My friend Sarah’s little brothers Nick and Alex are 10 and eight years old, respectively. Sarah is one of my best and oldest friends, so I’ve known Alex since he was born and Nick since he was just a kneebiter. With their parents’ permission, of course, they kindly took some time out from their busy schedules of watching Adventure Time and playing video games to chat with me about their career aspirations, taxes and how best to manage one’s money.

What do you guys want to be when you grow up?

Alex: Ninja.

Nick: I’ll be a pilot. Wait, actually a basketball player and a pilot.

How come?

Alex: Because it’s cool. You can have swords.

Nick: Because my favorite sport is basketball and it was always my dream of playing it. And then I can fly jets and planes. I’m also going to be a cowboy and other people.

What other people?

Nick: Well, um, I’m going to be noticed.

Why are people going to notice you?

Nick: I’m going to do good deeds, stuff like that. I’m going to look good for all the people.

And they’re just going to love it so much that they’ll give you money?

Nick: Yeah. And I’m going to be the cleanest and put deodorant on 10 times a day.

The deodorant company will pay you for smelling so good because of their deodorant?

Nick: You can also buy the deodorant sticks at Kroger for probably only one dollar.

If they pay you because you’re making it popular, that’s called a sponsorship. If you’re a super attractive male model and you wear their deodorant all the time and you’re like “I love this deodorant,” then they might give you money.

Nick: Sweet.

Alex, what’s the best part of being a ninja?

Alex: Helping people. Stopping bad guys.

What kind of training do you need to do that?

Alex: Maybe, you know those things that you do, it’s like high, those things for practicing for boxing?

You mean the hanging bags?

Alex: The hanging bags. Maybe also train in cutting lots of things with my sword.

Are you guys going to make a lot of money?

Alex: Yes.

Nick: Yes.

Where are you going to get it from?

Alex: The bank.

Nick: People.

Nick, how are you going to split your time between being a basketball player and a cowboy and a pilot?

Nick: I’m going to do it over the weekends.

You’re just going to work all the time?

Nick: Yeah, but on some of the weeks I’m just going to take breaks and on Saturdays.

What are you going to do on your breaks?

Nick: Buy video games and play them.

What else are you going to buy?

Nick: I’m also going to buy stuff that we need and pay my taxes. ‘Cause the government ain’t shuttin’  down my house.

You don’t want them to do that.

Nick: That would be stupid ’cause they would also shut down your power. That would be the stupidest thing in your life.

If you don’t have power you can’t play your video games.

Nick: And even worse, they would shut down the TV.

Alex, how do you feel about taxes?

Alex: I don’t know what taxes are.

When you are older and you have a lot of income, you have to give some of it to the government.

Alex: I don’t like it. If he tries it, well, if he doesn’t give me anything back, I won’t.

You won’t? You’re not going to pay your taxes? What if they come to your door, and they knock on your door and say you haven’t paid your taxes, what are you going to do?

Alex: I don’t know. That’s wasting money.

Nick: I’ll rescue you. I’ll beat them up into sandwiches.

Where are you guys going to live?

Alex: Right by this house.

Nick: A place that’s near my parents’ house.

Nick, if you’re going to be a cowboy and a pilot, will you have to travel a lot?

Nick: Yeah.

What places do you want to visit?

Nick: Maybe I’ll visit Canada, if anybody needs a ride there.

I’ll let you know if I need a ride.

Nick: Alright.

Am I going to get free rides in the plane because I’m your friend?

Nick: Yes.

Do you think it’s better to save your money or spend it?

Nick: Save and spend, both.

Alex: Save.

How come?

Nick: Because you need to save your money for taxes and I’m going to spend my other money on really fun stuff.

Alex: ‘Cause there might be an expensive thing I want.

Do you have any money right now?

Nick: No, I don’t have any money in my wallet.

Alex: Yes, I don’t know exact.

Nick, did you spend it all?

Nick: Yes.

What did you buy?

Nick: Video games.

Which video games?

Nick: Um, the only video game that I can remember that I bought is Batman: Arkham City. And it’s not LEGO. It’s real.

Alex, are you saving up for something?

Alex: A Nerf gun shotgun.

Are those expensive?

Alex: Yes. Meijer’s has it, I don’t know exactly what place they’re at.

Would you guys ever go into business together?

Alex: Maybe. Yes.

Nick: If he’s not too mean.

