I don't have music to share for Music Monday like I had hoped, but I want to still share something valuable. While I no longer coach music career as my main thing, I still enjoy constantly learning about and keeping up with current music business best practices. While researching the validity of a certain music business book, I accidentally came across the Custom GPT, The Musician's Roadmap. I used this tool to map out a full release plan for my songs, collaborations, and poetry, that fits my brand, genre, goals, ideal fan, and more. But to do that, I had to know how to talk to it about yourself. Otherwise, it give incredibly generic answers. If you're unfamiliar with Custom GPTs, to put it simply, they're an AI conversational interface that's trained on knowledge base files and specific instructions to answer your questions. Trained and instructed correctly, they can be very powerful tools. In this case, The Musician's Roadmap is trained on just about anything you need to grow your music career, from recording to growing a fanbase. Like any Custom GPT, the more detailed information you give it about you and what you're trying to do, the better the answer it will give you. One big trick with AI is to get it to ask you questions to help you come up with better prompts or to ask it better questions, especially if you haven't yet fully figured out how to prompt it or what information to give it. To test it, I gave it general information, just to see what type of answer it gives and if it was worth using. The answer was detailed, but as I told it: "This list is vague and overwhelming. Ask me questions to help me form a better plan based upon my brand, music, ideal fans, and more." That opened up the floodgates. The questions it gave me, which I'll put below, helped it give me a very details plan specifically for me. That started a good back and forth conversation that felt like an extremely well-informed expert was brainstorming ideas with me. Any new ideas I had, I would ask it questions about, which it would then compare to it's knowledge on trends, market, and genres. That led to a whole conversation about possible things to do for social media, fan interaction, release schedule, collaborators, hired guests, other creative offerings, and much more. I now have a full, multi-phase, monthly plan to start moving forward with, and good ideas for how to adapt it as I go.

Now that we're two weeks in and things are starting to settle, I feel like I can finally wish you a Happy New Year! I plan on slowly going through the quotes we've posted on YouTube and Instagram to dive a bit deeper than a quick post can do. Since the year is still relatively new, and people are still trying to get their New Year's Resolutions in order (something Amidei and I go into in our January 1st podcast episode), I thought the most recent quote card to be very relevant: "Life owes you nothing. You owe yourself everything." Corey Taylor, Seven Deadly Sins: Settling the Argument Between Born Bad and Damaged Good. Everything. Stop waiting for a handout, a savior, or to be discovered and then finally have the freedom you want. It’s not worth living in the endless circle of “if only” and going nowhere. You can do this. You can reach for the stars and bring a few back with you. There’s a way. You don’t have to go it alone. Many have gone before you and shined a light on their path. And many would love to join you and support you on your journey. This is especially true for your music career aspirations; it also rings true for anything you hope you could do… if only… Do you really want to model those who have gone before? Allow me to play my own Devil's advocate for a moment. My son, Ender, is a reader. At 18, he's probably read more book than I ever have outside of my 10-year doctorate studies in religion and Middle-Eastern History (a story for another day). Ender, Nadine, and I often talk about what he's reading, sometimes all getting excited to find a life-changing book. when he shared with us Morgan Housel's Psychology of Money Nadine and I ate it up. Nadine even printed out most of his blog. I finally felt like someone was able to sum up my ever-looming question of "why would somebody do that?" You know the question. Humanity being sheeple, being human, seeming to disregard others, or making decisions that are simply dumbfounding. When Housel's book, Same As Ever came out, the answer to that question became even more clear. And I now know why I make so many dumb decisions! Haha!

What have you found yourself always coming back to for inspiration and motivation year after year? There are a couple of things that inspire and motivate me every time I hear them, things I keep coming back to as the years pass. Every few months to a year one of these pops up in my head again and inspires me to feel like i can take on the world, no matter how I feel things have been going. I’m an avid reader and have a list of books that I found life changing. But I don’t tend to reread many books. However, there are a few shorter, more quickly digestible things that I keep coming back to over and over again. I think we all need beacons like that in our lives. They have saved me many times from falling into disappointment in my progress, struggle with hardship, and being on the edge of giving up on my dreams and aspirations. The first, An Invocation for Beginnings, I’ve posted before. The second is Saul Williams’ Pedagogue of Young Gods. ********** Pedagogue of Young Gods by Saul Williams Are you afraid to have someone believe in you? Can you commit to your ideals? Even if you think nothing of it, are you willing to allow others to think the world of it, and of you? Pedagogue of Young Gods. All slavery ever does is free you. All anyone ever does is an example. All power is just collective energy. To abuse the privilege is to sell your soul and that is to rent with the illusion of owning. We are the landlords. If you misunderstand us, you're dead and deserve your demise. Your dominion is your overthrow. The controllers are controlled. Spread the word, it will save you and depends on you to be understood. There is no school bell, only nursery. Our heroes reward us with stars, ever-still, ever-moving. We sing to ourselves in our cars. Music is our sanctuary. Anywhere you put it it's ours. Our living voice, our living testament. We dream aloud, we scream and shout. Our courage will defeat them. Our struggle will unite us. Our wisdom is ourselves, our resources our own,

