We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Caleb Jerome Morales a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Caleb Jerome, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’ve love to hear an interesting investment story – what was one of the best or worst investments you’ve made? (Note, these responses are only intended as entertainment and shouldn’t be construed as investment advice)
From an early age, I learned that the Divine comes in trilogies. Mind, body, and soul. Rhythm, melody, and harmony. Work, fitness, and passion. Each day offers an opportunity to invest into each of the latter trilogy: your Work, your Fitness, and your Passion.
Imagine three jars each labeled as follows: your Work, your Fitness, and your Passion. Each hour you spend on your education or profession — your Work — adds one bean to its jar. Each hour spent taking care of your body adds a bean to your Fitness. Each hour spent cultivating your love and skill in whatever it is you call “your thing” adds a bean to your Passion.
Eventually, after filling your jars, you will need to decide between two paths forward. You may stop spending hours on these three pursuits, leaving your small jars full of the same beans forever, or alternatively, you may trade in all your beans for a larger jar and start filling that new, larger jar.
Each time you fill a jar, the next jar is harder to fill than the last. It is larger and requires more hours to fill than its predecessor. Each year that passes, your contemporaries may acquire larger jars and thousands of beans, or their jars may crack through years of neglect and deprecation.
Some will continue the cycle of filling and acquiring jars until their last breath. Others will forgo one jar to invest more time into the other two. Others still will specialize, opting to fill only one jar. Finally, some will stop filling their jars altogether.
How one defines each jar more precisely is unique.
In my youth, I filled My Work jar with school work. I filled My Fitness jar with organized baseball. I filled My Passion jar with piano lessons.
Today, I fill My Work as a Consumer Research professional, my Fitness through rigorous training and precise dietary programming, and My Passion through music and other artistic endeavors.
Oftentimes, external forces will attempt to dissuade you from investing in one or more of your jars. Life happens.
Personally, I never allowed such forces to cease my investment in My Passion. Even when My Work demanded more hours or My Fitness required attention to injury, I always found a way to collect beans for My Passion, day after day, year after year. It all adds up.
Now, 25 years into my musical journey, I am proud to say My Passion Jar is large and full. With the economic and physical demands one will face in this life, it is difficult to resist the pressure to neglect one’s Passion. Perseverance through the most difficult times has afforded me the necessary skill and network to release a new song every two weeks and perform as a session musician with a growing client base. This newfound ability to leverage my musical Passion into Work has opened up new opportunities for my family and me that would never have been possible if I had abandoned My Passion Jar.
Caleb Jerome, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Sure! My name is Caleb Jerome Morales. I am a recording artist, entrepreneur, and session musician based out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. While I have played music for 25 years, I just recently launched my career as a musician formally in July 2023. The music industry is one I studied from a distance for much of my life while I focused my efforts on business, building a differentiated skill set along the way.
Well chronicled are the stories of young artists whose careers derailed at the hands of a bad manager. Bad business practices. From my teenage years, I studied and practiced the principles of sales, marketing, management, leadership, and communications with hopes that one day, I could live as an artist, equally free improvising guitar riffs as sitting at the negotiation table. One day, I knew I would be armed with the perfect combination of business acumen and musical ability that would form the foundation of a career that ignites my passion.
The two guiding disciplines of my life, business and music, overlap as much as they differ. Both require daily practice, continued education in the face of ever-evolving norms, and fervent goal orientation.
My musical journey began at four years old, when my mother brought home a toy keyboard and my face lit up with joy upon pressing my first key. She would teach me piano before I learned to play the guitar, trombone, bass, to sing, and how to produce mostly through online videos.
When selecting my university major, my mother advised me to pursue a business orientation, assuring me that the music would never leave me and that a more varied background would open more diverse opportunities. She was absolutely right.
Nearly ten years into my Consumer Research career, I am respected as a leading expert in consumer panels, a method of shopper research that allows us to understand how and why people make purchasing decisions. My years in this partly academic, partly commercial field give me insight into “the why behind the buy,” and eventually, I believe that these years of experience will translate well as I build my second career as a musician.
My primary musical pursuit is purely a creative and artistic endeavor. First and foremost, I release a new song every two weeks, with every dozen or so songs culminating in an album. Each song aims to fit a different style or genre than the last, building towards a catalog I call, “The Musical Food Hall.”
This unique versatility is as much skill as it is gift — I was raised on salsa, classical, house, rock, new wave, contemporary, and ancient music. As such, I was never satisfied with mastering and sticking to one style of music. The path of the jack of all trades chose me.
This varied background and my skills on numerous instruments enable me to fill multiple roles as a session musician. The main function of the session musician is to serve and elevate the artist. One must also be available at a moment’s notice to fill in for a missing band member on a show or in the studio. The show must go on, and the capable session musician helps to ensure that.
With my comfort on the guitar, bass, and keyboards, I specialize in being a band’s “glue.” Oftentimes, I am the fourth member of a trio or the fifth member of a quartet. I fill in a band’s gaps, make the show or production sound big, and add in earworms that spark audiences into applause or dance.
Of course, I am quite comfortable taking a more leading role when needed. Sometimes a bass player cancels at the last minute or a guitar player sprains his wrist. An artist or band can scarcely afford to cancel the gig, potentially risking rehire, but a smaller sound than booked can be equally costly.
This is where my diverse background allows me to graciously help my clients. With just a couple of hours of lead time to listen to the setlist songs and gather my show gear, I am prepared to ensure that the show will go on, regardless of which instrument my client needs covered.
As an artist, I am most proud of, at long last, orienting my life in a direction that allows me to release songs every two weeks. My first album took ten years to write, three years to arrange, and 3 months to record and produce. With the help of my esteemed collaborators, I am now able to write an album in less than one month, and arrange and record in a week.
