The 5 Stages Of A Successful Recording Career

Chris Graham (0:30)

60 degrees in Columbus, Ohio right now.

Brian Hood (0:32)

It's 72 right now in Nashville, which at the time of recording this, it's the day after Valentine's Day, and it shouldn't be this warm and sunny out.

Chris Graham (0:41)

You might say that 72 degrees is terrible podcasting weather in February for you, and it is for me, I should go outside soon.

Brian Hood (0:48)

How was your Valentine's Day, by the way? Did you do anything cool with the wife?

Chris Graham (0:51)

Yeah, I did the coolest thing that you can possibly do.

Brian Hood (0:54)

No, you didn't, I did, but you go first. I'll tell you what I did.

Chris Graham (0:57)

Well, trust me, I did the coolest thing with my wife that you can possibly do. My wife doesn't believe in Valentine's Day because she's awesome.

We don't do Valentine's Day.

Brian Hood (1:08)

What the hell?

Chris Graham (1:08)

Yeah, we think it's cheap and creates this unhealthy expectation. It was a big issue for us when we first got married because we had different expectations about Valentine's Day. And I remember one time I was out touring, I was like a solo singer, songwriter, musician, and I decided to drive home from New York City on February the 13th to get home, but there was nine inches of snow on the ground, and I was gonna have to drive through nine inches of snow the whole way. But luckily, I had a Subaru, so I went for it and drove home to be with my wife on our first Valentine's Day, and she got really mad that I didn't get her anything.

I risked my life. I was literally one of five cars from New York City to Columbus, Ohio, which is a good eight hours with good weather that I saw the whole time. It was insane.

Brian Hood (1:59)

That hurts for me. Well, I know that my girlfriend, her favorite day of the year is Valentine's Day, so I know how to go about this. There are no mismatched expectations. We went out to something called Dinner Time Stories last night, which is a projection mapping dinner.

If you've ever seen concerts where they have projections up behind the people, and there's all sorts of crazy shit, that's called projection mapping. They had 15 projectors above the tables, and on the tables are projecting this story, and it's like this dude walking around, going through these different nations to find all these different ingredients, and he's like building this meal on your plate, and then they bring out six courses of meals to you, and they're all different themes from different countries. It was amazing.

Chris Graham (2:40)

It sounds like, to go on that date, that you needed to have a six-figure home studio to afford it.

Brian Hood (2:45)

I'm not gonna talk about that shit.

But it was a lot of fun, and it was a cool experience, so. We were definitely the youngest people there.

Chris Graham (2:52)

That's amazing. That's amazing.

Brian Hood (2:53)

Anyways, that was just the worst use of the time of the podcast possible, but you know what? There's some personal stories about it.

Chris Graham (3:00)

Yes, personal banter, personal banter, personal banter. Now down to business.

Brian Hood (3:04)

Yeah, you know the formula. Here we go. So today's episode, we were talking about some episode topic ideas, and we thought it might be interesting to do an episode about what we think are the stages of a typical recording career, or not even a typical, maybe an extra ordinary recording career. What do the five stages look like? So we mapped out from both of our experiences what we think the five stages of a successful recording career are.

And just to preface this, this is not the end-all-be-all list of the five stages you are guaranteed to be going through. Both Chris and I had some differences on what we thought the stages might be, so we'll probably talk about that at the episode. But we're gonna give you five stages of a successful recording career, starting now.

Chris Graham (3:50)

So, the first stage in a successful recording career is pre-revenue. It's before you make any money. And for those of you guys that have heard Brian Hood's interview, I believe that was episode three, Brian's pre-revenue story is insane. This idea that he got Pro Tools before he was the successful owner, producer, entrepreneur that he is, he got Pro Tools, and he would stay awake for 30 hours.

Brian Hood (4:16)

40

Chris Graham (4:16)

40 hours learning to use Pro Tools, and then he'd fall asleep, and then wake up and spend 40 more hours.