Stephan Jenkins on the Business of Music

Question: What do you enjoy more, producing or performing?

Jenkins: I engaged the creative aspect of making music in a very different way than the business aspect of bringing it to people. The business is about taking the music that I make, that my band makes and reaching people with it. They feel like two different kinds of brain functions, but they, in some sense, have invigorate me in my day. So I don’t see that one taxes the other, I think that one actually can kind of encourage the other because there’s really only so much creative work one can do in a day, at least for me. Some people would go on, you know, 16-hour benders.

I have a band that’s I’m working with called the Up blowing and they’re in the studio now and they like to stay up, you know, all night and just work and work and work. I like to work long hours, but at a certain point, I feel like I’m done and I need to recharge. Ernest Hemingway, he only wrote for like three hours but he did it every morning, he was very consistent about that and then he went and lived life and did other kinds of things and those things kind of gave him this charge of boom, being able to fire up something else.

So, the biggest problem for me right now of combining creativity and the business that I do is that the business is changing so radically and we are creating the business as we go that it does consume a lot of the day, so it’s more that the sense of actual time that it takes rather than the mental space because the mental aspect of combining work and play and music, actually, is kind of symbiotic.