Like a chef combing through the finest ingredients, I have built quite the pantry of musical capabilities. My long term musical goal is to compile as many of the world’s musical flavors as possible to curate a spicy catalog, told through my unique musical voice. The great food halls of New York City, like Chelsea Market and Smorgasburg, showed me that people have an appetite for a diversity of global flavors in one culinary experience. Perhaps, as music listeners have adapted to access to an endless variety of music via streaming, there too may be an appetite for a single artist who achieves an impressive stylistic diversity on his own, unburdened by the traditional music industry.
This is the legacy I intend to leave as an independent musical artist.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
The driving goal in my creative journey is to create great songs that endure the test of time. My mission is to see, hear, and experience externally the ideas that grow like seeds in my mind.
For some songwriters, the art of the song is a means to an end. For others, the song is an outlet for one’s innermost emotions. For me, the song is a way to explore ideas and mold the world around me. Descriptive, poetic lyrics combined with rich, diverse musical arrangements wield a unique power to transform reality like the great films and our oral tradition.
As a child, I would hear symphonies in my mind, and my pursuit of musical expertise was fueled by my desire to translate those symphonies into a medium others could experience. I learned over a dozen instruments and sound design techniques aiming to never be pigeonholed into a small set of genres or musical styles.
My greatest fear is mediocrity, and musically, my personal definition of mediocrity is to be easily labeled. “I am a rock musician,” “I am a classical pianist,” or “I am a pop singer” are phrases I run away from. This fear has driven me to consume and learn from the world’s endless musical depths, despite the intense difficulty of doing so. Every song I release could be classified in a different genre than the last, granting me an endless palette of flavors to borrow and combine uniquely.
Just one generation ago, such an approach would be the death knell for a musical artist. Artists had to tuck neatly into a radio genre in order to have their records played, with the only real flexibility existing in Adult Contemporary — where artists would be insulated from young tastemakers — or Jazz, a medium that offers little to lyricists.
However, today the musical landscape is completely different than just one generation ago. Artists have complete autonomy and flexibility over where, to whom, how, and how often they release music. Artists with no fans can distribute their music through the same channels as Beyonce, Frank Sinatra, or Beethoven. They can be as creative as they desire with at home recording easier than ever before. Equipment, software, and education have been democratized, allowing resourceful independent musicians access to the tools and information they need to command their own destinies.
Over the past fifteen years, I have invested much of my time and resources into realizing my most ambitious goals. As of the time of this publishing, I have roughly 30 songs published with another 30 planned for release over the next year.
With each release, I learn something new from the last, compounding my abilities and improving the quality of each subsequent track.
With an endless imagination and a burning desire to continue growing until the last of my days, I hope to one day leave behind works that stand the test of time. I dream that my lyrics are studied in English classes and that my musical arrangements leave people dancing and feeling for generations to come.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
They say “if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere.”
After finishing my business studies at the University of Florida, I was called to New York City, a magical place where the world’s greatest business minds and musical artists alike are groomed, tested, and actualized. There, I found great success, growing exponentially and building the foundational skills that shaped me as a human. Over my three years there, I wrote hundreds of songs, developing my voice and message that would culminate in my first studio album, Community.
Community is a Hero’s Journey, a storytelling structure and archetypal narrative refined by Joseph Campbell that follows a protagonist on a quest away from his homeland to experience transformation before returning home with the prized elixir.
There are many versions of The Hero’s Journey, centered around three acts: 1) Departure, 2) Initiation, and 3) Return. In writing Community, I followed the 12 step method:
1) Departure
– i. The Ordinary World
– ii. The Call to Adventure
– iii. Refusing the Call to Adventure
– iv. Meeting the Mentor
– v. Crossing the Threshold (into The Special World)
2) Initiation
– vi. Test, Allies, and Enemies
– vii. Approach to the Inmost Cave
– viii. The Ordeal
– ix. The Reward
3) Return
– x. The Road Back
– xi. Resurrection
– xii. Return (to The Ordinary World) With the Elixir
As I began sequencing the songs that would tell my Hero’s Journey, it became quite clear that New York represented The Special World in my story.
In his famous book, The Alchemist, Paolo Coelho describes “Maktub,” the Arabic word meaning “it is written.” That which is written will be, and the story I was writing for myself began to point away from NYC. It was clear that I had become stuck in the second act, and the only way to conclude the arc was to return to The Ordinary World to impart the lessons I had learned and build my own community.
This need to pivot was quite the confrontation. I loved NYC, but it had grown very difficult for me to sustain a life there. The relationships that grounded me there began to decay, and my solitude bore diminishing returns with each passing day.
It was clear in my final months there, the only way to complete my metamorphosis was to go home.
As such, I returned home to Miami, but the job and story were not done yet. It took several years of hard work and reinforcement of the lessons NYC provided me to realize my vision.
The final efforts to complete my story, to punctuate the last sentence in my book, culminated in the ultimate reward — the formalization of my music business in July 2023. As a result of this major pivot, I have finally launched my business as a recording artist and session musician.
The need to pivot one’s life dramatically is central to the human experience, and the resulting blessings are abundant. I am forever grateful for my years in NYC and am grateful to be on the path to the artistic apex.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.calebjeromemorales.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/calebjeromemorales/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CalebJeromeMorales
- Twitter: https://x.com/CalebJerMorales
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz58c2Q4quX48Kv6VCEDdiQ
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/caleb-morales-334761004
- Other: Threads: https://www.threads.net/@calebjeromemorales?xmt=AQGz8p_-ja0X9sNaZdnN27_DmR7owVVKzgE116kWy2Q1zHw
Image Credits
Lexis Casiano