Julie Beck is a writer and editor in Chicago. She’s going to hold Nick to that promise of free plane rides.

Tired of spending too much money on rent, Melissa Fletcher found a solution, and a home, in a yurt. Getting her first yurt built was a slog of permits, codes and dispelling myths, as the structures were not well-known, well-understood or allowed in Hawaii at the time. But once she had one under her belt, she was certain she could create another. And another.

Thus was born Yurts of Hawaii, Melissa’s company, which helps prospective yurt-buyers design and assemble their alternative homes, handling every aspect from permitting to septic systems. I had the chance to talk on the phone with Melissa about the cost of a yurt, the popularity of alternative housing and why you should always research any company you trust with building your home.

For those who may not know, or who haven’t spent hours looking at them on Airbnb like I have, do you want to explain what a yurt is?

That’s been a challenging question over the years. A yurt is many things. It’s big, it’s a wide open room, affordable housing, it originates from Mongolia. The concept of the structure is a little more than a thousand years old. In modern days we’ve adapted that to use contemporary materials.

It goes up very fast, very solid and very durable, meets all the codes for the most part. There are some codes that are a little more challenging than others, especially as the years go on and zoning departments become more and more stringent, not necessarily always in a good way. Usually they raise the cost of housing more than is needed. But the yurts are compatible here in Hawaii, and in many cities and states.

Some people call it a round portable cabin. Some people say that they’re like tents. I don’t personally like that analogy because a tent can’t withstand 120 mile an hour winds. It doesn’t have that strong infrastructure. But I think what throws a lot of people off is that it’s got material on the top and sides, and so that’s why people tend to want to classify it in a way that they know.

How did your life, then, become intertwined with yurts?

I moved to Hawaii back in 2005 to go to college, to get my degree in psychology. But I was paying a lot of money for rent. My roommate had land. I was like, “What are you crazy? Why are you paying this much money for rent? It’s Hawaii, it’s not like Maine, where you can’t really live outdoors.” So I made a deal with him that I would figure out an affordable way to build on his two lots and in exchange he would give me free rent until the time I graduated. So that’s what started it.

The permit departments here were not permitting them at the time. So I had a bit of a battle on my hands there. But I started engineering them with structural engineers here and made my case, and in the end we were able to do it. That was part of the journey, because I realized I could do that for a lot of people around here.

How did you go about starting the company? You said you’re not an engineer, so what has been your role in all of this? 

There are a lot of different manufacturers of yurts, but what none of them do is the legwork to get you your drafting, your permits, your site prep, your plumbing, your electrics, your design all pulled together. There’s nobody doing that, except for us, that I know of, in all of the states. A lot of people could buy a yurt, but not a lot of people had the time and the knowledge to pull it all together into a functioning house. So because I had done it and because I had made contacts with the architects and the engineers and the permit people, all of that, I just started pulling it together under one roof. Then I added services on from there. Now we can help them from start to finish.

Was it hard to get the company off the ground? It seems like it’s a bit of a niche market. Is there a lot of demand for alternative housing in Hawaii?

There is a lot of demand for alternative housing. And I think that’s the case everywhere, really. Especially, as I was saying earlier, the cost of housing is just ridiculously high. There’s no need for it to be as high as it is these days. But, you know, people make money on it, so they just drive those prices higher and higher. And people are figuring that out. So people are looking at things in alternative ways, whether it’s yurts, or container homes or all of those different things where you can keep the costs reasonable.

It took me a lot of work to get the business off the ground, but it was something that I was extremely passionate about right from the get go, and when you’re that passionate about something it doesn’t really seem like work. Every day I put in a lot of work and before I knew it I had a good business going.

I was looking some stuff up today, actually, about average rent costs and I found that the average rent in Hawaii is about $1,300, compared with $860 for the United States as a whole. Between that and the economy, have you seen demand increase for this kind of solution?

I have seen it increase. I think it’s coming into people’s awareness more. When I first started the business, the biggest question that I would get was “what’s a yurt?” Now I rarely ever get that question, because people know. Word has gotten out, you know? People love them. I think that combination affects it, the economy, and certainly people figuring out that the cost of housing is disproportionately high, but I also think that it’s getting out there in people’s consciousness that these are an option.

