A Quote by Jake Owen
I went from a playing in a bar on a bar stool for free beer and tip money, where people weren't paying attention to me, to now I've got their attention. It's up to me to what I feed them with my music. It's up to me how I do that. I've put a lot of thought into how great the songs are, and how I want people to perceive me.
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When I started playing music at East Tennessee State University I would sit on a stool with a tip jar in front of me and play four hours a night at a college bar called Quarterback's Barbecue. I wasn't thinking about doing it for a living. I was just making enough money to go to Taco Bell every day. People were eating chips, drinking beer and not listening to me. I'd had three or four years of people ignoring me, and I'd kind of gotten used to it.
And I thought about how many people have loved those songs. And how many people got through a lot of bad times because of those songs. And how many people enjoyed good times with those songs. And how much those songs really mean. I think it would be great to have written one of those songs. I bet if I wrote one of them, I would be very proud. I hope the people who wrote those songs are happy. I hope they feel it's enough. I really do because they've made me happy. And I'm only one person.
I gave examples from my clinical practice of how love was not wholly a thought or feeling. I told of how that very evening there would be some man sitting at a bar in the local village, crying into his beer and sputtering to the bartender how much he loved his wife and children while at the same time he was wasting his family's money and depriving them of his attention. We recounted how this man was thinking love and feeling love--were they not real tears in his eyes?--but he was not in truth behaving with love.
I was a bar-back, which is the person who cleans the bathrooms at the end of the night in the bar, and a cook. I had kind of given up. I was into backing other people up. Music was something I just did on the side and I don't think I had the energy to pimp myself out, like call people up and ask them to book me to play.
I learned a lot in my life by paying attention and listening to how people around me worked.
If I were to go the major route, again, attention would probably be the first and foremost. You want attention, you want support, you want to be treated properly, and I don't wanna have to go anywhere and teach people how to treat me. As far as money, acclaim and fame, those things are a plus - accolades - they're all great.
I wanted to learn how the business worked. I wanted to see how people got drafted, how players got traded, how they got picked up in free agency, how the salary cap worked, how do you manage an organization, how do you negotiate contracts. The Bulls gave me an excellent opportunity to answer all the questions that I wanted to ask.
When I did get signed and I was going around letting people know what I was about, that's exactly how I did it: me on the piano, playing a couple of songs I'd written and talking to the people in between. That's how I got my performance chops up.
The point of my music? The point I just want to get across is I'm me and I exist. Just letting people know who I am. Ever since I was young, I was the little attention grabber; I always loved attention. I want to grab people's attention. I want them listen to me and know that this is really good music. Whether they like it or not, they're gonna listen.
You learn the most by listening and so, to me, always just listening, always just paying attention and finding out what it is that people see in somebody like them. You find those things, and you try to figure out how to fit them into who you are, who you want to be, and how you want to lead.
People who are just starting out are always sort of coming to me for advice as the example of "independent girl," and lots of people ask, well, how did you get the booking agent or the national distribution or the tours? And I look at them like, "Good lord! Relax!" I mean, how I did it was to not care about it and to not even think about it for years and years. All I thought about was getting the next little gig in the little bar, and I get this sense that people want me to give them the secret formula or the magic trick to make it all happen.
I opened up my mind as far as playing music. I was at a Cody Chesnutt concert a few years ago, and a friend introduced me to him. We just started talking about music, and he asked me what I did. I said, "I have these songs and I'm kind of nervous to put them out, because I've just kind of been playing blues stuff, and playing other people's songs." He said, "You should just put them out there, man. Why not? It's just gonna bother you if you don't. The easiest thing to do is to just let it go." So I just took that with me.
And what makes me happy now has changed as well... Its one thing to play in a bar or at a biker festival, and hear a guy who's been drinking beer all day come up and tell you how good you are. For a long time in your life that will make you happy.
If we were at a bar in a small town and not many people were there, people would bug me to bring in my guitar and play. I was paying my dues, learning how it all worked.
There's no certainty to the next couple of years, but people are paying attention now. And I want to put out a record when people are paying attention, because that's when it has the best chance of being heard.
I'm used to people not paying me a whole lot of attention and underestimating me and, frankly, for me a big challenge is to have people believe that I can be the president of the United States.
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