Moving from Room to Room

Sometimes I think I’m crazy for not wanting to leave my house.

I did a lot of exploring in my first two years in D.C., then found my community at Incubator House. 

I get pretty much everything I need through Incubator and it all happens at the house. 

Friends, an audience, space to hang out and play music.

Instruments, A/V, lighting and pedals. So why go anywhere else?

Why go anywhere at all?

Musicians in D.C. get to choose from around four dozen rooms scattered around the city to perform in. 

The Pocket, DC9, Pie Shop, etc.

Each room has a different vibe, but what they have in common is there will be some sort of stage and sound equipment.

Maybe there’s someone to run that equipment for you. Maybe an audience will show up. Maybe there will somewhere to escape to when you’re overstimulated. Maybe there won’t.

Maybe you’ll be able to share a backline with the other bands on the lineup. Maybe not.

So many maybe’s in this journey of moving room to room.

But that’s the life of a wandering musician. You’re given a room to play in and in return, the owners of the room make money when people buy tickets and alcoholic beverages. 

It’s all so transactional. 

You pay, you scan in, you consume, you leave.

I did that for years, but then I realized you can’t build community when you’re always moving around.

To build community, you have to see the same people over and over again.

You have to build familiarity and comfort and the best way of doing that isn’t by being nomadic.

It’s by finding your room.

Incubator House is a room just like all the others in D.C., but it’s not just a place for people come for shows. 

Practices happen here. Prom, parties and jams too. People live here. 

This is a living space, not a space for a transactional performance.

When it’s full, it’s full of people who know each other.

Sadly, most musicians are left to wander

Most musicians wander room to room, booking, planning, loading and unloading when all that effort could go into community building and art. 

So the question that arises is: what’s the point of moving room to room? Where does it get you?

In D.C., it’s a short ladder to climb before you reach the top. 

You start at The Pocket or wherever will book you, then Pie Shop maybe and finally, opening for a touring act at 9:30 Club.

In the process, you’ve gotten more comfortable performing and built a network, but name one band that built a career performing by doing this.

It’s a dead end. The reality is you have to move to a city like NYC or LA, so what’s the point of playing around in D.C.? Is it just a sandbox to prepare you to leave your community?

Do you want a life as a roving performer, followed around by a team of strangers, performing to strangers? Do you want to be turned into a product to be sold by a corporation?

The entire default trajectory for musicians is a result of capitalist hustle culture that alienates us from each other. 

It’s a Squid Game-style competition that plucks one out of a thousand and showers them with riches, leaving the rest to suffer. 

And the solution is having a home

At Incubator House, we’re striving for collective success. Where everyone stays together and attempts to succeed together. 

Instead of investing effort into moving room to room, we’re investing in our room and in our relationships. 

We’re turning on the cameras so people anywhere can join us virtually and we can interact with them. 

We’re building a model that can be replicated in other cities, so we can go room to room, city to city and feel at home everywhere we go. 

But until then, I’ll be staying put in this room on Georgia Ave, where I have everything I need.