You always get those people who are not comfortable getting out of their own paradigms and their own way of thinking. So there is always that. People want to kind of put them down, and come up with all these reasons why they don’t work. But nine out of the ten of those reasons, upon scrutiny, they just don’t hold any water. A lot of times I get the statement, “Oh they don’t ventilate, they don’t do well with mold.” It couldn’t be farther from the truth. Our office yurt is in the rainiest climate in Hawaii. It’s been up for two years now, and there’s not a speck of mold. You just have to make sure you get the right upgrades.

There are also very poor yurt makers out there and they’ve done a lot of damage to the industry. You’ve got these really great people that are making yurts. They’ve done their research and they’ve done their engineering. It’s so important when people buy from companies, that you’re working with somebody who knows what they’re doing and is going to stand behind their product. When I first started out, we were with a company that was awful, and I quickly learned the difference.

What was going wrong with the yurts with that company?

Oh gosh. Well, one of the major things was what we call corkscrewing. You have all these rafters going into a ring in the center, and that ring wants to twist. So if the company hasn’t dealt with that, you have a very dangerous situation on your hands because that whole roof can come down in an instant. And so all of the major yurt companies have dealt with that: Colorado, Ranier, you’re not going to see that problem with any of their yurts. But the poor companies—and there’s a few of them—you will see that problem. Their roof-to-wall connections are shoddy, their wall-to-floor connections are shoddy, a lot of their connections are just shoddy. The hardware, the interior metal is going to rust out real fast. They just haven’t been doing it long enough, they haven’t addressed it, they’re just kind of in it to make money. So they just have that lack in quality. It’s worth it to pay a little bit more and not have to deal with any of those problems.

That’s the only thing I would say—just make sure that you’re dealing with a good, reputable company. A little bit of research will let you know. NAYA, which is the North American Yurt Alliance, is something that I and a couple other yurt manufacturers have started up. We’ve been slow getting off our feet. It’s a national yurt alliance for good quality yurt makers. You can check with groups like that to make sure it’s a good yurt company, check with a website called yurtforum.com. Just do the research.

I was looking on your website and I saw that you can price your own yurt. But I don’t know what kind of features I should get. So I was hoping you could tell me, if I was going to move into a yurt, just a modest one with only the features that you think are really necessary, about how much would that cost? Ignoring the fact that I would have to move to Hawaii.

There’s a huge variance, really, in what people do with them. There’s a huge misconception, too, that when you’re buying a yurt you can get into a yurt for $10,000 and that’s it. But when you’re looking at a yurt home, your main costs associated with building a home are going to be infrastructure. It’s going to be your septic or your cesspool system, getting electricity to the property and run through the structure, plumbing, your water source, things of that nature. If we’re talking about just the structure itself of the yurt and the platform, then it’ll vary from about $22,000 to $28,000, depending on the flooring that you use and stuff like that.

And that’s not counting all the infrastructure?

Right. Because your infrastructure’s going to vary too. If you’re on a larger lot, then you can go with a cesspool instead of a septic system. If you’re going to go solar, that’s going to be a different cost. You can cut it to the wire and build on as you go. You could put your septic system in and then rough it for a little bit until you can afford your electric, and then rough it for a little bit until you can afford nice cabinets and stuff. And then you’ve got the cost of drafting and permitting, that’s with the architects and walking it through the permit department, permit fees and all of that. That averages about $5,000. Drafting is when we sit down with you and figure out what you want the inside to look like, where you want everything, you know.

There’s going to be land ownership costs hidden in there, too, right?

Yeah.

You’ve got to have somewhere to put it.

Right. And that can vary as well. Obviously. We’ve got some lots here that go for $10,000 and the same sized lot on the other side [of the island] will go for $500,000.

Do you live in a yurt?

I don’t live in a yurt now. I did for about four years, and recently we decided to put our money into doing our office yurt. So we built our office yurt on the side of the highway, near Volcano Village and so that’s our big project now. I look forward to living in a yurt again someday.

We’ve been talking about the upfront costs of getting a yurt and I was wondering if you could detail for me, after the dust had settled, what your monthly expenses were once you were just living in it? 

Well, your monthly expenses are going to be what they would be in any house. You’re just going to have your electric, gas. Most people here in Hawaii don’t pay for water. Electric is high here. If you’re on solar, you can count that out. Again, it’s a huge variation.

You don’t have maintenance costs like you do with a house, where you’ve got to replace things, or you’ve got to paint. You wash the yurt once a year. If you get the Duro Last roof, which we recommend here, that comes with a 15-year warranty. Usually it lasts closer to 20 years. At that time you just replace the roof and the walls, that’s the exterior. The infrastructure still stays solid. And you replace it in a day.

