last good country

Jumping off a cliff;

It’s been nearly four years since I jumped off a cliff and took a chance on a big adventure. I was fresh out of college, about five months into my first office job. I was working in IT, and I was fairly unhappy. I worked for a great organization, but being in the IT department often means being far removed from the action. The curse of working with technology in a non-technology organization.

I was bored and the economy hadn’t skidded yet. I assumed I would be able to find a new job just as easily as I had found my first one. I had been dabbling in live music photography for a while, and I wanted to pursue that a bit more. I started by getting to know some bands. I focused on sort of mid-level groups that played decent venues. I’d email them or find them on Myspace and offer to shoot their shows when they came to town. I wanted to meet them, and also capture the behind-the-scenes feel of their show. I thought it was incredibly interesting to see how these are just normal people who make a little bit of money recording and touring. It was always such a contrast, to talk to fans who imagined a band to be much ‘bigger’ than they were.

I was listening to an album by a band from Brooklyn called Dirty on Purpose. I liked the music, and ended up shooting their show at the Rock and Roll Hotel, shortly after that venue opened. Before they went on I was talking to them backstage, and they mentioned they were soon about to tour with the Album Leaf. I offhandedly mentioned that I’d never been to the west coast and that touring sounded intriguing. “You should come man, you’d see a lot of the country.”

So I jumped off the cliff. I thought about it for a while, except I had already made up my mind. I quit my job and went on the road for three and a half weeks. The tour started in Montreal and stretched out to Seattle, San Francisco, and back across the country. It was an incredible experience, and I saw first-hand the difficulties that independent artists face. I also saw first-hand just what an amazing and unique experience touring can be. I also got a few decent photographs.

In this case, jumping off the cliff didn’t change my life. It opened a few doors, I ended up doing another brief tour stint in 2007 (this time bigger names, it was an O.A.R. tour). It didn’t change my career path, and in fact I find myself now back in IT, though a bit better off. While I have regrets about other decisions I made over the past five or so years, this is not one of them. The bigger regret would have been not going.

I like to think I’ve learned a few things over the years, but really all I’ve learned is that things never turn out how you expect. When you are afraid of taking that chance, of jumping off the cliff, the fear is usually based on worst-case scenarios that may never come to pass. Our minds fill the unknown with things we do know—all the ways we can fail. That’s some bullshit, though, because in the end if you do fail, it will likely be in a way you haven’t even thought about.  The urge to jump is there because there’s a chance that the unknown will turn out to be amazing. Sometimes that happens, and it changes your life. Other times it turns out to be just another step, another experience that pushes you along until you reach the next overlook.