Business for Self-Employed Creatives

Shawn Eiferman is a singer, songwriter, musician & creative entrepreneur who's been a staple of Las Vegas entertainment since the 90s. When he's not performing, he's exploring other business ventures like creating solutions for working musicians and renovating RVs.

In this episode, we're talking about his career in the music business, doing what you're passionate about, and the two things that will change your life: the people you meet and the books you read.

He's played shows countless major artists, but the highlights of his career have been singing with Prince and opening for Journey. Even though live shows have sustained his career, he always has some backup plans in place.

When COVID shut everything down, he pivoted into the road trip business with his Free Bird RV Fleet. And while his crystal ball is busted, he's looking forward to playing more show and seeing the artistic explosion that's bound to come out of the shutdown.

The full transcript is available at https://aardvarkgirl.com/shawneiferman/

Connect with Shawn @shawneiferman

Connect with me on your favorite platform: https://pods.link/aardvarkgirl

The "Self-Employed Creatives" club meets Wednesdays at 4pm Pacific time on Clubhouse. 

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00:41 Since I was 15 years old, I've been making a living butchering songs wherever there's a bar and a place to plug in some stuff. I just got really, really lucky/fortunate. And it comes with hard work.

03:04 As a songwriter, I made a living just writing songs in the 90s. I've had stuff placed in TV and film. And as a songwriter, it's a different ego. It's a different beast that you're feeding, because the truly creative side is really out there.

05:11 Persistence wins, I guess, because out of nowhere, like two-and-a-half-hours into this thing, he goes “Come on up.” And so I got to sing with Prince. That's the highlight of my whole music career.

08:25 I set myself up for other things besides music, because I knew that my hands weren't gonna be able to play guitar forever. I’m not gonna be able to sing forever. 

11:17 The only thing that's missing [in Vegas] is the songwriting culture.

12:00 What a spectacular opportunity to be able to share a stage with Guns and Roses and Goo Goo Dolls on New Year's Eve in the entertainment capital of the world. And then literally the same night - I wish I was joking - we had booked at Texas station starting at 11 o'clock at night. 

14:45 All my favorite family vacations were road trips in that RV with my kids. And so when COVID hit, we poured gasoline on that fire, and I now have 14 RVs. Some of them we're customizing and renovating and flipping for sale, and some of them are in the Free Bird RV fleet. It's something I've always loved to do. Road trips have always been fun, you know? It's a cool thing, and so we're now in the road trip business.

17:00 You got to meet different, better people and read different, better books. It's everything. The people that you meet, and the books you read, will change your life. You don't have to worry about what to do. You'll figure out a way how to do it by those two things. They'll just kind of present themselves. 

21:23 I really believe in that whole balance in all things. It's a shift, I think, a paradigm shift of, I could be a musician or I could be in the music business. And I don't know what happened, quite frankly. It was probably somebody I met or a book I read. But I decided a long time ago to be in the music business. I didn't mind bands I was in, or myself, being thought of as a product. Whatever it took to be able to balance my creative life with a business model. 

24:04 We started to get the offers that we got, from 33rd Street records all the way to Universal and Interscope. A handful of interesting conversations were going on. And I think the deal breaker across the board, just six months later, was some guy at some label in some office going, “Oh, well, what are your MySpace numbers?” That was it. 

29:14 I created an LLC a few years back that is just solutions for working musicians. I'm in conversations with Fender right now to sell the design to this [built-in guitar stand] to start building and selling the Fender Standacaster. 

35:24 Collaborate. You don't know everything. Collaborating with those people, understanding how other people write songs, figuring out what why a drummer plays what a drummer would want to play in a song versus what's best for the song. It’s empathy, I guess. Treat everybody how you want to be treated is an interesting way to look at your musical endeavors. Because part of collaborating is the audience, and until you put yourself in the seat of that person out there, you can't really make a living out of this. You can't do it at a certain level. You have to make it about them. 

39:00 What COVID, I believe, globally is going to produce is the time and the energy and the passion of the average creative person has now been kind of massaged into this, well, what do I want to do? I think there's going to be poetry, books, music. I think the films that are going to come out… some of the scripts, the stuff that's going to come out of this shutdown will be a renaissance. I think some of the paintings we're going to see, and that there's going to be an artistic explosion.