There's a couple of “overnight sensation" stories I really like. They're short, they're fun, they're light-hearted, and they all distort the reality of how success really happens. The success they describe is always the result of hard work put in before, not during, the story.
To explain what I mean, let me begin by telling you a story about Paper Tongues, my new favorite “overnight success" story:
Paper Tongues formed in 2007 in Charlotte, North Carolina, when a few musicians with very different musical backgrounds decided to start a band. After playing together for a while, they started work on their debut album. While this was happening, the band's lead singer, Aswan North, ran into world-renowned producer Randy Jackson at a restaurant one day and decided to confront him with his music. He gave him a slip of paper with Paper Tongues' myspace address on it and said something like, “You'll like this," and walked away. Well, it turns out North was right. This encounter led Randy to become the manager of the band.
I am very jealous of that story, because it's the kind of thing every band wants to happen to them. And that is a big problem, because what does that do to you? It makes you start looking for miracles instead of working hard and letting stuff just happen.
That's certainly what happened to me. After I heard that story, I'd look around after every gig I played with a sort of “Anyone want to sign me?" look on my face. Every time I walked into a restaurant, I'd hope to bump into someone who I could give my myspace address to. I even bought a mobile phone, punched in my number and gave it to a famous artist who I happened to see on the street in Nashville! (I'd heard someone had done that before, too). And for some reason, when nothing happened for me the way it had happened for others, I felt quite disappointed.
I was spending my time with finding ways to make a story happen, instead of working hard and letting the story look after itself.
But I have to consider myself lucky, because while I was trying to reproduce a miracle I had heard about, my own little miracle was happening without me knowing:
A few months ago, when my band was in Nashville, we were sitting around the breakfast table at our friend's house, checking our band e-mails and our myspace messages, just like we do every morning. That day, I found one titled “Message from Sylvia Massy (producer)." It read:
“Incredible vocals and drums guys! What are your plans for your next album? Would love to produce on your stuff so let me know as I would totally work you into my schedule! sylvia."
Now comes the part I wish wasn't true. In my infinite stupidity, I closed the message and thought nothing of it. We'd gotten ridiculous “production offers" in the past, and I simply assumed this was another one of them. Stay in a band for a certain amount of time, and you adapt a very distrustful, arrogant mindset about offers like that: you assume that anybody who's offering you anything is a loser.
But later that evening, just because I was bored, I decided to google her name, and when I found out who I was google-ing, I couldn't believe my eyes. I wanted to take my head and bang it against a toilet seat.
Sylvia Massy is a multi-platinum record producer who has worked with Red Hot Chili Peppers, Prince, REM, Johnny Cash, Deftones, System of a Down, Tool, Tom Petty and many more. And what impressed me most was that she'd worked with Rick Rubin, the producer guru. So after I had cleaned the shit out of my pants, I wrote back as quickly as I could.
Apparently she heard about us from someone named Christy, who used to do A&R for Sylvia: Christy (who we didn't know, which made it kind of spooky) had read a review of our new album online. Hard work had gotten the review there—we had made a list of over 700 blogs over the previous two years and written to all of them, once our album was out. This one happened to be one of them.
Thanks to all that hard work, the great Sylvia Massy wants to produce our next album. I'm embarrassed, excited, nervous and honored, and I'm also reminded that great stuff happens, but only as the saying says: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."
So let your own story happen. Don't try to copy someone else's.
