Hear J&P's latest release "Loose, Limber and Lithe"

A Day in the Life of Jeff of Paige: Dealing With Doubt

 

It’s 9pm. I emerge groggy-eyed from our son, Wolf’s, bedroom.

“Flubbsies?” Jeff asks.
”Mmmmhmm.” I reply. Flubbsies is our word for this moment of coming out of a darkened bedroom, bleary-eyed, squinting at the light, after falling asleep putting the kid to bed.
”So you want to rehearse that new song for Sunday?” Jeff asks.
A moment of annoyance passes through. Not at all! I want to say. I’m tired and the last thing I want to think about is how we’re going to perform Density. Right now I don’t care about the performance, or social media posts, or selling the new album. I’m tired and…

 Jeff & Paige Rehearsing “Density” in their PJs at home. Jeff & Paige Rehearsing “Density” in their PJs at home.

But actually I do care. I care very much about the performance, and selling our new CD, and raising enough money to reach our crowd funding goal to donate the curriculum we’ve created to classrooms. I care about so much of it that sometimes it’s hard to know where to start. For now it’s with this rehearsal of a new song. And this cold dark winter night, after the kid is asleep, is the time we have to rehearse and prepare without interruption. So I swallow the thoughts, and the urge to yell this at my husband, and the temptation of putting off the work for another time. I’ll enjoy the process if I can shake the tired off long enough to say…

“Yes, let me just make a cup of tea.”

Jeff and I are working parents, same as any others, though the content is slightly different from spread sheets and long hours at a computer (trust me there are plenty of those too). Running a kid’s music and entertainment business together is more work and more joy than either of us ever could have imagined. It’s long weird hours, it’s long weird fights about the dumbest things—where to place the stuffed animal onstage, how to say a line of dialogue— it’s also so much joy, fun, and hilarity when we don’t take ourselves too seriously.

Yet, taking things “too lightly,” hasn’t worked either. For every show that we put on there are hours of cumulative rehearsal involved. For every album we’ve released there are days and nights of memorization, creation, recording, production, and workshopping. For every event that we put on there are marketing budgets, social media campaigns, e-mail newsletter blasts, tickets to sell. There is a temptation to always feel like you are missing something, to always wonder… if I had just posted one more time to Facebook, or followed up with one of our community partners to get the word out could we have had more people there, could we have sold an extra album or t-shirt, if I asked differently for someone to sign up on our email list would we have more… But those doubt-filled thoughts, we have learned, lead us no where. Nowhere except a spiral of uncertainty and fear that can be paralyzing. So the work of being small-business owners, entrepreneurs of the educational music kind, is often to focus on the next most important thing, take a deep breath, and trust that if we continue to follow the creativity, love of the earth and human beings, and urge to share that love with others, we’re heading in the right direction.

I don’t have a perfect conclusion for this blog entry. Running our business (or moving out of the way to let it run us), performing for kids and their parents, creating new interesting and relevant content, and constantly promoting ourselves and our brand so that we can continue to support our family and show up fully in our work, is a constant work in progress.

Update – We performed that new Density song at in January. If you’re in Boulder, CO join us at The Rayback Collective Sunday Feb. 10th, 10am for another new track from our latest album “Little Songs, Big Science.”

Visit our calendar for info about all our upcoming events.

3 Comments

  1. Dave KaganJanuary 12, 2019

    I love that you wrote this; that you’re fully bringing your audience into your lives. Your passion shines through in this very well-written blog post.

  2. Soo-z-qJanuary 13, 2019

    Love you guys!

  3. Darlene DeeJanuary 15, 2019

    Wait, Paige…does this mean you are a real person? 😉

Comments are closed.