Question: How do I balance the demands of my day job with my desire to make things?

If you’re going to be a doctor or a dentist you have to go to school, but if you’re gonna be a cook you can do it without going to school or getting any formal training. It’s just gonna be harder for you and you have to be way more psychotic and intense about it in terms of how you learn to do these things.

There’s this romantic feeling that being a full-time artist is the goal, but that doesn’t have to be the goal, or shouldn’t be necessarily. There are so many artists that are super successful that also diversify the sorts of projects they work on. It’s not shameful to be a working artist or to have other interests that you’re also pursuing in tandem with making music. It’s easy for people to think that because you’re working a job and you’re also making creative work that you’re somehow not doing it, and that’s just not true.

Having a serious day job is good for saying no. Sorry, I have no time. I can’t do it. But most of the time I say no to something because I just don’t believe in what people are asking me to do.

That’s the thing about being creative: You’re trying to make money off of something so deep. It can be really scary.

I ended up joining their writers group and then they gave me this fellowship not that long after I moved to New York. That really did change my life, because even though I was working a day job and most of my hours were not spent feeling like a playwright, it changed my perception of myself. That is probably when I started writing through the night because that was the only time I had. As with anything, you have to go out and find your people… and you have to go out and find the people who might be out there looking for you.

If it makes you money eventually, that’s a great bonus, but that shouldn’t be the fuel for your creative impulse. Make money from your day job, then be creative because it makes you feel good. I always tell people, don’t worry about everything making money so much. Worry about how it feels.

Having a job is absolutely ok. Having lived off my work for a while, I’m now at a point where I just can’t get a stable job without something really suffering. So for me, the gallery is my day job, but that’s just as hard as making it as an artist

For a lot of creative people there is that guilt that comes with ignoring your creative work because of your day job commitments, or vice versa. At a certain point, maybe you just have to give yourself license to be like, “When the semester is going on, I’m not going to feel bad about not being creative.”

I put out my first record, Cassette City, in 2009, and then while I was working on my second album I got a job as marketing director for a tech startup. I have no background in marketing. I don’t even have a college degree.

It’s tricky. I feel like I’m always negotiating how to do it properly, so that one part doesn’t suffer. It’s certainly easier to push off my own creative projects than it is to push off the day job, especially when my day job is in a creative field. So it’s not like I’m just working a generic office job, I am working with other people’s art all day. So it’s harder to slough off that responsibility.

I’m definitely a big fan of, no matter how busy your job is, take 10 minutes to write your own email that’s going to push your own shit forward. It’s better than looking at a website or something, or checking your email. There are a lot of hours during the day.