J. J. Cale Quotes

You have to spend a lot more time on the road these days if you want to make a living with music.

It's really hard to make a living as a musician. It's almost impossible.

I am, as they say, the classic starving artist.

I came to New York with $500 and I had to live on that, but thankfully I was taken up by photographers quickly.

Playing live, you can't survive, certainly not in England. We used to work daytime jobs and play gigs at night. It was very exhausting.

I feel quite sad for the young musicians coming up because they may never get to pay their rent properly. It doesn't matter what the genre; nowadays, it's so much harder than it ever was.

I do smaller films, I'm not getting big paydays. I feel like we're just kind of scraping together here.

I say that I get paid to travel, and I play the shows for free.

I didn't think we would ever make enough money to pay rent by playing music.

The Misfits pretty much funds the Misfits. It used to cost me money to be in the band. I think we got paid the last gig we ever did. After that, we had to work to support our families.

Do I love the road? Honestly? No - but it's how I earn my living. I also don't have the blues, like it's some kind of fever. The blues is my job. It's what I do.

As a journeyman singer, I have to go to where the work is.

Being a professional musician with Downhere for 11 years now, I feel completely at home on stage.

I was a studio engineer out in L.A. for about six or seven years, and I played sideman for different people, and played in bar bands. I was an old man of 32 when I made my first album.

It doesn't matter how big the shows are, as long as I'm making a living playing music. That's all that matters to me.

I dropped out of school at 17 'cause all I wanted to do was play music. I had odd jobs on the side of gigging until I turned 22, when I was lucky to start doing this full time.

I never wished to be a 'rock star.' I just wanted to be a working musician. My dreams didn't even go past a session player or a working musician. It was too far beyond my dreams.

Basically, I'm just a guitar player that figured out I wasn't ever gonna be able to buy dinner with my guitar playing. So I got into songwriting, which is a little more profitable business.

Being a hungry artist, you don't have the luxury of buying whatever you want. There were years of me doing a lot of odd jobs, this and that just to make ends meet.

I was busy enough when I was just a musician. I wasn't making all that much money but I was busy.

But it's hard to support yourself from music when nobody knows you.

I never set out to be a rock star, I set out to be a working musician.

I'm not stupid enough to want to be famous. But I would like to be able to earn a living playing music.

I never expected to make a lot of money from music.

At the end of the day, a playback singer has to depend on live shows as their source of income.