Author or Be Authored

I was working as the assistant composer for John Frizzell. He was scoring a quirky little independent film with Antonio Banderas, Bob Hoskins, and Wes Bentley called The White River Kid. It was a low-budget score, and John wanted to spend the money on getting the best musicians, so we did the whole thing inside John’s home studio. We brought in one musician at a time, building this bluegrass soundtrack one player at a time. And John was using some of the most brilliant musicians in Hollywood.

We hired Sid Page to play country fiddle. This was the first time I had met him. I didn’t know who he was. He was clearly a bluegrass expert. I didn’t know that he was playing with the Santa Rosa Symphony at thirteen and that as a child they called him “Symphony Sid.” I didn’t know that he played with Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, and Roy Orbison and Jerry Garcia. I just knew he showed up and played the hell out of that fiddle.

Imagine my surprise when a few months later, I bumped into him on an orchestral recording date. He wasn’t just playing in the orchestra. He was first chair first violin, the concertmaster.

I said something to him, expressing my surprise to see him in such a different musical setting, and he said, “It’s funny. Half of the composers in town think of me as a fiddle player and won’t hire me to do classical gigs, and half of them think of me as a classical player and won’t hire me to do fiddle gigs.”

It was clearly not the first time he had said that sentence. In an industry where people specialize it’s very rare to find a Sid Page. What happened to him was that he was getting pigeonholed, people were putting him in too small a box in their minds. It’s easy to understand why. When you see someone do something, and that’s all the information you have to craft the story in your mind about who that person is, that’s what the story will be. The only reasonable conclusion that I could draw from watching him play country fiddle was that he was a country fiddle player. It’s hard to imagine that someone could do it so well if they hadn’t dedicated their lives to it. And if the first thing I had done was seen him play classical violin, it would only be reasonable to conclude that he had dedicated his life to that.

This was a problem that obviously had been plaguing him because he had crafted this brilliant solution. One sentence that changed the story in my mind. Before he said that sentence, I thought of him as a country fiddle player. After he said it, my story for him was that he was both. Being pigeonholed meant less work, and he needed people to understand the range of his talents. So he did the simplest thing. He told me a story. A story about other people. He didn’t state facts. He gave me a narrative about him to replace the one in my head. I didn’t realize the lesson he was teaching me at the time.

Nowadays when we want to show music in progress to a director or producer, we send them videos over the Internet. Back then the internet didn’t do that yet, so they had to drive across town and come to the composer’s studio. A particular director on a TV movie we were working on didn’t want to make the drive. He just basically said, “I trust John. I trust John.”

Well, when we got to the final mix stage, it turned out that the director was not as happy as he thought he was gonna be. Since there was no music editor on this movie, I, as John’s assistant, sat on the mix stage with headphones on and re-cut the score for the entire film. The picture editor, Christopher Nelson, sat next to me for two weeks and helped me through it.

Flash forward a year later, and Chris calls me. He’s got his first job as a producer on a TV show. It’s called The Education of Max Bickford, starring Richard Dreyfuss, and he has a first-time composer and wants me to come be the music editor for his show.

I told him I was a composer and not a music editor.

He assured me. “Oh no, you’re a music editor.”

And then he told me it was a union job with benefits that paid weekly, and I had just gotten married and I really, really wanted to take it.

But I had been advised against it. John’s agent warned me that if I took it, it would be the end of my composing career. I had just scored my fourth feature film and I didn’t see how that was remotely possible. She told me people will pigeonhole me. I didn’t believe her.

I took the job.

It was my first union music editing job, and it launched my career. Was it a mistake? I don’t know. But I do know it was basically the end of my composing career.

When people think about you, they think about a story, and if you don’t tell them that story they’re gonna make up their own. They’re gonna make it up with just the information in front of them, and that’s almost never enough to tell anyone the complete picture of who you are.

Sid had practiced an answer. A new story to tell about who he was. Not just the great fiddle player I was watching before my eyes, but a man who could play anything on the violin, and silly people were mistakenly not realizing that. That became the new story I thought about when I thought about him. And he put it in my mind in one sentence.

It’s impossible to show people everything you can do. You almost never have enough time to show people everything you want them to see before they’ve formed a narrative in their mind about who you are.

Ironically, being good at something increases the risk of being pigeonholed. When you show people you are a brilliant country fiddle player, who isn’t gonna think, “Wow, what a brilliant country fiddle player”? Everyone’s going to, as they should. When I started going around town working as a music editor, and more and more people saw me as a music editor, and more and more opportunities opened up for me as a music editor, how could anybody think of me as a composer anymore?

Sid knew the secret I didn’t. You gotta tell them. You have to proactively author your own story in the minds of others, because if you don’t, they’re going to author it for you, and they don’t really know all the complexities that make you you.

Notice when people are making misconceptions about you or pigeonholing you. Figure out the specific things about you that routinely get left out of people’s narrative about you. And then do what Sid did. Make sure you know what story to tell to fill the holes in other people’s narratives.

Author or be authored. The story people are telling themselves about you is being written right now, either by you or by whoever’s looking. If you don’t have your narrative ready, others will write one for you.