AJ Croce – HuffPost 4.2.13

Mike Ragogna: What advice do you have for new artists?

AJ Croce: Work really hard I guess is the best advice that I can give. Practice as hard as you can for as long as you can when you’re young. The older I get, the more I recognize how lucky I was to have known what I wanted to do when I was twelve years old. If I hadn’t had those years really dedicated to practicing and not having to worry about paying bills and those kind of things, I don’t know that I would have been able to do what I do. You rarely have a moment in your life when you have the opportunity to make that happen. Now, I know a lot of artists who came at it later, and they just had to work doubly hard to make that happen, but most of my friends have done it all their lives. They’ve done it since they were kids and, like myself, were starting bands at fourteen and fifteen years old, and then it just sort of transitioned into being a career. So, yes, work very hard, practice hard and don’t take no for an answer. If you believe in yourself, then you really need to stick to it. On my first record, I had every benefit of having a name that people recognized and no track record of any sort of failure, so there was nothing but positives, in a sense, and yet my manager and I sent out over eighty-five demos to eighty-five different labels before one said yes. It got even more extreme as I got older because I initially got put in a genre that I don’t really fit in. I’m more of a singer-songwriter than anything else, but I was put in this sort of jazz category. It was a challenge because traditionally that genre just doesn’t sell very well. [laughs] Yeah, it takes a lot of work, and you have to really believe in what you’re doing. So, yeah, work hard.