We were lucky to catch up with Nick Best recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Nick thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?
This topic hit me immediately as the quest of earning a full living from music moved me across the country to find an answer. I’ll spoil right away that so far that answer is no, at least not yet. A year and change ago, I moved from upstate New York to Nashville. Over the past few years I had been steadily playing more and more gigs, and when I started getting some real checks from just doing this thing I love, I was hooked. Now, I got my bachelors in music, so making music my job was always kind of the plan, but after making a comfortable life working in live entertainment production after college, I had no real thoughts of ever pushing for it. In 2022, between lessons, gigs, and even a few commissioned compositions, I had quite the side-hustle going. By late August, after a few other moons aligned, I had decided to make the move to a bigger city, to Nashville. If I had all this spare income with just the gigs in and around this small town, I figured I could actually make it work in a real city.
I had enough saved up to make it a few months while I find gigs. I did have a part time job for a little extra cash, but spent most of those few weeks meeting people off of facebook groups, playing at jams, and sending in playing tapes to posted gigs. I also have a drummer friend from college in town, so naturally we met up to play too. Luckily, a lot of those days began to change over to learning new music. I played with a few rock groups here and there, drove out to sub in for the last two shows of a small country group’s tour, and started to play out with the band my drummer friend introduced me to.
The biggest takeaway here for me is; it’s all about the hang. You can be really properly bad but if you’re fun to be around, you’ll still have gigs to take. That country group explicitly told me I have more to work on in my playin than their main bassist, but they wanted me on future tours. Because when you’re spending 4 hours in a cramped car together, it’s easier when everyone’s friendly. And I’m not some charismatic Prince Charming, I’m actually quite introverted and a bit awkward, but a little effort goes a long way. There’s so much more I’d love to go on about but I got to get to my main point.
So even with some gigs flowing in, and my network growing, Nashville is just not a cheap place to live. When an opportunity to work full time at an instrument manufacturing company came up, I took it. I’ve been working there since around April. This was perhaps the hardest decision to make in my professional life. Now, I can enjoy playing any type of music, but sometimes it does take work. I was playing a lot of music I wouldn’t normally listen to, with people I wouldn’t normally spend time with. Music was losing a lot of what it meant to me. It was tax time, and I was viscerally aware of just how much money I actually was making from music in New York. I probably could have just quit my day job and would have been better off not moving, and would be doing music full time.
My story is never going to be the one in the movies, the regression to a day job and playing music on the side. But what I wish I knew is that was okay. I still is and it always will be. Now I have the resources in life to indulge in all my non-music passions. I get to be choosy over with who and what music I play, and I get to play only music that invigorates and inspires me. And my day job is still doing quality control inspections on musical instruments, I still get to be a musician all day. And it’s important to accept that not feeling so much existential dread over my finances has immense value to me, even though I can’t buy anything with it.
Lastly, I would be remiss if I don’t mention I still prefer playing and within my comforts, I’m still working for that opportunity. Playing with my band, Powers and the People, is one of the forerunners. We just released our 4th single! and we’re getting to the point that we might be able to make the finances of a tour be feasible soon!
Nick, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I’m primarily a bassist, but secretly I just think of myself a musician. I started playing piano since before my earliest memories. Kept up with music and eventually decided to play euphonium once my school district’s band curriculum started for me. Then, sometime in middle school, I can’t remember when or why, I decided I wanted to play electric bass. Now that’s almost all that I play. Much of my professional experience is in musical theater, so I’ve long loved the challenge of rapidly adapting to different styles and genres of music although now I play mostly indie, jazz, and fusion. I can think of so many things I adore and appreciate about playing bass, but that’s only because it’s what I know the best now. The truth is I started playing it more and more because those were the gigs that paid.
I’m playing out and recording with a few different projects now but the oldest one is the only name one so far, my band Powers and the People. We’re a five-piece indie rock band with some shades of folk and funk in there too. We have four tunes out so far and a packed release schedule moving forwards! Playing with these cats is the best. Our repertoire is delightfully eclectic with all five members helping in writing each tune. Almost every song I feel like I had to grow to fit, a lot of my proudest moments as a musician are some of the tunes and licks they’ve driven out of me.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
Don’t just buy local, but appreciate local. There’s certainly swaths of the creative industries at risk from AI and other machine learning tools but I really don’t buy that it’s a death knell for professional creatives. I have a bunch of handmade dishes, art, clothes, and other stuff that, a lot of which, would have been objectively better quality and cheaper if I got a mass-produced factory version. But I spent more and a less-sleek product because a human made it. Humans like human stuff. Sure, there’s a program that can score your movie with original music, unidentifiably different or lower quality than human composers. But people will still be hyping up that cool indie movie because they hired a real human composer for the music. So we need to not just appreciate the art, but the story behind it too. And we need to downplay the importance of the money in that story. Taking pause to appreciate the patterns sunbeams make in dust, the color combinations of your latte; all these mundane moments of wild art are just as important to the creative health of a society as piling into a hall to see a global master perform. And I would argue the former is even more important.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
Smaller topic but I learned I need to stop telling people I play piano and low brass and banjo and bass and guitar and…. but to just say bass instead. There’s not a singular moment of epiphany but a gradual realization. Playing in smaller towns in new york it was advantageous to wear on my sleeve everything that I was proficient at playing. There’s always someone looking for a something.
But in a real city, there’s not as many niches for the generalist. And I picked up pretty quick (although definitely not quick enough), that I needed the humility to not spew my entire CV when I meet another musician and just identify which instrument they’re most likely to want me to play with them. And the real kicker is more often than not, there was probably someone at that gig who could play circles around me on bass, but I’d never know because it’s just one of their secondaries. Heck the dude at Wendy’s is probably a better player than me because it’s Nashville.
I deeply think of myself as must a musician, to the point were I think identifying as just a practitioner of any subset of all the instruments and types of music out there is antithetical to creativity…but when someone here I asks what I play, I just say bass.
Contact Info:
- Website: powersandthepeople.com
- Instagram: @nicks.best.music @powersandthepeople
- Facebook: /powersandthepeople
- Youtube: /powersandthepeople
Image Credits
Britt Mae Photography