We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Gianluca Magalotti. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Gianluca below.
Gianluca, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us 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?
Dear reader, welcome to my interview today. I picked this particular topic because it represents a challenge for me, and I always like a good challenge. Just to go straight to the point, no one who is currently earning a living out of their creative work knows exactly how it has been happening. However, the only thing I can say for certain is that anyone attempting this life path will at some point face a dualism: planning VS doing. On one hand, if we take the technical preparation out of the equation of what “planning” actually means, we are only left with a bunch of mental and/or written instructions that we are supposed to follow in order to achieve a certain goal. On the other hand, we have our own personal ordinary life that constantly puts us in front of different choices to pick from, which are inevitably out of any plan we might have previously written down or thought about. The act of taking executive decisions in our life (also known as “making choices”) is called “doing.” In my own experience, the subject of “doing” almost never complies with any long term plans, simply because by the time the subject of a plan enters the reality, life might have already offered us opportunities of any sort and put us in front of choices that require our priority, therefore making any plan obsolete. You ever heard about the COVID-19 pandemic? Well, that was a good time for me to get to realize that any life plan is indeed destined to be just obsolete. Better to invest our life doing something, rather than planning for it!
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My adventure as a working musician begins in my home country of Italy almost 20 years ago, back when I was gigging with different local independent artists and bands, paying my dues as anyone else in this wild industry. Like every other artistic craft, it all begins with the love for it, and in my case the love for music. Having approached the study of music at a fairly young age myself, I understand that the concepts of fun and enjoyment must be at the core of anyone’s drive. Then perhaps comes discipline, which in turn might lead to commitment, and eventually to developing our personal determination, the ultimate ticket needed to enter any professional league and give it a shot for real. As for me, studying at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, where I graduated full-marks in 2018, represented the key to be able to unlock my own personal potential and to advance my musical skills massively. These days I am a full-time bass player for hire based in Nashville, Tennessee, working with several emerging local and national artists. I am definitely proud to have reached a somewhat scary point of being able to make a living solely out of my professional activity, which translates into recording and touring nationally by serving original music and supporting other creatives in this insane journey.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Wanna talk about the COVID-19 pandemic? What a perfect example of a “resilience test,” right? Let’s go. So, after graduating from Berklee College of Music in the fall 2018, I relocated to Nashville, Tennessee at the beginning of 2019 and started exploring the actual music industry while putting into practice what I had learned until then. The proliferation of gigging opportunities back then was so remarkable that I was almost immediately able to pay all my bills and survive solely out of my performing activity, by freelancing for a few local working artists and even tour with them nationally. Then the world turned over in mid March 2020 and hours after the media announced going from an epidemic to a pandemic, my whole world (and anyone else’s) was shaken big time. The US administration issued a public notice that implied canceling all flights to and from Europe within a matter of days, and so I had to purchase a flight ticket right away, pack all my stuff and show up at the airport. This only happened in just about 9 hours, from the US administration’s public notice being announced on TV to me carrying a ridiculous amount of items and bags through the international airport in hope to be able to actually catch my flight back home before it was getting canceled. The alternative would have been to stay and play it by ear, but according to the insanity behind the costs of flights during that particular time and the fact that my US work visa only allowed me to work as a professional musician, I had already foreseen where the world was headed and it wasn’t financially safe for me to stay. Shortly after I flew back home, my calendar went from being full of shows happening through all the year to having all those dates canceled in less than a week. Now, imagine a foreigner trapped abroad on a soon-to-be-expired work visa, without proper working opportunities to pay the bills and survive. But this is only the preface, since the hard part comes afterwards really. Italy during the time of pandemic was even crazier than ever, with a rate of decent job opportunities that went from unsustainable (before the pandemic) to nonexistent. While everyone was just hoping that such an unprecedented global issue would vanish in no time, I was already trying to rebuild some kind of temporary life, though in a place that is sadly very unfriendly to the art industry nowadays, even though Italy owes literally everything to art. In more than 2 years back home, I only worked as a musician on two private shows, one of which in a different continent. For the rest of the time I went from being a heavily underpaid server in multiple bars to a warehouse worker, an extra for movies, a trader, and an outdoor guide for adventure parks. In the meantime, my level of English language downgraded dramatically and my professional music history became a sort of dream that I wasn’t even sure I had lived in the first place. To summarize, I went from two full-marks music degrees and a successful year of music career in America to absolute zero, as if no past professional history had ever happened at all. However, every negative experience paves the way for some kind of rebirth at some point, and the key for me lied in preserving the love for music deep inside, no matter what a specific cultural and social environment would want me to believe. in 2022, I applied for a US work visa, soon got back to Nashville, Tennessee, and guess what, things are better than ever now.
Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?
Of course, music schools are just a tool to develop a certain set of skills, mostly the technical ones. However, I wish I knew that the actual working music industry has much more to do with our social skills than our technical ones. Someone may get frustrated reading this, because we all wished that our technical skills would be enough in order for us to “make it,” since it takes decades to develop a decently relevant performance level on a musical instrument or any other creative craft, and so we – the musicians – at some point just want to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The reality of things is that musicians far too often forget that we are humans before being whatever professionals we want to be. Being a human means that if we let our craft grow more than our person we will have to face the consequences related to our social (dis)integration within an industry that depends on social interactions, simply because we do not get to print money by ourselves. It is fundamental to take care of our own personal growth as humans before attempting at perfecting the study of a musical instrument or any other creative craft for 12 hours a day over the course of years. In fact, our success is just a reflection of our personal features, more than it is a reflection of our technical skills, which only require a massive amount of time and dedication and which anyone could develop regardless of their intellectual growth. So, yes, I wish I was taught to prioritize my own intellectual growth as a human before anything else, even though getting to realize this concept at any point in our life is always better late than never.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://gnluca.wixsite.com/gianlucamagalotti
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gmagalotti
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gianluca-magalotti
- Other: https://www.fiverr.com/gma7913
Image Credits
Steven Quach, Colton Zenni, Valentina Prosperi, Lorenzo Piccone