St. Lucia Quotes

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.

We all know the record biz don't pay. All musicians have day jobs - no matter how big they are.

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

Before I got my big hit, I was selling beats for $500.

I started out as a duo with Mis-Teeq's Sabrina Washington, and we worked for four or five years before signing a record deal. I had no money, and I was taking part-time jobs just to earn the train fare to get to rehearsals.

I did a lot of songs that I sold, but then they never came out and I never got paid for it. You learn real fast that the music industry, in the beginning, you're not going to get paid for a while, and then you start getting the accolades.

I didn't have any knowledge of the music industry when I first got to L.A., and I really didn't know on a creative level what I wanted to sound like, so I had to do a lot of experimenting. It led to a spiral of depression and being broke.

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 need the money. People don't understand how little money you make in a band.

In my early days, I was about 145 pounds. I was really a starving artist; the poster child for starving artists.

Honestly, when I got to Hollywood I was trying to sell my songs.

The first four and a half years was me in the studio every day, writing songs for other people. I had jobs, too - eleven jobs. I worked at Kinko's, Fatburger, Subway - I was a sandwich artist - and I was a claims processor at Allstate Insurance.

A lot of musicians aren't proud; they'll do other work, just to be able to play music. I guess that's the way it's always going to be - musicians will have to suffer to a certain degree in order to obtain their outlet.

You rarely get money out of labels, except for when they open up a budget for a project. Other than that, it's a do-or-die type thing.

I had to live on $17,000 a year until I was 33, because I was a failed artist until I was 29, when I made my first short film that went to Sundance.

Going through economic hard times is something I know firsthand.

My dream that I followed and that I'm living now is that I actually always wanted to go to music college, play in a band, do a world tour, and then eventually get into film music.

We had an era where we wasn't getting paid, before the 'Versace' and all that.

It happens in this business - The Rolling Stones were ripped off, so were the Beatles. George Harrison hardly had anything left in the end.

I think that I'm lucky in that, even at levels where I, by and large, wasn't making enough money to sustain my life, I worked as a male nanny, I waited tables and did what I had to, to keep doing theater and acting.

You see the music videos and the bling and the cars, but all of that goes home at the end of the shoot. They make nothing because there's less and less money in the music industry.

The jingles saved my life. When I got hired to do that, I was on top. I finally was making a living doing what I loved. Before that, it was so bleak; it got so dark in L.A. I was 25, been living there for seven years trying to make it, and getting really close to getting signed with different bands and as a solo artist only to have my hopes dashed.

It's a tough business, yes it is. But I've been fortunate. The only real hard times I had was when I was with Montague's Kentucky Serenades. We really had it tough then.

My family endured a big crisis after my father's business went bankrupt and we went from having a comfortable life to having virtually nothing. I saw from that moment how fragile and precarious life can be and you have to work very hard not just to survive but also to accomplish something in life and fulfill your dreams.

Doin' music, musicians and artists, we have the advantage of doin' something that is our passion. At the same time it's fun, and it's like a dream to other people, and live off it, feed yourself off of it. 'Cause it's hard, you know what I"m sayin'? You really gotta grind and you really gotta love and enjoy what you do, if you're gonna make it. 'Cause if you don't believe in yourself, if you don't got people believin' in you, people aren't gonna buy it.