In order to successfully maintain a career as an indie artist of any kind requires the skill of a restauranter. Mainly the ability to wear many hats. You need to understand the entire operation, from the front of the house to the food and preparation, to the decor, to the dishwasher and the clean up crew. Most of all, any meal you serve needs to taste good to your customer.

As an indie musician you need to eat, sleep and breath the biz. You need to be able to change hats daily, sometimes hourly. Not only are you the artist and all the things that go along with cultivating and creating your art, but you are the one who has to market it and present it to the public. To deliver it you need to be a savvy businessman. You need to make the contacts and then act on those connections. That often means putting on the publicist hat and and the marketing hat and the web master hat. All hats that will lead to the desired end of getting your music heard.

I myself, enjoy creating my music and performing it live more than anything else. As nice as it is to just show up somewhere and play, in order to do that properly requires first wearing the hat of booker. Now of course one could always hire a booking agent but when you're running your own record label and trying to operate on a budget, saving the 15% or 20% booking fee means a lot.

So as I'm sitting here in my blog hat thinking about it all and trying to make a personal connection with my fans, I realize that I'm actually lucky to be working in a time when it is possible to have the tools to be able to wear all these hats and have a career sharing my original music. Being able to wear multiple hats allows me to save money and ultimately have artistic control over my work and the look, feel and sound of the end product.

And if I look bad in one of my hats there is no one else to blame. Hope you like my hat.