That’s about how long most metal roofs are going to last. Here in Hawaii, that’s what most people have. If you look at the cost of replacing a metal roof, you have a huge amount of money for materials, and then you have a huge amount of money for labor and it’s usually going to take at least a week to replace a decent-sized roof. So if you look at it that way, the maintenance costs of a yurt are way less, way easier to deal with.

So did you feel like you were saving a lot of money, then, when you were living in the yurt?

I felt like I saved money from the get go. Once the yurt is up and you’re living in it, you’re going to have very similar costs to any other structure. Your savings are in the building itself. So when you’re talking about a 700-square-foot house that you have to build, for the structure alone, you’re looking at $58,000 to $80,000. And with a yurt, you’re looking at $22,000 to $28,000. And then you tack on the infrastructure costs, which are going to be the same regardless of the structure.

This is just something I was curious about, because you mentioned septic systems—do you have a bathroom in the yurt?

Yep. You can have it in the yurt, or you can tack on a room. A lot of times people want to keep the yurt really wide-open feeling, so they’ll add on a little room, with a bathroom and things like that. We do a lot of custom-type work like that. But you can definitely have it inside the yurt. I like it inside the yurt, because you have to have a ceiling over the bathroom—that’s code—and then you can easily turn that into a little sleeping loft or a reading loft.

You talked about it a little bit, but what are the legal hoops that you have to jump through with permitting and such?

Our biggest challenges when we started permitting were a lot of misconceptions. They didn’t think that the yurt would hold up to the wind, and we proved through rigorous engineering and testing that they would hold up to 110 mph winds with the basic wind kit. We have an alpine yurt that will withstand, gosh, probably up to 150 mph winds. And the standard one is going to withstand up to 80 mph winds.

Insulation is a big one, especially in colder climates. They want to see the R-value. R-value is really an outdated way to figure insulation because modern insulations, they’ve been developed by NASA and they are reflective insulations. They’re phenomenal, lightweight, environmentally-friendly materials, but they don’t meet R-value, because they just act a whole different way. We’re still seeing a lot of places that will give us a hard time because of that. And then we have to put in insulation that’s not ideal for the yurts.

The manufacturers don’t do a lot of that. They make the yurts and then it’s up to the people who buy them to make sure they meet code. That’s what we do here. We work with Colorado Yurt Company very closely and they make sure that their yurts are made to our specs so they’re going to meet all the codes here.

So you guys are the intermediary.

Yeah, we do all the work to design it, permit it, getting it all set up, and then they make the yurts for us that we request, with all the upgrades.

About how many a year have you been putting together?

Probably seven to ten a year.

Hawaii seems like a place that would be extra-conducive to yurts. Do you think that this is something that might catch on in other states?

I think that’s a common misconception. When people hear what my business is, they’re like “Oh yeah, yurts would work in Hawaii, because it’s warm and temperate and tropical,” but actually Hawaii has 80 percent of the world’s climates. Last night it got down to 41 degrees. Up in Alaska, Nomad Shelter—that’s Lee and Jess Tenhoff—they make their yurts up there. That’s their specialty, making those yurts for Alaskan weather. And Colorado Yurts, they have a colder climate in the wintertime. If you look at their alpine yurt, it’s phenomenal—it’s so strong. It’s the only yurt on the market that can really take snow well. You see them at ski resorts, you see them all over. You see them in every climate. So I definitely think that they’re catching on all over. Not just Hawaii.

Julie Beck is a writer and editor in Chicago. She pays rent. For now.

Photos courtesy of Yurts of Hawaii

Let’s start with the basics. This is how I made my money:

And this is how I spent my money:

I lived in Chicago, in a lovely apartment with reasonably-priced tacos down the street—things I was very grateful for when talking to apartment-hunting friends in Manhattan.

I went on a few trips, for weddings and work, visiting family and friends.

But mostly I looked at my aspirational travel price alert emails.

I had some conflicting feelings about my career.

But then again…

But then AGAIN…

My savings account went up, though not without some difficulty.

I had a 401(k).

But I didn’t even try to understand it.

I was late on my student loans a few times, because I just forgot when they were due.

Now, I’m steeling myself for tax season.

Last year was kind of a disaster. I was completely freelance and didn’t know about quarterly taxes.

