We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Marwan Nassar a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Marwan, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Earning a full time living from one’s creative career can be incredibly difficult. Have you been able to do so and if so, can you share some of the key parts of your journey and any important advice or lessons that might help creatives who haven’t been able to yet?

I have. But it’s not as simple as a yes or no question. Here’s some background first. Coming out of college, I moved to LA immediately with no job and music being my only plan. I started putting up ads for private music lessons and looking for gigs, even though the latter was scarce because it was during late 2020 in the peak of the pandemic. I managed to get enough private students and gigs to keep me afloat pretty quickly, but I was still looking to increase my standard of living while also doing something equally fulfilling, so I also started mentoring first-gen immigrant high school students part-time. It was great work, but about 8 months in I decided that I do want to go completely freelance to put everything I have into music. I had built a lot of new relationships through a weekly music and art show and jam session I hosted called Apiary, and felt I had enough going on to make it happen. I did that for almost two years. I made it work, I got to live the dream of being a completely independent musician. Don’t get me wrong, it was a great blessing and a privilege, as well as something that I worked my ass off for. However just recently, I began thinking about how much I still had to hold back myself from things I wanted, things like fitness classes, martial arts classes, travel, expensive meals, etc. I got to reflecting and came I was holding on to being a complete freelance musician not because it is what was making me happiest in that moment, but rather because of an idea I had built up in my mind about that being the definition of my success. As I broke down that expectation, I decided to begin part-time teaching in the absolute BEST music program I’ve seen for elementary school, the Music Immersion Program at Roosevelt elementary. I am grateful to have found a group of dedicated musicians and educators who care about their students and continuously amaze me with their creativity and ingenuity in bringing music to the lives of their students. I am loving my time there, just as much as I am loving my time as a freelance musician making music with incredible players and friends that I respect and look up to. So in short, I decided to break down the barriers I created for myself by setting up a rock-solid image of what success looks like to me, and it made me happier and more successful as a result.

Marwan, 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 am a professional musician, composer/arranger, producer, and curator. I play guitar in the bands of many talented artists I am grateful to know in a bunch of different styles ranging from funk to pop, RnB, Jazz, Hip Hop, blues, and rock. I am also an arranger and have arranged music for a variety of groups from string quartets to big bands, jazz combos, and pop arrangements. In addition, I absolutely LOVE hosting and curating events and spaces for people to express themselves creatively, and feel included in a community. During COVID, I hosted weekly music and art shows and jam sessions, called “Apiary”, that were incredibly healing for me and the community members that became a part of them. Every week, we had live music, an improvised jam session where everyone was welcome, artwork, 8-12 small-business vendors selling everything from accessories to clothes, food, etc. What mattered more than all the things Apiary had though, was the feeling it created, for me and everyone else. During those thursday nights, we all got to experience connection with people who used to be strangers, express ourselves, whether through music or live painting, and feel included and safe in a group. Since then I’ve hosted many other jam sessions, and look forward to curating more experiences in the future.
Another area in which I work is production. As a producer, it is my goal to help artists realize their visions and truly feel that their work is representative of who they are as people or the message they hope to convey. I am a spreadsheet freak and love keeping things organized and coordinating with different people for the needs of each project, so my favorite projects to work on are ones where I really get to help an artist bring their project together from all different angles. Things like hiring musicians, arranging music, booking studios, music directing rehearsals, organizing budgets and schedules, and everything else that falls within that is (one of) my happy place(s)!
Finally, I just love to help people. So if you have an idea that you want some guidance on, I am more than happy to help bring that idea to life, or to refer one of my amazingly talented peers to do that! I believe knowledge is meant to be shared, and strive to live by that daily. I know I would not be anywhere close to where I am today if it wasn’t for the selfless sharing of knowledge that my mentors and peers embody.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

Ah, great question. While there are several I could name, I would say the top contender here would have to be “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. James, I don’t know where you’re at or what you’re doing, but I sure hope you’re having a splendid life. I’ve always thought about how fickle time can be. How life is short yet days are long. Minutes, even longer. Thinking that way, I always worried about running out of time and not being able to be the kind of person I want to be in time. Nothing helped me combat that fear as well as “Atomic Habits”. Our days are our life. How we spend our days, is how we spend out life. I’m sure I got that from somewhere, very possibly from “Atomic Habits” itself. This book helped me, and continues to help me, structure each day in such a way that I am patiently and steadily working to progress on my goals. It taught me to allow things time to stick, while making a smal consistent effort every day. It also taught me something which goes against all my iinstiincts, and that is to make things easy for myself. I have always been the kind of person who does the harder version of things in order to get better, and to get better faster. That mentality helped me a lot growing up, especially as an immigrant moving here at 13 after being out of school for a whole year due to revolution in my home country and not being a fluent English speaker. However, I learned through this book that I have outgrown this way of thinking. II am grateful to iit as it guided me through some very challenging times, however I am now in a different place. So now, I adjust my positive actions, or the things I want to make into habits to make them as easy as possible. Starting something is easy if doing the thing is easy, and if it’s quick. Then once it is started, it is easier to keep going. So now, I find the easiest possible version of a habit, and I do that for as long as I need before building up the habit to being closer to my initial goal, that way I get into the daily habit of starting that thing. For example, I am currently working on putting on my running shoes every morning. I just put them on and take them off. It sounds crazy! But after this simple action becomes more automatic, it’s going to be 100x easier to take a morning jog if I already have my running shoes on. So in summary, hack your brain!

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

Well, there’s a lot. I’ll mention this one mainly because it’s been on my mind for a while now. Knowing my value in terms of how much to charge for my services. Some of you may not know this, but it is a wild game when it comes to money in music. You can be playing huge festivals yet be broke, and you can be completely unknown and be making bank. While there are a couple of reasons why that is, a really big issue is the lack of regulation regarding musicians’ rates for different kinds of gigs (weddings, backing a small artist, doing a 2 day festival, etc). Those of us that went to music school know all kinds of impractical theory, yet we were never taught how much to charge for gigs. Those of us who didn’t go to music school are in the same boat. People find it taboo to talk about money as well, and so you can be a working professional musician and still have very little sense of what your peers are charging and what they’re getting paid for the same work that you are. To combat this, I have learned two things: 1- to talk about money, and 2- to set standard rates for myself for different kinds of music work. However, that is not enough. Professional musicians must come together and create agreements for acceptable pay for different kinds of work. Don’t get me wrong, music is a relationships industry more than any other, and we make exceptions to these rates under certain circumstances, whether it is to help a friend, or if we see a non-monetary benefit to on rarer occasions accepting gigs for lower rates. It is not all about money, yet it is important for us to set standards so that we can all succeed. That way, professors aren’t losing gigs to their students who are taking them for cheaper, or even worse, for free, and musicians aren’t getting abused and underpaid just because there’s no transparency when it comes to budgets. If you’re reading this and you’re a musician, I encourage you to talk to me so we can brainstorm a better system for all of us, and more importantly, I encourage you to bring up this issue with your peers because it affects all of us, and we deserve to have a union and to be paid what we are worth.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marwan.music/