I’ve been in the music business for decades and have acquired some skills at adapting to change. I’ve had to! When I started, being a musician was considered a career with a very uncertain future. That at least hasn’t changed…

There were many lines of work that seemed like a safer bet – and they were. But even those safer bets have turned out, in the turbulent economic world we’ve lived in for quite a while now, to not be such safe bets after all.

Change has seemed to hit the music business sooner and sometimes harder than other lines of work. It’s a very technology-driven business.

When synthesizers and drum machines arrived I was a pretty busy bass player, playing recording sessions. Things changed fast, including the market for people like me who played ‘real’ instruments (not synthesized or sampled). Then computer recording came in and changed everything for everyone; not just players.

Those are a few of the shifts – there were many smaller ones – that affected my career as a bass guitarist. There were also massive transformations on the business side of music. Analog became Digital. LPs became CDs became Streaming… What was paid for became largely free… The economics became utterly different and, for the music creator, much more challenging.

Years ago I went through a painful process (which luckily for you I won’t get into in detail now) of realizing that if I wanted to keep making music professionally, I couldn’t just keep doing what I’d been doing. The world was changing around me. I had to either adapt in some way or find another line of work.

To me this didn’t mean to follow every trend. But it did mean I had to figure out, through a process of trial and a lot of error, what was essential to my core beliefs, to my integrity, which I couldn’t and wouldn’t change; and then to consider where I could be flexible. How could I adapt to change (which of course continues to this day, more than ever) and still remain true to myself?

A hard question. All I can say Is I’ve done my best to learn to address it on an ongoing basis. In my case, abandoning a rigid idea of who I was musically – ‘just’ a bass player, and a producer – has allowed me to explore other parts of myself I’d always wanted to explore anyway, such as being a songwriter, recording engineer and mixer, a teacher, a prose writer…

It turned out that a lot of my difficulty with changes in my work was, and still is, really just fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of myself… you name it.

But as time has passed I’ve gotten better at accepting change, to know it’s going to happen. I want to live in the present, but part of me is afraid of what the future holds, so I turn back to what I know. I don’t do that as much as I used to.

Why bring all this up now? Because once again everything’s different, and different in a way that was unpredictable before a few months ago. And, like most of us, I have to adapt again.

To give an example of how I’m thinking about that, I am, like a lot of other people who do what I do, moving my workshops online. I’ve wanted to do this for a while – songwriters have been requesting it for years. But I  could never quite get around to it. I was busy; yes. But also… fear of something new.

Obviously, now’s the time. And I have done it. But as obvious as it might be, even to me, I still feel the old inertia trying to hold me in place, always wanting things to be as they used to be – even if the way they used to be wasn’t so great.

For all of us now, at least temporarily, things cannot be as they were. So… what can I do to adapt to this new environment? Whenever I’ve been able to go in the direction – forward – of adapting, as opposed to the “Why can’t things be like they were?” direction, it’s opened me up to new things, new approaches, new opportunities, etc. And this goes for my songwriting too!

Things keep changing. The world, the nation, the business, the craft of songwriting… everything. Adapting to that changing world while remaining who I am and true to my core principles… that’s the challenge.

Adapt.

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