On Success An interesting conversation unfolded on social media over the last couple of days. A musician who has been around for a while and (from my perspective) has an established profile – is playing lots of gigs, doing interesting shows with awesome people, popping up on line-ups that I aspire to etc, made a post talking about feeling both busy and rejected by the local music community. It hit hard, because most of the comments were musicians who I look up to – all sharing the same sentiment. Strange that I find myself in the same category as musicians who play with Jessica Mauboy and Guy Sebastian, artists who’ve won ARIA and GRAMMY awards, bands who’ve played headline shows on overseas festivals. I’ve been thinking a lot this week on what ‘success’ looks like, as an artist who might just float along at this level for the rest of my life. This might be it – the pinnacle of my career releasing an album to 150 people in Melbourne then hitting the East Coast for a run of festival dates where we’re either on in the early afternoon before the audience starts moving, or on as a late night closing act after the headline act has played and most of the sensible people have gone home. I keep reminding myself that we’re lucky to be on festival line-ups at all. Continue reading “On Success”