We recently connected with Gianluca Magalotti and have shared our conversation below.

Gianluca, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. 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?

For someone in my position, this question always requires a “so far.” Making a full-time living through music is complex, even among the most respected peers, because the field is inherently volatile. Am I making a living from music? Yes—so far—but that answer only scratches the surface.

Living fully off music means relying entirely on your craft to cover rent or mortgage, bills, insurance, transportation, and everyday life. The shift from being a music student to navigating this reality is never smooth. When I moved to Nashville, I went from a safe academic bubble to a city where I knew no one, all while I watched my savings dwindle and faced serious financial pressures.

It was in that moment I realized that practicing endlessly would not automatically make me a working musician. I had to reconnect with the simple reality of surviving while building a sustainable life as a musician—remaining humble as a student of both music and life, staying open to opportunities, and sometimes taking temporary gigs that didn’t fully match my personal artistic vision. Even the smallest steps, which might seem inconsequential at first, can prove defining in shaping a music career. The true challenge is maintaining your determination and self-belief, even when the surrounding environment often makes you feel invisible.

Gianluca, 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?

Hello, and thank you for the opportunity to share my journey with CanvasRebel.

My name is Gianluca Magalotti, a professional bassist originally from Rome, Italy. Over the past decade, I’ve built my life and career in the United States, and I’m currently based in Nashville, Tennessee.

Music has been my constant companion for as long as I can remember, and I feel fortunate to have turned that passion into a career that continues to evolve. Touring nationally and internationally, I collaborate with artists across multiple genres, always aiming to adapt my playing to their unique identities and artistic visions.

My experience in audio engineering, production, and songwriting has given me a deeper perspective on the emotional and technical aspects of music, which informs everything I do as a bassist—whether on stage or in the studio. Among the artists I’m proud to collaborate with are legacy country artist and country-rap pioneer Colt Ford, Grammy Award-winning songwriter Steve Leslie, and two-time Josie Music Award-winning songwriter Jake Bradley. Alongside these high-profile collaborations, I also work with a wide range of emerging artists, helping to shape and support the growing local music scene.

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

One of the most revealing lessons in my career was learning to stop thinking of myself as just a vessel of technical ability and decades of experience, and instead focus on connecting with people on a human level. In the music business today, it’s common for people to act like slot machines, swallowing both monetary and social-media-validation coins in exchange for their artistic contributions.

What truly matters is understanding the role your human interaction plays with others in the same field, beyond all the technical whistles and bells attached to your CV. A practical way to develop this is to dedicate time to building in-person relationships and following up consistently. You don’t need to be everyone’s best friend, but at least make sure that when you meet peers, not only do they remember your name, but they also associate it with something positive. This is especially true in a place like Nashville, where professionalism and social skills often matter more than technical skills alone, and where both reputation and personal connections can spread rapidly, shaping opportunities for success or failure.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

The heaviest test of resilience in my career came after I thought my path was clearly mapped out—then Covid-19 hit and upended everything. I was suddenly on a flight back to my home country of Italy, where I spent 2.5 years completely out of the music business, struggling to remind myself that I was still a “musician,” even when my life seemed to scream otherwise. I even began to doubt whether everything I had accomplished up to that point had really happened.

I somehow found (or perhaps never really lost) the strength to stand up again and move back to Nashville, rebuilding friendships and professional connections from scratch. Beyond that, I had to overcome the personal shame of fumbling through English on phone calls once again, asking people to repeat things even three or four times, and struggling with basic conversations. It was like arriving in the U.S. for the first time all over again, except now after having spent several years there before the pandemic.

Part of what kept me grounded during those years back home was having already paid all my immigration fees in full at the beginning of 2020 to obtain my first artist visa. That investment tied me to my old reality and froze my dream temporarily—I couldn’t get the money back, so I had to wait until I could pick it up again. In a strange way, it forced me to stay committed to the path I had already set, except now when everything around me seemed uncertain.

As the cherry on top, my grand return to Nashville in mid-2022 was heavily characterized by commuting around town—and beyond—on an electric scooter, sometimes for hours before sunrise to reach bus call locations on time for tour runs, or very late at night returning from in-town gigs. I’m still not entirely sure how someone in their thirties finds the drive to put themselves on a 15mph battery-powered kick scooter, running alongside huge trucks going 75mph, just to pursue music. Well, I guess it was a necessary step in my life to avoid turning down gig offers simply because I lacked a means of commute or couldn’t afford ride-sharing options, until I eventually managed to buy a cheap used car. By the way, I survived that reckless phase of my musical journey—and I’m here in Nashville now, very much alive and rollin’ on this interview!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://gianlucamagalotti.com
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/gmagalotti

Image Credits

mintypics.com