A lot of musicians have some sort of side job. Some might work in an office, others might teach or drive an Uber or Lyft. Then there’s Eric Mayson, whose other job besides making music is teaching people how to fly planes.
In 2019, Mayson, a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, made the decision to leave his life as a full-time freelance musician and go back to school — flight school.
“When I grew up, my dad flew a little Cherokee plane back and forth between Mississippi and South Carolina when we were living in South Carolina, so I kind of grew up riding in little planes,” Mayson told me.
He’d been fascinated with aviation his whole life, but never thought it was something he could afford to pursue. Then about five or six years ago, after hustling as a freelance musician in the Twin Cities for 10 years, Mayson decided to brainstorm alternative career paths.
“Life as a full-time musician was not turning out exactly the way that I desired it to turn out, and I really wanted to find something that could allow me to separate music from income a little bit to keep it more personal,” he said.
Mayson wasn’t alone with his frustrations with making a full-time career out of music. Last week, the city of Minneapolis published the results of its 2024 Minneapolis Music Census, conducted by Sound Music Cities, a Texas-based firm, in partnership with the city’s arts and cultural affairs department.
In the survey report, 89% of respondents said they had “low or uncertain pay,” 71% reported a lack of benefits like health insurance and retirement, and 57% said a music career was hard to maintain long-term.
(I take these results with a grain of salt — in part because the respondents don’t appear to me to be an accurate representation of the scene. As an example, 84% of respondents were white, and 79% of “creatives” were white. That’s a striking difference from what I’m seeing when I use the U.S. Census Business Builder for Hennepin County— which lists music groups and artists as being 69% white.)
In any case, Mayson decided to make the leap away from being a full-time musician during a conversation with his wife, Kara Motta, when he looked into the sky and saw a plane. “I thought, wait a second – that sounds cool,” he said. “I Googled it, and it turns out there’s a pilot shortage, and Mankato had a flight program.”
The couple moved to Mankato while Mayson attended the school. After graduation, Mayson got a job as a flight instructor, working eight hours doing flight lessons. The couple, who moved to New Prague for a time, are now back in Minneapolis. Motta now owns The Wellness Center Minnesota, while Mayson commutes three hours a day between work and home. “Now I have friends close by that I can play music with in the evening time,” Mayson said. “I’d say my music life is starting to really come back into something that I feel really good about.”
Mayson’s latest album is called “Rerun,” which he started around the time he decided to leave life as a full-time musician and try something else. “I think I was freaked out about not having the identity of being a musician anymore, so part of it was I wanted to make music to show myself that I am a musician,” he said. “There was a burst of frantic inspiration and creativity that happened, and then they just kind of sat there half finished.”
Mayson revisited the music in 2022, after getting encouragement from his friend Medium Zach, a local producer, beatmaker and composer. “I opened up each one of these tunes and tried to write a second verse to them, responding to the first verse, seeing if I felt differently than what I was expressing at the time, or similarly,” he said. “And I think it created this interesting little time capsule thing where I’m kind of talking to myself. It’s been written in fits and starts over five years or so now.”
In one song, “I Just Want to Go,” Mayson started out writing about feeling anxious to get the next chapter of his life started, including getting married and going back to school. Three years later, he returned to the song. “The second verse ended up being about how foolish that was for me to want to be moving so quickly, and how I need to slow down and take time and look around a little bit,” Mayson said.
There’s a bit of flying imagery in the album too. In one song, “Back Down,” Mayson writes about wanting to be more grounded. “And I already spend enough time with my head up in the clouds,” he writes in the song. “I spend too much time above floating round/Now’s a good time to come back down.”
Mayson will be sharing the tunes in an album release show this week, with Barlow opening and Lady Midnight (accompanied by Joshua Williams on keys) performing after Mayson’s set. Mayson is joined by vocalists Aby Wolf, Nathan Barlow and Isabel Fajardo, drummer Toby Ramaswamy, bassist Trevor Peterson and guitarist Luke Enyeart for one tune.
Wednesday, Nov. 27 at 7:30 p.m. at Icehouse, $12 in advance, $19 door. More information here.
Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at sregan@minnpost.com.
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