Every independent musician is told there are rules to this.
By Joseph Sinatra
Rules to touring. Rules to grinding. Rules about how long you’re supposed to struggle before momentum kicks in and someone finally notices. When I was younger, I took comfort in a line from The Notorious B.I.G., “there’s rules to this sh*t, I wrote me a manual. “It sounded like confidence, like mastery, like someone had cracked the code and left instructions behind. But in 2009, while touring on an indie hip-hop circuit, it became clear there was no manual waiting for us.
Only notebooks, half-empty rooms, borrowed floors, and a slow education in what survival actually looks like when there’s no safety net and no clear path forward.
The rules I eventually wrote down weren’t instructions so much as observations, pulled from journal entries made in vans, basements, and venues that barely qualified as rooms. They weren’t about how to get famous or how to break through. They were about how to keep going when the show didn’t pay, when the crowd thinned halfway through your set, and when the only thing keeping the tour alive was the generosity of strangers who believed in the idea of it more than the outcome. Those notes became the backbone of Before the Groove, not as a guidebook, but as a record of what independent touring actually demands long before anything starts to resemble success.
One of the first rules I wrote down came from something a musician told me before I ever left town: the hardest place to make it is your hometown. At the time, I didn’t fully understand it. It sounded cynical, almost lazy, like an excuse. But it explained why strangers forty miles away treated us like something special while people who had watched us grow up barely looked up from their drinks. On the road, perception did half the work for you. At home, familiarity erased it. That rule wasn’t about ego or escape. It was about momentum, about learning when to leave a place in order to become who you’re trying to be.
I started writing these things down because nothing about the road felt stable enough to remember on its own. Nights blurred together. Cities bled into one another. Advice came fast and disappeared just as quickly. A pocket notebook became the only way to keep track of what worked and what didn’t, what saved us money, what saved us time, and what quietly saved us from ourselves. Calling them rules wasn’t about authority or certainty. It was about giving shape to chaos, about turning experience into something portable enough to carry from town to town.
Years later, when I returned to those notebooks, I realized they weren’t really about touring at all. They were about learning how to move through uncertainty without waiting for permission or guarantees. Before the Groove grew out of that realization, not as a manual, but as a record of what happens before anything starts to feel stable or earned. Most creative lives are spent in that space, before the rhythm locks in, before the plan makes sense, before anyone is watching. That’s where the rules come from, and it’s where the real work begins.
Joseph Sinatra is an independent musician and author of Before The Groove: The hustler handbook’s to make a living as a musician and survive to tell the tale.
