Despite all the evidence that a life as a full-time touring musician is quite possibly the hardest career path to pull off these days, it’s still the dream for lots of musicians and even non-musicians out there.
It’s not hard to imagine why. After all, it’s a life entirely dedicated to your passion. You get to travel, meet new people, and essentially be your own boss. But what does the life of a full-time musician actually look like?
Is it all drugs and groupies or is the reality less glamorous? Well, Hypebot might just have the answer. They recently spoke to Alex White, one-half of garage rock duo White Mystery, to find out what the daily schedule of a full-time touring musician actually looks like.
To give you a quick background on White Mystery, the brother-sister duo has been around for more than five years, though the pair have been performing together for longer than that. They are, for all intents and purposes, a success story.
The band make their living from their music, putting out four LPs, touring relentlessly around North America and Europe, playing huge festival gigs, getting featured in promotional campaigns for Levi’s and Converse, and recently completing a film about their travels.
“My life, physically, is like coffee, emails, working out, playing, sleeping. And some eating. But mostly coffee,” Alex tells Hypebot, though she admits that there’s no such thing as a typical work day.
When not on tour, Alex typically gets up around 7.30 in the morning. She makes “like six cups of coffee” and starts going through her email inbox. “I get almost 100 every day. I start answering them in order of easiest to answer to hardest,” she says.
After the emails a done, Alex gets in an hour-long workout, and then comes home to greet the three interns she has working with her. They come at 1pm and “learn a different discipline every week and apply it”.
“I do so many things that I always have a project related to what we’re talking about,” Alex explains. “Today with the group we focused on booking, and they have the option to call in or come in person.”
At around 3pm, Alex returns to her inbox and is usually answering emails until late at night. What’s actually in the emails? It varies and encompass everything from fan questions and booking requests, to contracts and financial matters.
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“[What] took up a lot of my time [recently] was developing the film,” she says. “Working with an editor and his questions and the filmmakers, who each have their own part, and then booking the premiere party for it. You’re trying to cover a lot of ground by communicating with people.”
“I’m really thorough,” says Alex. “There’s a lot of people out there who get 100 emails, and they only answer maybe 10. But when there’s a young band who emails me about how to play in Chicago or someone with a blog that wants to do an interview, I’m happy to do that stuff, even though it can muck up the [day] a little bit.”
So what about the all-important band practice? “It’s hard to practice, [because] even when we are home, we’re usually playing twice a week, so a lot of times we just perform live and do a lot of our writing in that two-month period when we’re home.”
“Usually when we’re home, it’s unplugged electric guitar and working on lyrics, then we kind of brings those songs to our live shows and kinda test them out live. Kind of organically that way,” she says.
Of course, this is when Alex and her brother Francis have the luxury of being at home. 10 months out of the year, they’re familiarising themselves with the many highways of Europe and North America as a full-time touring machine.
“I open my laptop in a hotel [at around 11am], probably, and try to find coffee,” Alex recounts.”Then I take a shower, wake Francis up at noon, and request a late check-out for 1:00 p.m., like, ‘Hey, we’re not ready yet.'”
By 1pm, the band is assembling at Starbucks and preparing to hit the road. “We’re usually driving for three to six hours a day; we try to cap it at six and not do more than one of those weeks [a month], and we typically arrive at the venue around 7:00 p.m.”
“Even though a lot of places want us to load in early, it just didn’t make sense to be at a bar for, like, seven hours when you’re only performing for 45 minutes, so we kind of take our time. We’ll arrive at the venue, and sometimes that’s our first meal of the day at 7:00 p.m.”
“We set up our merch when we walk in the door, then basically play pinball until the doors open at 9:00 p.m., and man the merch table until the show, which is usually around 11:00 p.m. or midnight. And then we play, then we party until three in the morning.”
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Of course, this doesn’t account for all the small logistical concerns and general ‘life stuff’ that needs to be taken care of when the band isn’t en route to a venue, on the stage, or partying it up like rock stars.
“You have to stop, you have to refuel your car, you have to check your oil, you have to make sure all your equipment is covered with a blanket so it looks like nothing’s in there,” Alex explains.
“Sometimes you have to pick up stuff that you need for your normal life even though you’re on the road, like toothpaste or get some batteries. You have to still maintain appearances and chores, like I try to clean the car while we’re on the road, and we definitely have to do laundry while we’re on the road.”
“So that time while I’m waking up I’m doing laundry at a friend’s house… you’re toeing the line between normal life and chore stuff.” No doubt it takes a special breed to be able to pull off such a schedule successfully.
So, less sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and more a life of answering emails until two in the morning when you’re not spending six hours driving to a venue sounds like it’s your dream life… and rock and roll. Doesn’t sound too bad to us, really.
