Recording music can't be profitable, right?!
Wrong! Russ changed his major from law school to audio engineering when he found that music can be a career.
So well, Nashville was at that point considered a lot more of a… I mean, I really feel like we've got a great city and it's a music city and people think of it as Music City. You know, and we've got rock and we've got R&B and we've got, of course, Country and we've got roots rock and we've got singer songwriter, and we've got folk, and all this stuff, and it feels like a pretty diverse city now. But it really felt like a country city that had some other stuff at that at that point. It felt like a country music city, and country music has always been the one flavor of music that I'm not too fond of, so the idea of staying in Nashville was never very appealing to me. So my whole plan was “once I get through Belmont, I'll move to either New York or L.A. because that's where, I did read enough of the credits to know that the records I liked the most were either made in New York or L.A. So that's where I wanted to go.
But my last year of college, I started doing demos for a couple different publishers, and was making enough money when I graduated doing enough projects on the side, and I was able to bring projects into Belmont, which I know was against the rules, but we could bring friends in there and record, and you would charge the band 150 bucks or whatever to record music from midnight to seven in the morning, and I didn't have to give anything to school. I booked like a project, so I made 150 bucks, which I was thrilled to make 150 bucks at night, and I did that all the time, but I was making enough money to stay alive.
When I got out of school, the idea of, um, I was afraid to move to L.A. or New York because I didn't want to feel like I was going to a place where I didn't know a soul. And I was making a living here. I mean not a good living. I was, my first year out of school, I wanted so bad to break the $10,000 mark, and I didn't quite make it. I think I made like $9,980 or something in the year. But at the same time, that was enough money to pay. I didn't have a car payment, I just had rent and there were plenty of weeks where I bought a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter and jar of honey, and that was enough, you know? But I did that from the get-go. I never waited tables. I never did anything else except for for music, so I was pretty excited about that.