Band going on tour. What should I tell the shop?
3rd year guy here. In about 5 months from now, my band is scheduled to go on a two week long tour because I wrote some weird heavy music that went viral out of nowhere and this is the kind of stuff I do in my spare time
Based on my past experiences, it's clear that the older demographic of people who have never been in the performing arts world have absolutely NO idea how any of it functions. For instance, they think that because my cousin is married to someone rich and famous that I shouldn't be doing construction. They also don't realize that most bands lose money on tour and that it's basically a vacation with side missions laced into it.
Older people can't wrap their head around the fact that I want to work a stable career whilst putting a considerable amount of time into this as a hobby and have no intentions of making that my full time thing, ever. I have many friends and blood relatives who are either mega famous or famous enough to where they do make a living off of their art and I love that for them, but I'm still making more money than all of them just as a 3rd year
I say all of that to say that, I'm going out of the country to visit family for a week in August, then touring the last week of September through the first week of October. Kind of close to each other and I've been working like a dog. I've been to a few shops up until this point and am finally compitent enough to not be called stupid constantly, and in fact I've been getting a lot of "atta boy"s which is a swell feeling and I don't want to get laid off by them. Like I genuinely was just flat out terrible at my job for the first 1.75 years of my career and only just became worth my wage
Ive been told by a lot of old timers that if you're taking a substantial amount of time off with a smaller shop, you wait until it's closer to the day you're leaving because they will generally choose to just lay you off on the spot. I did witness this happen once
Sorry if this came off as semi incoherent and rambling, but real ones will give me some good advice in the comments. Ty