I Also Play Drums...

Have you ever felt that the weight of everything else bears down on you to the point that the original cause and point of the exercise gets lost in the morass of detail? Let me explain. As a wee lad, I was motivated by the usual kiddie urges to follow my interests, and for reasons that elude me (but probably relate to being attracted to noisy, obnoxious and person-unfriendly things), I ended up being into playing and listening to music. Specifically, music that involved me sitting behind the drums and banging away. Now, this activity kept me enthralled and engaged for many years, and I got to the point of being quite good at it, so much so that other people asked me to play with them in bands and even to go on tour with them. But it was at that point things started to go a little awol. In the quest for betterment, and the promotion of advancing your cause (whatever that may be), other factors start to loom large. For instance, recording an album. With the cost effectiveness and ease of doing it yourself these days, spending thousands of pounds in a studio or doing it yourself would seem to be an obvious choice to make. But after a day at work, heading straight off to your personal studio to spend a whole evening recording guitars, bass, keyboards, vocals, Chinese Nose Flute or whatever starts to take it's toll. Combine that with having to send e-mails, sort your band finances out, arrange rehearsals and sort all manner of minutiae out for the band's admin purposes, and before you know it, in a week you find you have about half an hour to cram some drumming practice into the schedule. Which, given that the whole point of the exercise was to enable more drumming opportunity, seems more than a little odd.
It's for these reasons that I've almost stopped thinking of myself as a musician. I've involuntarily shifted into a position of desk-jockey, where it's almost become more important to make sure that a rehearsal is scheduled properly than to actually pay any attention to what's played at the rehearsal itself. Therefore, this is a personal wake up call to myself to make sure the purpose of doing all this extra work isn't lost. Yes, the management is important, but the music, and the thrill of playing it, is even more important. As long as that is kept in mind, I'll be able to smile to myself knowingly when someone else asks what I do in a band. "Sit at a computer typing. Oh, and I also play drums..."