This time it will be better! I think. I hope.

So while I may have gotten a little carried away with Christmas presents this year, as I am wont to do

And I’m not loving hearing about other people’s holiday bonuses

And overall, there’s probably a better way to do things than what I’ve been doing

For 22 years old, 2 years out of college, I feel like I’m in a pretty good place.

Julie Beck did her best to limit the number of David Tennant gifs that went into this post.

I met Matt Duke at a concert venue in my college town, cornering him so I could take a picture for the student website I worked for. Several years later, he has three records and one EP under his belt from working with record labels, and is now self-financing his next record on a Kickstarter, which, full disclosure, I contributed to. I cornered him at a show again, and he amiably agreed to speak to me over the phone about his struggles with record labels, the costs that go into self-financing, and why going on reality shows can be a good career move.

You started off on a record label and now you’re self-financing. Why make the switch?

In terms of budgeting for records and how they were allocating what they were spending on the record, it was sort of being mismanaged. There was a lot of turnover. And when there were so many different people coming and going, nobody got all that familiar with the stuff that I was doing. It was either a waste of money, or money wasn’t being well spent in other places where it should’ve been. We had an amicable split over a year ago. As much as I love the president of the label—she’s unbelievable, she’s been such a huge supporter of mine—it just wasn’t working. And I was getting frustrated not being able to control the decision making as far as where the money was being spent and how much we were spending. So that’s why, once I went completely independent, I was excited to try self-financing my new album.

How did you come up with the $10,000 figure then for your Kickstarter? Can you give me a breakdown of what costs go into making an album and why you picked that amount?

Sure. I started with $10,000 because with the Kickstarter thing, it’s not like you’re necessarily selling yourself short, but you set a realistic goal for something that you know that you can get. You obviously want to make more than that. So in my mind, the magic number was hopefully actually going to be $15,000. We set it at $10,000 because the last record that I made through [my label], Rykodisc, was somewhere around the $7,000-$10,000 range. After years and years of playing music I’ve established relationships with engineers and producers and mixers. There are people who are interested and wanting to work, in general, for a lot cheaper than they usually would. I know that we can do the same quality product for less. We’re not going to exceed $10,000 to make a record, but we could probably keep it somewhere in the $6,000-$7,000 range. Kickstarter takes a percentage off the top of whatever you make, so you have to keep those things in mind too.

But after that, it’s making sure that there’s a little bit of money to be able to pump out merchandise, including the physical product itself. It’s going to be different for me this time because I get charged a lot for my back catalog, because of how much the record labels take per copy of the record. This time around, it’s going to be exponentially less, which is great. The money leftover, a lot of that is post-production, advertising, speaking to people about radio, finding somebody to do press. Once the record’s finished, you want a window of two or three months to be able to get all the good press out.  You also want to make sure that you have a little bit of a safety net, a little bit of extra money, just in case you hit snags. So those are the very nebulous metrics of what it is that we’re going to be doing.

Are you planning on having it all being funded by the Kickstarter or do you think that anything might end up coming out of your pocket?

I would be naïve to say that I think it could all be accomplished through the money that we get from the Kickstarter—I’m hopeful that we can. The management team that I have and myself, we’ve got a plan in place. We all know what happens to best-laid plans. However, as long as all the right people are in place to do it, we can do it for what we’ve got. I’m prepared to still spend a little bit more out of my own pocket if I have to. That really won’t be the end of the world for me. I feel a lot better in my life at this moment, to spend a little bit of my own money to make this happen as opposed to having the strange bureaucracy of the record label industry manage that and dictate what they’re going to do for me.

All the costs that you were talking about, the nebulous costs, those would be covered by a record label if you were on one, right?

Yeah. They would be covered and ultimately they would be rigged through all the millions and billions of records that I would have sold. It’s all, like, liquid. That’s part of the problem, too. Here’s the difference between myself and the business side of the record label: I’m strapped. You know what I mean? I work very hard. We’re going to be penny pinching [making this next record]. And that’s a good thing. It’s going to put under a microscope absolutely every move we make in order to have this record be as successful as humanly possible.

At the label they can look at old models and plans that they had dating back even as far as the ’80s and say, “Well we threw this much money at this and that worked before, so it must work again. Once we throw all that money, ultimately the artist is going to be responsible for paying at least half of that back, so we don’t necessarily need to talk about how much it is we’re spending, but it’ll come out of his pocket anyway.”

