There are, roughly speaking, three types of bands. Any of the three is a legitimate way to make a living as a musician, but they’re different and require different skills and mindsets.

To be successful at any, we must choose and know what we’re signing up for. The biggest mistake we can make and the surest way to be average is to not choose.

The job of a tribute band is to be as close to the original as possible. At a tribute band’s show, the audience very explicitly doesn’t want anything new. The whole craft of being a tribute band is mimicking, with intense fidelity, what has come before. To be good at this, we have to listen, with unrelenting meticulousness, the artist we are paying tribute to. The key question for a tribute band is, “does it sound like the original?”

The job of a cover band is to play hit after hit, across artists and genres. Cover bands take the songs people like and play the hell out of ‘em. To do this requires great musicianship and an ability to find the balance between preserving the original and putting just enough of a twist on it to make it feel new and exciting. Cover bands have to be good at listening not to the original artists, but to the audience in front of them. Their key question for a cover band is, “does it sound like something the audience wants to hear?”

And then there are those bands who want to be artists. The job of this last group is to be new, to be original, and to bring a new point of view - catching lighting in a bottle, if you will. To be an artist, an original artist, is an entirely different proposition than being a tribute band or a cover band.

To be an original artists requires wandering around lost, often for significant periods of time. An original artist has to find the songs that only they can write and only they can sing. Original artists cannot listen, too much, to what’s come before them. Instead, an original artist needs to listen to their own voice and to the rhythms and melodies out in the world that nobody else is hearing yet. The key question for an original artist is, “What does my voice sound like?”

I think we underestimate, still, how much our culture indoctrinates us to avoid wandering. We have curriculum and an education system. We have college majors with specific requirements. We have board exams and certification tests. We have career plans and linear project plans. In the corporate world, we have competitive benchmarking and the application of “best practices.” We’re told, ‘Don’t recreate the wheel.”

All these things, in aggregate, seem to just scream sometimes, ‘Wandering is bad! Bad boys wander! Those who wander are lost!”

To be original artists, we have to unlearn this indoctrination and replace it with a new belief, “Not all those who wander are lost. On the contrary, if being an original artist is what we choose to be - wandering, to where it is quiet enough to hear our own voice for the first time, is the surest way forward.”