Moving sucks. There is no other way to put it. You have to do it sometimes if you want to get where you want to go. And even then it is really where you think you want to go. Moving is pretty easy for me. The first few times of moving to a different city are a little scary. Things are not going to work out in the way you want them to but they will work out anyways. That is a hard concept to get but once you do get it, it makes everything easier

A few things came up this weekend about where I have lived and why I moved and all that kind of stuff so I thought I would break down the types of individuals I have found in the world that are in bands.

To put it simply, there are people who are full time musicians and people who have day jobs. Everyone knows that. The hard part about being either one is that day. That one day where you have to decide which one you are. It's easy to make the decision if you have no strings or anything like that, but let's face it, a lot of the time you have to give up a whole lot to get where you want to be. And if that "where you want to be" is just another possibility, it makes it that much harder. What if you have a girlfriend or a boyfriend and you are going to have to move 700 miles away to keep going in this band? What if you have an OK job and by moving, you have to start working in a warehouse again? To start over? What if you have nowhere to go? What if you really start hating each other?

I guess it really comes down to if you believe in something or not. It would be great if everyone lived in a town that already had a music scene that was big and was your type of music. But in reality, it doesn't happen that much. You have to go to that scene. Some scenes got lucky and for some reason or another got noticed on a large scale, but really, you have to go where it is happening. All I know is that where I came from, moving wasn't really an option. It was a reality that we would have to face someday.

This is where it sucks to be the "safe man." The man who needs his security and needs to know what is going to happen the next day. Having a place to stay is nice, but hell, we all have lived on sofas before. So what if you do move? What if nothing works out? What if in six months you come back as a failure with nothing to show but a few more addictions and some huge debt that your ex girlfriend ran up cause you forgot to cancel the credit cards that you had been living off of for the last two months?

That reality faces everyone when they move. There is no way around it. Getting a job before hand usually helps but really, by moving you are putting yourself at survival level for the love of your music before the comforts of, well, things like eating. Tell me how many bands haven't done the soup kitchen celebrity or happy hour bar hopping just to eat for the day.

It is really lame when you get something like a good guitarist who won't move with the band because he or she is making a decent living at their day job. Or has a girlfriend. Or whatever. Really splits the band up when you want to take it to the next level. It's hard to practice everyday when you live five hours away from each other. Or even two. So you have to decide.

It is in that moment when you can define who wants to just be in a band after work and who wants to be the band everyday.

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