We recently connected with Kyle Foley and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Kyle 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?

Being a full-time musician is as hard as it sounds. It’s obviously not all sunshine and rainbows and it takes a lot of dedication and hard work. There are so many other musicians doing the same thing as you so you always have to be on your A-game. While I personally don’t view my fellow musicians as competition, in a way you kind of have to view it in that sense if only to make yourself better. Use it as motivation, but absolutely collaborate and befriend your fellow musicians.

You don’t start as a full-time musician right away, takes a lot of patience, practice, networking and some more practice. I’ve been playing music since I was ten-years-old when I took piano lessons. Of course, at the time, I hated it and didn’t want to do it because my mom and grandmother were making me. Eventually I quit, but a few years later I took violin as my mother did in high school (she was very, very good when she was in high school and I had her same violin teacher.) I took violin for several years and eventually joined my high school orchestra my sophomore year. After my sophmore year ended, our orchestra didn’t have an upright bass player for the following year so I took upright bass lessons over the summer to be ready for the fall. I started playing upright bass the beginning of my junior year and by that Christmas my grandfather took me to the local music store and bought me an electric bass, without telling my mom and grandmother about it. Needless to say, once that happened, I didn’t put the thing down and I started to learn very, very quickly. Didn’t take long after for me to join my first band. We were terrible of course, we could barely play, barely sing but we thought we were cool. But that’s how you need to start off, just play with other friends and be bad together because the more you do it, the better you start to get. It’s been almost 20 years since then and there has been many bands and life lessons in between that time and all of it has helped me to become the musician I am today.

I moved to Austin in 2012 to be with family and I really wasn’t all that musically involved at first, I still kept up with practice and all that but wasn’t in a full-time band or anything like that. I got a job at a brand new restaurant and worked about 60-70 hours a week as a bar manager. But at some point the restaurant slowed down and I was getting physically and mentally tired. A fellow co-worker at the restaurant got a job at Dell and suggested I try it out. Eventually I did and went to work at Dell for almost 2 years. It was during that time that I started getting back into music and took up teaching part-time just to make a little extra cash on the side. Not really sure what year it was by this time, maybe 2016 or 2017 but by then teaching was my full part-time job. I say that because i was teaching basically everyday but still needed a day job since I was only teaching at night. It wasn’t really until this year, 2024, that I was able to teach full-time, still mostly nights, but my gigs have now become pretty consistent where I can play a show at least once or twice a week. While it’s still not super consistent, it’s certainly better than it ever has been in the past.

Kyle, 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 just proud of myself for being able to do this for a living. Even though I’m not living super comfortably I’m making it work and I love teaching kids about the wonders of music and the amazing things it teaches you. Music is by far my biggest passion and I’m just thankful that I get to do it for a living.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

My goal isn’t to be famous or “rich” necessarily, I just want to be able to play and teach music for a living and be able to do it comfortably. So that would be my current goal.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

Playing live shows a lot, while I love it and it’s fun, isn’t really known for paying musicians super well. If I walk out with $100 for the night, that’s considered a win. So 6 shows a month might seem like a lot, but it’s really not all that much at all. That’s why it’s super important for everyone to show up and support us and tip us if you can. If you can’t tip, just showing even helps, it always helps us when the venue sees people there. If the venue knows we can bring people they will have us back. Sometimes we get paid off ticket sales, sometimes we get a small flat-rate and small percentage of the total bar sales. Unless you are a super established band with a huge following it’s hard to make a lot of money. It’s even harder to make money playing original music. Spotify and other streaming services give a very minimal amount back to the artists. So anytime you can support the band in person or even by buying merchandise, everything helps.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: kylemusicatx
• Youtube: Kyleplaysmusic23