Below is from the draft of my book, Rise Above the Noise, a chapter called "The 5 Problems (And What to Do About Them)," Discussing some of the most important lessons I've learned over the last 30 years as a professional singer and musician. Since the book is on hold while our new program and quite possibly a whole other book on singing is in the works, I want to share this part with you now, unedited. *************** 𝗟𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗻 #𝟭: 𝗬𝗼𝘂’𝗿𝗲 𝗦𝘂𝗿𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝘆 𝗡𝗮𝘆𝘀𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗿𝘀 You are surrounded by people who are all experts from the University of Social Media about subjects they have absolutely no experience in. You’re surrounded by people who tout decades old myths about how to have a career in music. Because of those myths, it’s difficult to find support in pursuing music as a career. And with those that have had some experience pursuing a music career, they often still act as harbingers of doom because they gave up a long time ago. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t look down on these people. They need to justify their failures to feel okay about giving up. In many cases, it’s totally possible that it simply wasn’t the dream they thought it would be and they moved on to other things. But in most cases, they believed the many, many, MANY lies about what it takes to have a singing career, and became one more person in the sea of noise that spread those popular myths to others. It’s not their fault. That’s simply the nature of The Noise. Let’s explore some of those myths. “𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗲𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 ‘𝗶𝘁’ ‘𝗼𝗿 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗱𝗼𝗻’𝘁.” It doesn’t matter that “it” is never truly defined. Is it natural talent? I will agree some people are more intuitive than others, but most of us have to work hard to earn those skills and are better for it. We earned it, and have the skills to prove it. I actually feel sad for many people who are highly intuitive about singing and music. Most of them have shortcomings that they never address because, to quote, “Why do I need lessons? I know how to sing.” Thankfully, for all the talented people that never pursued improving their skills, there are plenty more who got lessons and took it to a whole new level.

There were those who wanted to proclaim Kurt Cobain as the "posterboy of Generation X." One thing about being a posterboy, a role model, a leader....If you're gonna lead people, you have got to have someplace to lead people to. Nobody wants to follow a leader who is going to get them killed. By April 5th of 1994, rock had gotten about as far from "glamorous" as would have ever been thought possible in the 80s. No more gorgeous, "self-indulgent" guitar solos that served as the vehicle of the spirit of the guitarist. No more stage clothes. If these clothes are good enough for copping, they're good enough for rocking. No more stage shows with the dazzling lights and the blazing pyrotechnics. "We don't want to do anything too over the top." Well it's all those things that made rock so fun and so exciting to young people! Grunge did away with the glamor and the showmanship and the attitude and it just so happens that the 90s were the last time that rock music dominated as the young people's choice in popular music. The kids who grew up in the 90s gravitated towards the glamor, the showmanship and the attitude they saw in hip hop when they grew up. They saw hip hop stars livin' large and said: "Yeah! I want that"! I understand grunge wanted to present something authentic but there are a number of ways to go about doing that. If your heart and your soul and your passion are fully invested in what you're doing, then the way I see it, that is authentic as it gets! You do realize this is rock 'n' roll don't ya? What if The KIng had decided he wouldn't shake his hips when he was onstage because it was too "showy"? Would we even have rock music? Rock music isn't just a sound; it's an attitude. It's bravado! It's swagger! How else do you figure that a character vocalist like Mick Jagger could ever be the lead singer of "The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World" if it was all based purely on technical prowess? Mick Jagger is a legend and an icon because he gets into character so incredibly well for any song he sings. He sings what that character in that song needs to get across what he wants to get across. Mick can also walk and talk and strut with the best of them and he maintains that energy level the whole time he's out there.