I'm An Entertainment Attorney and a Musician Working With Tequila Mockingbird
I haven’t known the Tequila folks for long, but I’m already impressed with their drive and dedication.
We all know how difficult it is to make projects with a low budget, and many of us also know how much additional difficulty has been added by the restrictions relating to the pandemic, but these people continue to forge ahead on a bunch of different indie projects spanning multiple genres.
The work I’ve done for Tequila so far has been primarily as an entertainment lawyer, but I do have a strange double life that I think is fairly unique (heh, and Cameron asked me to talk about it in this blog post). In addition to my law practice, I also score films, write songs, and do lots of other miscellaneous music stuff.
Working in independent film, where everybody already wears multiple hats, this makes me able to be particularly “full-service” -- I can score your film and I can draft your paperwork, among other things. This has been a selling point for me on some of the projects I’ve worked on, although I wouldn’t recommend taking on both of those tasks for people who are not perpetually highly caffeinated.
How did I end up in this weird dual role? Music was the first thing I was truly interested in as a kid. I started playing in bands when I was 10 or 11 -- on the drums, which was my first instrument -- as well as in jazz and orchestra ensembles later on. In college, I unfortunately developed a practical streak and decided I wouldn’t be able to pay the bills just doing music. So, like a lot of people who would like to have a creative career but don’t see that as a realistic possibility, I went to law school.
But a few years into practicing law, my attitude started to change. In my mid-20s, I was working at a big law firm. When I had a late night in the office, I had a tendency to close my door and sing along with some tunes while I worked, at least when I thought no one else was around. But one evening, a colleague of mine heard me singing when she was walking by my office, and paid me a visit. She said she always wondered why I was practicing law, when I clearly was a creative type. That conversation inspired me to see how I could bring playing music back into my life.
These days, I do virtually all of my work from home -- I have one office I use for my solo law practice, and another that serves as my music studio -- and I’m pretty happy with the path I’m on. Before the pandemic, I thought I was approaching the point where I’d be able to do music full-time, but that’s slowed down a bit for obvious reasons. But I’m excited to see where my odd career path, and my work with the wonderful Tequila people, take me in the future.
