Back Up Plan: Homelessness

Since I was about 17 years old, all I talked about was being in a band, managing a band, going on tours, what the next step was going to be and generally trying to find out how we could get closer to "making it happen.” If you got me going on “band talk” I was going down the rabbit hole and I was probably taking you with me wether you liked it or not. The funny thing is: I was all talk. I wasn’t making shit happen… yet. 

Some people may have found it irritating, but I was infatuated. Obsessed. All I cared about was playing drums, managing my band and figuring out how I could do that for my entire life. Usually when I told people my plan after college, which was to not to get a job and do the band thing full-time, I received one of these responses: 

“That’s rad dude. Bands n’ shit. Ya’ll gonna like smoke weed and hang with your dog?” No one ever said this. 

“Wow that’s cool. But what’s your back up plan?”

“Maybe you should consider getting a real job?”

My favorite question was the 2nd one: …but what’s your back up plan? In my head I would think: “Bitch, this is the plan!" Quite honestly it kind of offended me because I felt like by asking that they believed I couldn’t “make it happen.” At no point had I considered getting another job, all I knew was I was going to figure out how to “make it happen." Side note: I feel like Gary V, or some inspirational self-help person who created some cheesy-ass tagline… 

Now let’s get this straight, I stil haven’t done shit yet. We have gone on a handful of nationwide tours and had a tiny amount of success with the music we’ve released, but SLS still has a long ways to go. The only thing we did was we started “making it happen.” Instead of waiting for our “lucky-break,” or for someone to help us, we started booking our own tours, bought a van and started driving around the country, we locked ourselves in a studio and learned how to record and produce our own music: we did what we needed to do in order to “make it happen.”  

Again, I have not “made it” or claim to be any kind of expert on anything. I am simply someone who wanted to do something, started taking steps towards it, and am starting to make it happen.  

Do you have something you're working towards, but haven't found the right path to get there yet? Comment below and we would love to hear your story. 

With love.

RIVIR