{"id":469408,"date":"2022-01-14T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-01-14T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecreativeindependent.com\/people\/musician-phillip-farris-on-the-difference-between-your-job-and-your-work"},"modified":"2022-01-14T08:00:00","modified_gmt":"2022-01-14T08:00:00","slug":"musician-phillip-farris-on-the-difference-between-your-job-and-your-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2022\/01\/14\/musician-phillip-farris-on-the-difference-between-your-job-and-your-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Musician Phillip Farris on the difference between your job and your work"},"content":{"rendered":"
Can you talk a little bit about how you started out as a guitarist, working in a couple of different projects and how you managed all of it?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n I don\u2019t come from a super musical family or anything, but my dad liked Southern rock, classic rock. When I was a little kid I saw a Guns \u2019n\u2019 Roses video and thought Slash made playing the guitar look cooler than anything else you could ever do. That always kind of stuck with me.<\/p>\n\n One day when I was about 14, I was skateboarding with a friend and we went to his house after. He had this VHS tape with Nirvana live footage. At one point, Kurt Cobain goes running and dives through the drum set, and in my head I was like, \u201cOkay. Well, I have to play guitar now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n It was the most pure expression of anything I had ever seen.<\/span> He just happened to be holding the guitar when he dove through that drum set and that was all I needed to see.<\/p>\n\n I became obsessed and I still am obsessed. I raised myself in a sense. I had an abundance of spare time and I didn\u2019t date girls in high school so I just learned how to play guitar instead. I would play for ten to twelve hours a day. To the point where I would give myself tennis elbow and have to take a break for a while.<\/span><\/p>\n\n From there I met some friends that were in a band in town, called Bishop Montgomery Football, which would end up being the first band I played. I never really stopped. I don\u2019t really know how to do anything else.<\/span><\/p>\n\n How did you get over the process of being on a stage and performing live?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n That\u2019s the easy part for me. The only place in my life where I feel supremely confident is on a stage.<\/span> There could be 10 people or 10,000 people, it\u2019s all the same to me. If you ever come and see me play, you\u2019re seeing a man at his most free. There\u2019s no thought that goes into it. That\u2019s as free as you could ever want to be, for me, at least. I\u2019m a chronic over thinker and in that moment, I don\u2019t have to think about anything.<\/span><\/p>\n\n As long as my gear holds up, there\u2019s just very little conscious thought. It just sort of happens.<\/p>\n\n I\u2019m also a person whose life was changed by live music so I keep it in the back of my mind that every single show is a chance to legitimately change someone\u2019s life. Most people have a song or a piece of art they could say changed the course of things for them.<\/span><\/p>\n\n How did you come to be in Norma Jean? It\u2019s a band that\u2019s been around for a long time and it\u2019s had so many different members, almost different iterations.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n I was driving to work one day and got an an Instagram message. It was from Norman Jean\u2019s guitar player at the time, a guy named Jess, who I had played in bands with before, before he was in Norma Jean. I could just kind of tell by the way the, \u201chey, man, what\u2019s up?\u201d<\/i> came across that something was different.<\/p>\n\n He was like, \u201cOkay. Here\u2019s the thing. We need to fill in guitar player for the 10 year anniversary tour of one of our records, and we were wondering if you\u2019d be interested.\u201d And I said, \u201cWell, shit, possibly. Yeah.\u201d<\/p>\n\n I got with my partner at the time and talked to her about it. We just had a kid six months prior to this. She said, \u201cWell, you\u2019re going to do it, right?\u201d We decided I should do it. So, I did the tour.<\/p>\n\n Halfway through the tour, at a bar after the show, our bass player was a few adult beverages in. He threw his arm around me and was like, \u201cPhilly, I like wish you didn\u2019t have a family, dude.\u201d I was like, \u201cAh, shit, John. Thanks, I guess.\u201d He was like, \u201cNo. I mean I just wish that you were some shitty dude so you could be in my band.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n I said, \u201cWell, if that offer were ever be officially extended my way, I would put that through the same steps that brought me onto this tour.\u201d That offer was extended my way, and they said they were working on a new album, and asked if I would help. A few months later I was in this multi-million dollar studio in North Dakota recording our album.<\/p>\n\n Since then, it\u2019s been a little bit of a whirlwind. I\u2019ve done a lot of things that maybe if you were to just look at the circumstances of my early life, I had no real business doing.<\/span><\/p>\n\n I did that record and a bunch of tours. Being a touring musician is pretty difficult at times if you\u2019re in a romantic relationship\u2014just listen to pretty much any sad country song you ever heard.<\/span> So, I took a step back for a while.<\/p>\n\n Also what they don\u2019t tell you is that if your band gets big enough, you have to answer a lot of emails. And I\u2019m a caveman. So, I just had to tell them they\u2019re like, \u201cY\u2019all just take me off the email list and tell me where I need to be and what and when and I\u2019ll handle that. Somebody else can take care of all the rest of this stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n\n How do you balance your day job and parenting with being in three different music projects?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n It\u2019s not even just those three. I\u2019ve been flying back and forth to Nashville. Fairly recently working on a secret record for a band that I can\u2019t exactly talk about at this point, but it was one of my favorite bands when I was in high school.<\/p>\n\n I think there\u2019s a big difference between your job and your work. A job\u2019s just something I sell a little bit of my time to. I\u2019ve said that my time is worth this much. I\u2019ll sell you this much of my time for this much compensation. The work is everything else for me. The work is your day-to-day life and how you treat people<\/span>, it\u2019s not just your music.<\/p>\n\n