Again, as much as I loved the people that I was working with, it’s irresponsible. And it sucks. However, it’s sort of like shame on musicians sometimes for signing these contracts. You go in with the high hope that they will be able to manage it a lot better than they ultimately do.

That’s something I wanted to ask you too, because I don’t know. How does compensation work when you get a record deal?

As per my deal, as it stood before I left, they had me for a number of records and after that they had a couple of options. It’s up to them whether they want to keep me or not, but obviously you can sit down and renegotiate. Every record that I’ve made, the advances got a little bit bigger. Were they substantial numbers? Sure. But in my case, too, because of how small the label was, we ended up having to restructure to try to make things work. My advances went down, actually, significantly. That was part of the decision-making process that I was a part of and I was willing to forgo X amount of dollars off the advance to try to make this work and pump that money back into the record.

When it comes to mechanical royalties, I get a small percentage of the sales in terms of the records sold, songs sold on iTunes and things like that. The records that I made from 2011 dated backwards, they have control of those records for maybe another seven plus years or so. There’s a record that I had that I think is owned in perpetuity actually, by a student-run record label. Which is kind of a drag, but when you’re 19 years old, you’re not exactly thinking of business economics.

So, the royalties are a little small, the advances can be big, but ultimately, it’s still money that you will be paying off. Depending on what kind of percentages they are taking from you, you’ve got to be very smart with how you’re investing that kind of money. If it’s not going right back into the record making process, you better be putting it somewhere, because that might be all you get. If you’re an unsigned artist in your development mode, you have to be very very very very very careful about what you sign. Mine fell in the middle between a good deal and a bad deal.

Were you able to live on that, on your advances?

Oh, no. No. Absolutely not. Oh God, no. [Laughs]

I don’t know if you saw that Grizzly Bear article a few weeks ago. The Internet was all in a tizzy about it for a while because they’re a relatively big name, playing Radio City, whatever, but some of them still don’t even have health insurance.

Being a signed artist to a label, or just being a musician in general is not an easy road to follow. You don’t think about these things, because the dreamers that we are, as artists and musicians, our hopes are so high for every record. Your expectations are so great that things are going to work out exactly the way you think they can: “I’m going to work hard, this record is going to be fucking incredible, people are going to love it, I know that I can find my voice and exactly where I need to go.”

Then when you start thinking that way, when you start thinking with your heart instead of your head, these deals are a lot easier to scribble and autograph your name to, and then you are left with these really shitty advances, and you’re left with really bad percentages. You get a check maybe once every six or seven months because they’re behind on their accounting, or because they don’t necessarily need to get you a quarterly check. I completely feel for them. Because you can be in a position where you’re playing a really big stage and everybody looks at you and says, “Man, those guys made it,” and in reality you are just kind of scraping by.

The health insurance thing is a bar. There’s a great program called MusiCares, but that’s in the event of really extreme circumstances, like you have hospital bills that you can’t pay. They come in and they try to help you out when you need it, like FEMA. It’s like fucking FEMA for your health.

It’s funny, because I think a lot of us laypeople see it as “oh, you’ve got a record deal, you’ve made it.” Obviously, there are different degrees of making it, but I feel like most people would define it as supporting yourself doing what you want to do. But it seems like signing to a label doesn’t end that struggle at all.

No, and the funny thing is, that if you were privy to conversations between musicians as you’re touring around and you’re palling around with a bunch of artists, when you start to meet other guys and you find out that they’re signed, the conversation is never, like you said, “Oh, you’re signed? That’s incredible!” The conversation is more like, “Oh. What was your deal?” You’re almost like, “Oh no, are you okay? Is everything okay?”

A buddy of mine was just on the show “The Voice,” Tony Lucca. He just signed with Adam’s label [Adam Levine of Maroon 5, Lucca's coach on the show] and he was in a position where he was rolling the dice with the show. If you were to be in the top four, and especially if you were to win the whole thing, Universal Republic could pick him up for a record deal. Because he placed where he did [3rd place] and because he made the connection that he did with Adam, that worked out really well because he didn’t have to do the Universal thing, but he made this incredible connection. Here’s a guy who’s got a lot of clout, as far as the industry is concerned. The dude is sort of a mastermind, he’s got his own label and he’s got the money to be able to finance and promote an artist that he really truly loves, which is Tony. That’s a good situation to be in.

