WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A PROFESSIONAL SINGER?

 

It's a lot of hustle and heartbreak. It's also glorious fun when you're successful. Over and over you will hear from people that the art of singing is incomparable, wonderful, compelling. It's the business of singing that's hateful.

 

The up side: you get to sing some of the greatest music the world has ever known. You get to work with wonderful, creative, interesting people. You get to travel. People you don't know make over you. There's a certain amount of glamour, fancy parties and beautiful locales. You're your own boss.

 

The down side: You are often at the mercy of mean or unscrupulous people who rank higher in the business than you. You spend a lot of time on the road, living expensively out of a suitcase and not spending time with your loved ones. Fancy parties stop being so glamorous and begin to feel like work after you've been to a few of them.

 

You are constantly interviewing for your next job, and always looking for that next opportunity. You are in a highly competitive field with many, many qualified applicants. You may be perfect for a job and lose it anyway because the people hearing you didn't like the dress you were wearing or thought you could stand to lose 10 pounds.

 

You have to be able to co-exist with quite a lot of uncertainty. It's hard to plan ahead, especially long-term, because you never know from year to year where you'll be or what you'll be doing. I often hear from non-singers, "I don't know how you live with all that uncertainty!" It works for me. I'd rather be doing this than be stuck in an office from 9 to 5 every bloody day. A professional singer has to be something of a free spirit --- with lots of patience, resilience, and thick, thick skin.