We recently connected with Scott Martin and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Scott thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights 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?

Yes – which, really, feels pretty incredible still. I think a lot of things had to happen on the road to this place, but I truly do think that the most important piece of it was my own stubbornness and refusal to pack it in, no matter the circumstances (and there was no shortage of dire ones on the journey).

I went to school to be a history teacher, but I knew what I really wanted to do was to be a recording artist. I was writing songs at the age of fifteen, played in a bunch of local bands, and worked at the local nursery, selling trees and the like. Later I wound up teaching in the local mom & pop music school, which really helped widen my understanding of music and my abilities. It also gave me a flexible job where I could take off in order to tour, and still return. The folks that ran that place, John and Lori Ciamillo, were saints, and they truly helped me a great deal.

During that time, I auditioned for and joined a band called Bulletproof Messenger – they were an up-and-coming regional act, and I wound up playing guitar for them, as well as writing for the sophomore album. We toured nationally and internationally with a bunch of big names, and I learned how that whole world worked – it really sharpened my skills when it came to performance, attitude, and understanding of the music business – which, you know, the knowledge you gain from your experiences is your real education in this field. It all comes back around into play, and if you’ve paid attention and can learn from your experiences, you’re a little better at it the next time and the next.

I thought that this was going to be the big ticket – we’d get signed to some great deal, and that’d be it – I’d never have to work a support job and could just focus on being a rockstar. Things were going great, we had solid attention, a big audience, and I was working with heroes of mine – but we hadn’t had our “it” moment yet. During all of this, my father, sister, and I lost our house in the crash of 2008, and I was living out of my old Toyota Camry.

So I was hoping for a miracle with that second record, I really was. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out that way – most bands have a shelf life, top tier famous or not – and after a year or two more of touring and relentlessly trying to break through, the majority of my bandmates moved on to other pursuits in life, because that level of success just hadn’t materialized for us.

I was stubborn, and kept at it. I remember when I was fifteen and started playing guitar, it was very much “this or nothing” – and this was that moment. Do I get a real job, go back to school and teach? I could have – nothing wrong with that. I was living in a basement apartment with the singer, and it was pretty low. He had just gotten a crazy job at Google, and here we were in a Long Island basement, while I still struggled along obstinately. Not very rockstar. But, I had started by then to play in some local cover bands, and I met a few people who were connected to a few people in an entirely different scene – the world of corporate events bands. I didn’t even know this kind of thing existed, but they liked me, and they liked my style, genuine as it was and filled with a whole bunch of knowledge from those years spent in Bulletproof. I was a decent player, but more importantly I carried myself like a pro, and I was seasoned – and that’s not the kinda thing you can learn in school, you know?

One day I got a call from a guy who was probably the most well-established bandleader on the East Coast at the time. His guitarist had torn his rotator cuff and he’d heard about me through a friend – could I come audition that evening?

Absolutely. As it turns out, I got the gig. And I remember calling my sister afterwards saying “this is going to change a whole lot of things”…and it did. Ten years later, I’m my own bandleader, performing high-quality, well-paying gigs once, maybe twice a week, and while it isn’t my own music, that schedule and that income “pays for my freedom”, if you will.

A couple years ago, I got signed to a pretty good label, my most recent record has solid distribution, and I’m able to devote most of my time and energy to my career as an artist. It’s been a crazy, topsy-turvy journey to get to this point, but here we are, with a sustainable living and a sustainable career doing what I always wanted to do since the moment I picked up my father’s old guitar.

Scott, 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?

Well, I’m a guitarist, songwriter, and producer out of New York City. I picked up the guitar because I wanted to be a songwriter, and that was my chosen instrument. It was only much later that I became an actual “guitarist’s guitarist” with a greater understanding of the instrument and skill – I’d say that that role is what constitutes the bulk of my professional career at the moment.
Production came later, in my thirties. I enjoyed cutting records and working with bringing songs to life so much that I wanted to understand how it all worked from the captain’s chair. Over time, I applied myself to learning about different instruments, techniques, and what makes a song sound “great” (there is no one answer, of course). It’s been an adventure that I’ve really enjoyed, especially when I can apply it to bringing the songs in my own head into the world.

