Reflection / projection about what a music career is like in the very early stages.
In the beginning no one trusts you or what you do - and they don’t believe it’s cool at all. As they have every right to.
Then some people listen. They are mostly fringe, enthusiastic, music heads and other musicians that are trying to do the same thing as you. Anyone who knows you are usually really lovely, hard working people who would consider themselves involved in the local music scene in some way. They want you to keep going, because they are too.
Then you get a bit better, laugh at how naive you were about blowing up overnight, and make something again. You make something a bit more digestible. A few more people start to listen, and buy tickets without knowing you.
At this point, you start to have interactions with the wider general public. They are 70% normal and 30% unhinged.
Musicians are really venerable at this point. Strangers start to lurk, but you haven’t realised that they are strangers because you are so used to everyone around you being a friend. Washed up photographers drink the rider in the greenroom - but you are just excited that there is a photographer there. Odd characters in the middle of a crises confide in you at the merch desk, because there isn’t a line of people there. Men seemingly emerge from the pub walls and tell you that they have been to every show but you don’t recognise them.
Sometimes it looks positive from the outside - like a larger community is forming. But a lot of the time this influx of people has a high turnover and individuals will leave as quickly as they appear, only to be replaced by variations of themselves. A lot of the time you got in front of these transient crowds at a time in their lives when they would have jumped onboard for anything.
What is actually happening (the positive) is that this is a brutal phase of public individuation. The first opportunity to learn how to exist publicly.
There are just enough people around to feel legitimate, but not enough of people around to protect you, so you learn to do it yourself.
The world will continues to send a more transient strangers, but you notice them less. You’re becoming more individualised on stage and off stage, and you are meeting other artists who also have arrived here through some hard won battles. Your ticket sales combined makes it feel like there’s a distinction between the band and the punters. Even when it’s a flop - each band collectively has taste of being legit and imagines it to be that way.
You naturally grow creatively, because there still are no deadlines or actual expectations for releasing music or booking shows - except the ones you give yourself. Maybe the work becomes more polarising, or you change projects, or move to a new city with your skin a little thicker and keep pushing.
The kind people from paragraph one, who were kin from the start, begin sticking up for you as a real artist now, and proudly wear the badge of knowing you from the start. The people who have always known of you but didn’t like it - start to care that you haven’t gone away. People in general become more accepting that you exist in the scene, however they still may not know what you are actually doing.
Industry professionals might bring you up in conversation, just to gauge how you are perceived amongst peers - but they also do not necessarily care. None of this is personal. You are just touching the edges of a very fast paced world, that and often has less resources than you think.
So from here A) you stay here continue to gradually grow… doing the work, skin getting thicker, finding community with more bands and their fans, your audience gradually expanding or B) you put out something that dramatically transcends, and people really fall in love with something you’ve made in a big way (which you cannot control), or C) you quit.
There is a quote from a book that I read, probably The Artists Way, which says that you can never actually quit - because if you ever start again, that period of time away was just a break.