop painting. Art needs to be made by artists, but you can’t base that on recognition or monetary success, because the success is in the making of it. Everything else is fucking lucky if it works out. But it mostly doesn’t! You’ve got to have satisfaction in doing it.
I was twenty-seven the first time anyone from a record company even came to see a band that I was in. I was twenty-eight when we got signed. That’s like ten years in clubs. At some point in there, I made the decision I was going to do this with my life. It was clear to me that no one was ever going to see it. Things changed, and I got really lucky and all this crap happened, but I had made the decision before that and nothing had happened. Like I said, I was twenty-eight. I wasn’t just starting out when I got signed. It’s ten years. I have no regrets about it at all, but people have got to realize that. The success has got to be the success you feel for yourself about what you’re doing. Not the clapping, not the money, that may never happen. You’ve just got to play for yourself. I’d encourage anyone to do it.