I think that as a sideman, the people I work with appreciate my intricate and detailed knowledge of live performance, the technical side of things, the minutiae of playing guitar parts correctly (when doing covers) or creatively (when they’re looking for a part on their own tracks). Honestly, I can really only chalk this skillset up to years and years in the grind of it all, and of course, an insatiable appetite for music that has helped develop what feels like an inexhaustible supply of ideas in my head.

I’m proud of the journey it took to get here, and I’m proud of the work I’ve done in order to arrive at this point. That could be my work in Bulletproof, my career as a bandleader, my career as a solo artist, bar gigs and club dates, or having been a teacher of the craft for many years – it’s all something to be proud of. But I think that I’m most proud of the fact that I never gave up, and I still somehow retained the ability and desire to create. That flame has never burned out.

I think at this point, one of the most fulfilling aspects of having become this person is that I might serve as a beacon of inspiration for anyone who is a fellow artist or performer and might have these sort of questions or self-doubt about whether they can do it, how difficult it may or may not be, etc. Having success at the midpoint (not the end, it’s never the end, and always in progress) of a journey gives me some knowledge and insight that I’m happy to share. If I can do it, you can too. But it takes a lot. It’s an insane commitment, with no guarantees. But the door is open if you want to walk through it, you know? It’s a journey, it’s a trip, and it’s a choice that you make, every day.

Tom Petty says it very well: “so I started out, for god knows where / I guess I’ll know when I get there”.

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

This one is pretty dark, and I touched on it earlier, but I think it’s pretty important – it was (to put it politely) the “fish or cut bait” moment, right?

When I was 22, my Mom passed away. Cancer. Ugly stuff. It wrecked the household, and things just kind of went off the rails from there. But outside of home life, the band I was in felt like it was going places, we’d just finished cutting our sophomore record and spirits were high. But one night in February, my father told my sister and I that we all had to move from our house – in three days. I believe he’d done what they call a short sale on it. Three days. Bone chillingly shocking. Long story short, I had nowhere to go and no money. But I had an old Toyota Camry. And I had a telecaster. So I lived out of the car.

I worked teaching at the music school for a little money, crashed on friends’ couches when I could (trying not to be a bother and cripplingly embarrassed by the indignity of it all) and kept playing with the band because we were oh-so-close (unfortunately, it turns out we weren’t). I saved what I could and after something like six months, our singer was looking for a new apartment because he’d gotten a new job, and invited me to pay very little for a room in a two-bedroom. I don’t know where I’d be without him. The band might have broken up and faded away, but he’s still one of my dearest friends and helped me get back on my feet out of dark times with an incredible display of selflessness. So with “a little help from my friends”, the journey kept going. And here we are.

Is there a lesson here? Maybe. Keep going when the lights go out, trust yourself and your own idea of who you are and are meant to be in this life, and never be afraid to ask for or accept help when you need it (this is one of the hardest things on earth for me, and always has been, but I’ve never been more grateful for anything in my life).

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

When I was younger, I remember that the prevailing idea that everyone always said (and that we were terrified of) was “if you haven’t made it by thirty, it’s time to pack it in”. The creative’s biological clock, if you will. And for so many of us, that clock ticks and tocks in our brains.

The thing is – the stuff I did in life that was really, really great – that all kind of started happening around thirty. So you know, that whole idea is, most definitely, a load of rubbish. And I hope that the younger generation of creatives doesn’t have that same time bomb ticking in their heads – because man, it made the idea of thirty a *lot* more terrifying than it should be. After all this time working in the pursuit of your craft, your personal identity coalescing around that, a timer goes off and you have to become an entirely different person with different life goals and choices because it’s “responsible”?

It’s nonsense. And in this day and age with technology and levels of reach that we didn’t have even just fifteen years ago when I was in my early twenties, it’s an absurd notion – that certainly no longer rings true. I had to learn it while living it, kind of discovering that truth along the way, but I’m glad that it’s no longer something that’s preached as gospel these days.

Contact Info:

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Image Credits

Maria Gigante / Firepower Media