However, with that said, you still go in with a little bit of trepidation. There’s always the “hopefully,” like “I hope that Adam is as invested as I think that he is, I hope that it’s going to pan out exactly the way that we think it could.” So we’re always taking a gamble no matter what we do. The business is trying to protect itself from you, the artist, in case you bomb, and you yourself have nothing to protect yourself with, you’re at the mercy of these labels. And that is the way it’s always going to be, unless you’re Bruce Springsteen and you’ve already sold a shit ton of records, and you walk into Columbia and jump up on the desk and say “I want an advance of $60 million, or I’m not signing.”

I was watching The Voice when Tony was on it, and I remembered him from when you two did TFDI together. It’s surprising to see people that you’ve heard of before auditioning, who’ve had record deals and they’re on there saying “I can’t support my family, I need to do this show.”

You’re looking for the next big break. I felt like it should go without saying, but I’ll have to say it because I feel like this has become a bitchfest on my part about how tough it can be, but we’re so lucky because we do still make money. We can survive. You go month to month sometimes, well, a lot of the time, but we still get to play music and we get to do something that we love, which not a lot of people can say that they get to do. Not a lot of people are that fortunate, in fact there’s a lot of people who just don’t have jobs, period.

I don’t blame anybody for wanting to audition for those shows. It’s always worth a shot. If anything, you can at least ensure yourself a little bit of exposure, maybe give yourself a little bit of a kick start. Why wouldn’t you be hopeful that things could be great? That a record label that you had to sign to because you won a TV show could maybe really help you skyrocket? They’re lofty expectations but those are the expectations that they set on that show. So I don’t blame anybody for wanting to do that kind of thing.

But it’s just like we were talking about, everything is changing. The labels aren’t nearly as important anymore. They’re just not. The money is important, to deal with clients and get these things to happen, but if you’re savvy you can do those things yourself without having to give up a whole lot.

When you were on your label, did you ever have conversations with people there about how they could help you earn a living?

Yeah. The woman in charge was so great, and she wanted to see me succeed. She was trying to do everything in her power to get me opportunities and to put me in places where I could be successful. But there were a lot of people in that company, there was a lot of turnover. When she would look down, all of a sudden, every face was different. Another four or five months would go by, she’d look back down and they were all different again. People weren’t familiarized with the record enough. They put her in a precarious situation. We would have a conversation and she would be sympathetic, like, “I know you’re not earning what you deserve to be earning and I know that it’s really tough, but if you could just hang in there, we’ll try to work this out and then hopefully we’ll get that big moment where things are just going to turn around.”

Unfortunately, that’s not good enough for both sides anymore. We can’t afford to do that. I’ve been working odd jobs for the better part of this past decade, trying to supplement income to make sure that I can continue to pursue my dream of playing music. The best part, though, now, is that without the label it is actually a little bit easier. I’ve got more control over what it is financially I get to do. That gives me peace of mind. Maybe that’s something that’s actually worth a little bit, at the end of the day.

What kind of odd jobs have you been doing?

I garden. I love gardening, actually. I used to work other jobs, too, like picture framing, or waiting tables. You do whatever. But this last job I’ve had for the past four years, and it’s worked out nicely. The thing was, with this woman who hired me, I told her, “Listen, the only caveat is that I might need to disappear for long weeks at a time to go on the road, and I don’t know how flexible you are.” She basically just told me right then and there, “Any time you need to leave to go on the road or go record, or do any of that, you can do it. Absolutely. And any time you’re home, there will be work for you to do.” I scored the best job ever. I’m in a good spot where none of that gets in the way of what I want to do. There’s a lot of other people who have a more difficult time being able to manage their time between having to make steadier income to survive while also pursuing music.

Do you have any worries now that you’re striking out on your own? Is there more pressure?

It’s the same anxieties that anybody will get. I’m 27 going on 28, and you hope that you can achieve some kind of consistency, some financial stability. If I was worried about anything, it’s always that the project could fail. But to be honest with you, what outweighs that is that I think it could be really fucking great. And that’s why I keep doing it. I can deal with month to month if I really think that I can make this work. And I do believe that I can achieve something closer to financial stability, that it can be more consistent than it is now. But yeah, like I said, same anxieties as anybody else. Outside of that, I’m in a pretty good spot. I’m happy that I get to take the reins on this.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Matt Duke is a musician in Philadelphia. He likes the smell of cut grass.