Balance

Hello again everyone. Now that I'm back into the full swing of things, it seems pretty ridiculous that I took such a long break from blogging. Recently I've been trying to finish up a lot of tasks that have been stockpiling up by simply not overthinking and diving in little by little to get what I need get done. After completing a few things, I couldn't believe that these things have just been sitting around not finished for so long. Some of the stuff included re-doing the band's online merchandise store to showcase some stuff like new shirts, phone cases, etc that have our new album cover printed on it. My main deterrent was the fact that I started doing this a few months ago absent mindedly placing our new album cover on the merchandise before it was actually finalized to include the album title at the bottom. You see, these little things create lots of mental clutter that kept me from making the merchandise available to people. But this was just one of several things that I've been trying to finish and after they're done and I realized that it only took me an hour or so to do I felt pretty stupid that I procrastinated for so long. One way I learned to overcome this was to simply write down some tasks that I knew needed to be done while thinking about how great it would feel later on when they were finished it to scratch them off the list. Don't ask me why but, this is one of the many simple pleasures in life for me.

The point that I'm trying to make here is, I've been trying to find balance. This was pretty much prompted after realizing how much focus I was putting on music as a whole and missing one of the key elements that keeps a band going, money. Yes for some it's probably much easier to find. And that is why I implore anyone that can give me some feedback as to how to balance things between music business and personal life to comment or message me directly. I really want to know what other people have to say, which should come as no surprise to those of you who follow me on social media as you may have noticed that I always engage people with different questions about music and what I like to refer to as "Music Monday" (or #MusicMonday). And yes it is yet another corny reference to the new YouTube series Cobra Kai, that is a continuation of the Karate Kid story. When it first hit YouTube red everyone was binge watching it and was very excited to see season two. It seems like the craze has died down a bit, but I watch it from time to time and I got to hand it to YouTube for giving people the bait they couldn't resist in order to subscribe to YouTube red. The series is mainly based around somebody who is considered one of the bad guys if you will in the original series, Johnny Lawrence. However, at one point Ralph Macchio's character Daniel La Russo recall's an old lesson from his now deceased sensei, Mr. Miyagi who remind him about a lesson in balance and added to it that balance was not just for karate but for his whole life. Well, for those of you who haven't seen any of the show I won't reveal what happens next. But my point is, in order to continue working towards any goal time management is very important. That also means elminating time wasters from your life. I remember one person that cried up and down that they didn't have time to do certain things, well I'll tell you that this person hasn't really gone far in music. As somebody who early on has wanted to pursue a career in music, I'm well aware of the fact that the actual playing and songwriting are only one piece of the pie if you will. Some people are not good at or not interested in doing some of the other things such as booking the shows, or any of the other various tasks. I not only do these things, but I also enjoy it too. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was reading a book after attending a book release party. There were actually two books being premiered that evening. This book will help aspiring artists manage their day-to-day chores in order to accomplish their goals. And like Ariel Hyatt's book, Crowd Start I highly recommend it. It is called : the Rock/Star Life Planner. Truthfully I've only begun to dip into this book but I see how it's been laid out and help you not only achieve your goals, but visualizing them as well as making you recognize the things you have achieved thus far. I think this is a very good way to help aspiring artists get organized and not become discouraged by the downfalls that come along with being an artist. Not to mention that Co-Author Suzanne Paulinkski was very prompted when I reached out to with questions I had.

One thing that I will reveal about the Rock/Star life planner and the Cobra Kai series is that both of them urge you to change or specifically "flip the script" as they say. One character had a total transformation, and this is what it looked like :

Well, please wish me luck in trying to achieve this. Every day we all have things we have to take care of obviously and this is why many of us decide that music isn't really worth pursuing after a certain age. I'll have to admit that I was scrambling trying to find a particular artist to reference in this entry. While I was taking a quick break from writing I noticed that a friend had posted a video from Iron Maiden called "Wasted Years". That rings out to me for many reasons, not only are we in fear of wasting our time but I think of the many years that I was unable to see Iron Maiden live up until last year. I think it's a real shame because they put on an amazing show, and to further rub salt in the wound there was someone in our section that had seen them 14 times. Their lead Singer, Bruce Dickinson has truly made lots of use of his time here. Not only fronting one of the most successful metal bands in history, but he has also beaten cancer and he is a licensed pilot with the ability to fly 747 jets. So this basically goes along with the old saying : "where there's a will there's a way". I'm not sure what the outcome of the next couple of months will be. But I hope that it brings on many positive changes for myself and all of you out there. Thanks again for reading and I will speak to you next week, Nate
For more info on the Rock/Star Life Planner please visit : The Rock Star Advocate
I also decided to include a music player so you can preview all the songs from my new album :
And, here's the video for the song I mentioned by Iron Maiden