Surviving As An Older Songwriter
funds, as well as friends in the same socioeconomic bracket that can come and see you, and if you make the club owner money, or if your show gets a good audience, you can make yourself a star in a small way—something you could never have pulled off when you were a starving youngster.
SYMPHONIC MUSIC
If you are any good at music scoring, there are more avenues than film and TV scoring open to you. Many local symphonies and schools welcome music from local talent—try submitting your piece to your kid’s school or the local philharmonic or small chamber group for a concert. You may even try your personal place of worship—there is often a need for new music, especially if yours is a more modern church. You most likely won’t get paid, but it would be tremendous publicity opportunity, from which you might be able to sell your tune to a publishing house later (especially if it got good reviews!). If you went to a 2 or 4-year college, see if there is any kind of alumni program for this, too—there are a few schools that will gladly play works written by alums, if you are brave enough to let your fellow grads know what you do in your spare time…You might even try your old high school or junior high, especially if you were a band member there at one point. You might even help them out with a new scoring of the school song or fight song to sweeten the deal. This can, at the very least, provide you with a really good reference for later work, whether with other symphonies or with film and television music companies.
HOOK UP WITH YOUNGER PEOPLE
This was the advice I was given by one manager that mentored me for a while—she felt that I’d do fine, especially since I look far younger than I am, but that I should recruit a bunch of much younger, very hungry artists to work with to be my sidemen in a live act. True, you do have all the problems of working with people of another age group, but, if you are sure to pick ones who don’t have an attitude about your age, you can get that youthful image you need to attract a young audience onstage, and still attract the fans that are in your age group—best of both worlds. The difficult part is to
Latest Articles