Most Music Careers Don't Fail. They Change.

The people I admire most in this business aren't the ones who never stopped. They're the ones who kept going, even if it's finding the next version of a life in music.

Some music careers end with a bang. A breakup, a blown deal, a final show everyone remembers.

Most don't. Most simply change shape while nobody is watching. One year the band is rehearsing on Tuesdays. A few years later someone mentions, almost in passing, that they haven't played in a while. And because we've been taught to measure a music career by how far up it goes, the quiet version gets filed under failure.

I think that filing system is wrong.

When my band was deciding to take the foot off the gas, I had this distaste for the non-committal to the end. I adopted the Neil Young lyric "It’s better to burn out than to fade away" and we end with a bang.

Then I went on to do music-industry related things for the next decade almost. Different focus, same world: record label, artist management, publicity, arts-association boards and leadership.

I thought the end of the band was pushing me out the door. So I scrambled my way back in the building, so I didn't have to leave music, just change rooms for a while.

For a long time I treated all of that as "what happened after." Not so much anymore. Hosting Almost Famous Enough has evolved my thinking, one long conversation at a time.

What does it mean when a music career "ends"?

Usually it means the job description changed, not the person's relationship to music.

That sounds like a small distinction. It isn't. If you define a career by one role (the touring artist, the frontperson, the one on the poster), then any move away from that role looks like a loss. If you define it by what you actually do, which is make things, connect people, solve problems for the music you love, then the same move can look like growth.

The guests who've stayed with me the longest are mostly people who made that shift, on purpose or by accident.

Can a decade somewhere else lead you into music?

Yes, and Joelle May (ep24) is the proof I'd point to first.

Joelle grew up in Alberta, and like a lot of people here, she started her working life in oil and gas. She spent roughly nine years in land administration, negotiating well sites and pipeline rights, working her way up from receptionist. She was clear on the show that she'd more or less happened into it. And then, nearly a decade in, she found herself asking what she actually wanted to do.

The answer arrived in a small way. Around 2007, friends in a band she'd been helping with gear hired a publicist, and it was the first time Joelle realized that music publicist was a real job. She knew immediately that it was what she wanted. She started her own publicity company that year, and since then she has done management, grant writing, festival work, and now serves as general manager of New Motor Records.

What stays with me is how much of the oil and gas years came with her. Negotiation, regulatory patience, the ability to keep a dozen details straight at once. She also said something about the higher levels of the business that I've repeated to people since: everybody up there is making it up as they go, the stakes are just higher.

That's not a career that failed in oil and gas. That's a career that transferred.

Can you keep a day job and still be a real musician?

Lisa Jacobs (ep48) would say the question is built wrong.

Lisa is an award-winning bass player who works as a freelance musician, touring and doing session work, and she is also a certified music therapist, working with people in places like dementia and palliative care. She holds both on purpose. Her therapy employer lets her take hours around her touring schedule, and she has pieced it together into something that works for her.

She was honest about the part that gets edited out of most career stories: she sometimes wonders whether she'd have gone further if she'd gone all in on one thing. Then she answered her own doubt. Somehow, she said, her heart knew she needed to do both.

I don't think that's a consolation prize. I think it's a different, and often steadier, definition of the whole thing. She gets the high-energy stage on one side and the quiet, one-to-one work on the other, and each one feeds the other.

Is it too late to change direction?

Sammy Volkov (ep36) is a good answer to that, because his path doesn't look like a straight line from anywhere.

He grew up as an Edmonton record nerd hunting for R&B at garage sales, went off to study acting in New York, ended up selling door to door in Los Angeles, and all the while kept building a music career on the side of whatever he was supposedly doing. Today he's making his second solo record and working in music production full time. The thread he kept coming back to was audacity: the willingness to ask a producer he admired to work with him, or to sit around in venues until the right people knew his face.

He also told me he doesn't consider himself a natural extrovert. That detail matters. Audacity, in his telling, wasn't a personality trait. It was something he found a way to summon anyway.

And Grant Lawrence (ep2) is a reminder that reinvention doesn't always mean leaving anything behind. He went from fronting The Smugglers to hosting CBC Radio 3 to writing best-selling books, and each chapter drew on the one before.

And I do love a thread running through different stories.

What's the difference between quitting and changing?

Quitting is stopping because the thing no longer holds anything for you. Changing is keeping the part of the thing that does.

I think a lot of musicians stay stuck in the wrong version of their career because they can't tell the two apart. They're afraid that admitting the old role is finished means admitting they lost. So they hold on to the job description long after it stopped fitting.

Maybe it's more actually the identity, more than the job description.

The people I've talked to who seem the most at peace did something different. They asked what they actually wanted from music, and then they let the answer be a different role.

Not the dream.

Not the plan.

The thing underneath the plan.

Tamara Beatty (ep3) can by all means sing like the stars she works with, or the budding stars she vocal-coaches on The Voice. Tamara's original plan was to be the one on the stage. The change brought a different role, and a deep fulfillment.

What I'd say to anyone in the middle of this

If your career looks different than the one you pictured at 22, you are in very good company. Most of the people who build something lasting in this business do it by changing, sometimes more than once.

I don't even know how young people in mid Uni years consider careers right now. I should ask Alexi. Do they expect anything to last a lifetime, the way I did at that age?

When I look back at my own years of vans, venues and small offices, I'm less interested now in whether I ever "made it" than in whether I kept going. When making music ended, I thought I had stopped. Turns out, I never did.

So maybe I still made it.