Blog

One More Microphone

One More Microphone is Lucas Will Johnson's blog hosted by wordpress. Topics center around music and policy.

Latest Post: Life In Austin Update, Six Months In

Well, world of readers, it’s been about six months since I began this music adventure. Memories of my drive across the country are still quite fresh, but it also feels like a long time ago that I finally bought a mattress* and a desk – my first furniture purchases post-college.

During the first few months, I wanted to get some creative work done without much distraction, so I lived like a hobo hermit musician, spending the bulk of my time practicing, songwriting, and recording (and hemorrhaging my savings). Come the new year, I fixed up my website to display the work with a shade of professionalism, and home-printed some simple business cards. Then I could finally get down to business meeting other musicians and finding substitute jobs playing the pipe organ for church services.

To which there has been some success! I am now in two bands, have jammed with a couple others, and have a handful of substitute jobs lined up, with the promise of more to come. Thus, I have staunched the outflow of money a bit and am developing a social life.

But that’s not all! I have plans to: develop a particular kind of music website (details TBD, but get excited), work on a piano-singing solo act, record at least another albumlet, and to write some solid essays on this blog. The tricky part will be in scheduling it all on top of my band rehearsals, shows, and pipe organ gigs.

ALL THE MUSIC ALL THE TIME!

“Well, thanks for the play-by-play,” you say, “But do you like the life as a musician?”

That is a complicated question. Employment and income feel fairly scattershot and insecure – even successful musicians I have spoken to say that you need a few different gigs going to adequately get by. Also, my life has been pretty abnormal so far, since I’ve been living off savings (and benefitting from the extreme good luck of having no student loans and, thanks to the health care law, no health insurance payments yet), so I can’t properly judge whether or not the financial situation bothers me yet. But I am cognizant of the difficulties that low income creates for the eventual realities of owning a home, having kids, paying their tuition, retirement savings, and health care.

Mostly though, I find that music is not enough. Sure it is a lot of fun to play shows, it is satisfying to record music that people enjoy, I can get lost exploring infinite sonic possibilities, and I do meet a lot of interesting people by playing in a variety of settings.

But it neglects the whole other side of me that is passionate about policy. I voraciously read the news every day, so much that I have trouble tearing myself away to practice. Even during the Super Bowl, I was constantly switching between a livestream of the game and a policy paper from NIST about innovation and manufacturing policy. Plus, when I imagine myself as an old man looking back, a life of simply making people smile (and rock out, of course) won’t be as fulfilling as changing the world in some concrete way. Sure, musicians talk about peace and enlightenment, but rarely do they pack a effectual punch (Bono being the most obvious exception).

But! It is still somewhat early in this story. As I get more involved in various projects, we will see if I find some way to satisfy my policy side. At least, I know that I will always at last play music on the side like I’ve done for most of my life already anyways.

As I’ve said from the beginning, I’m giving music a full shot. I know for sure that I’m in Austin until August. And if things are cookin’ and hoppin’ and bumpin’ I could easily see myself staying longer.

We shall see.

*For the record, when the salesman says he slept on a $90 mattress for ten years and then asks you to move your (not very heavy) mattress around because he has back problems, take note to buy a nicer mattress within a year or two.

Other Essays

Stanford Daily Column

For a period in college, Lucas Will Johnson had a regular column in the student newspaper about the music situation on campus called The Campus Beat. Though it often had a local focus, the ideas are widely applicable. Highlights included:

I Can't Hear You - Volume nobs needen't be raised to "pain."
More Guerrilla Musicians - Random acts of music kick ass.
Stop and Hear the Roses - Appreciate more the aesthetic of sound itself.
Bachelor of Music - Specialized musical training shouldn't be restricted to conservatories.
Listen Through Others' Ears - Empathize with other political cultures through music.
Play Music? Compose Too - All music lessons should involve compositional creativity.
Do You Support Music? - How we support musicians, financially and with our listening choices.
Mental Music - In which newspaper is transformed into music in your head.
A Creation Story - Let's realign towards a "where-to-go-next" creationist culture.

Radio

One Stanford Daily column was adapted for a radio broadcast as part of the Stanford Storytelling Project. It will eventually be heard on Stanford's KZSU station, but the time is TBD. For now, you can listen to it here: Stop and Hear the Roses.mp3

Policy Writing

Along with three other public policy students while in college, Lucas studied performance pay systems in the education sector. They advised the Mountain View Whisman School District on whether the district should implement a performance pay system. Here is a pdf (1MB) of the report written for the district (executive summary included).