I've never had much fear of rejection. I've never had the idea that anyone should like my music except me and the perceptive few who get it. If they don't get it, I don't worry about them.

When it became time to decide whether or not to quit the day job and go full time -- I had actually given notice -- we started taking a long hard look at what we had and what we wanted. It is pretty obvious that people who play European traditional folk music are not going to get a major hit, unlike singer-songwriters who just might make it as a pop band. Most of the biggest names in trad music make less than I do at my modest paying job. The plan was to play a lot of weddings, tour a couple of times a year, and start getting as many students as possible. This is when we (my wife/music partner Anna and myself) realized that we don't really like playing at weddings, after three weeks or so on the road we're ready to go home, we don't really like teaching a lot, and we never wanted to do a four hour gig in a smoky tavern again. We had jobs we liked a lot. As she said, why quit doing day jobs we like in order to play music we don't like? Why not just go flip burgers?

So now we play two to four gigs a month, which provide a healthy addition to our incomes. I have a job with a musical instrument company, and they are very understanding of me taking time off to play music sometimes. One of the reasons they hired me is because I am a professional musician. Anna does freelance work out of a home office and can set her own schedule. We play the music we want to play, we turn down gigs that look like bad news, we get well paid for all our gigs, we produce our own CDs and no one but us has any say about how we do our music and what our CDs sound and look like.

I am fairly egotistical and still have the desire for every fan of our kind of music hear me play. But I am realistic enough to know that even if I was playing and touring full time that probably wouldn't happen. And I wouldn't have health insurance or retirement savings, and I would be playing lame arrangements of dweeby music as background music at weddings.

John