Hearing a tune you recorded in your bedroom on a Coppertone commercial right before an episode of Breaking Bad is something else.
Hearing it long after hanging up the dream of a band and joining the workforce makes you think hey I still got it.
For better or worse.
I'd moved to a town called Fishers by then, out of the sticks and into surburbia. TRASH and Lifetaker were a couple years old, and the new Bunker Studio in the polished suburbs was where I would record JC Autobody's Indiana and Young Tobacco plus City Water 1 and 2.
The "live room" was still the dining room, and mix-down happened in a home office space off the front door, but the house where I cranked out songs for filthy shows like Shameless and Lucifer was surrounded by meticulously kept-up yards and bound by an HOA. Luckily, no one ever called the sheriff when I cranked up the SUNN Beta Lead.
The syncs were a streak of good fortune, helped by an old publishing deal my band made years ago. Publishing was always a black box to me, just one of those things you check off a list when you're a serious band - record label (check), booking agent (check), publicist (check), publisher (check). I didn't really know what they were even supposed to do back then.
They weren't able to do much in those days, and I found out later it was because they were hamstrung by our label who would eventually go under. But as I "went under" myself far away from the music industry and into a world of cubicles and office lighting, the tiny publisher we signed with during Brazil's last days started popping up on everybody's radar years later, signing mega-acts like Lorde, Pharrell and The Weeknd. There were write-ups and profiles in Billboard and all the other rags, and at some point I thought now might be a good time to reconnect.
The Coppertone spot was more money* than I'd ever made in the band, and thanks to that and a handful of other syncs, I was able to upgrade the borrowed gear from the TRASH days to some quality stuff of my own. I could afford to do things like send my mixes off to mastering and take short trips out to California to meet other folks to write music in other homemade studios. The world was now my DIY oyster, and I no longer had to worry that my gear was holding me back.
But it was a dual life. Back in cubicle-land, I'd take calls from my publisher in the phone rooms on my lunch break, optimistically calculating that if I could just land a handful of Coppertone-like syncs a year, I could go back to making a living with music. The life I wanted. The one I preferred.
But thanks to an ingrained Midwestern scarcity mindset, I didn't trust that another Coppertone would come around, even though I would continue to land a few syncs a year for the next few years. I never took the plunge.
In the dual-life, I'd run before dawn and come back to work on music until eight-thirty. Then I'd head to the office, a coffee-sipping commuter in chinos, TPS reports and all that jazz. The studio, set apart from the rest of my professional life, stayed a siloed place.
But a safe place, a state of mind.
*If you're curious how much a Coppertone ad campaign paid in 2013, it was $12,000. Not enough to live on, but enough to light a fire.
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