I’m in my last three hours of full time employment at NERA Economic Consulting, my sole place of full time employment since I finished schooling 12 years ago (hello, colleagues)! With this remaining time, I will write this post to announce a major life change, which is to (largely) leave the corporate life behind and center my life around music. Relatedly, I’m planning to use this blog space to chronicle some of these new adventures, so I’m also rebranding this to no longer be focused on my PCT thru-hike in 2019 to be more generally about my adventures.

So let’s do a quick Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How.

Who?

Who: Me. My name is Søren, 35 years of age. Born in Quebec City, Canada; Raised in Davis, CA; Attended university at UC Davis, then moved to London for master’s degree in economics from the London School of Economics; Got a job in 2014 in NERA’s London office doing energy economics; Took a sabbatical in 2019 to hike the Pacific Crest Trail; Moved from London to San Francisco in 2021, where I have lived ever since.

Relevantly to this post, in addition to being an economist and an amateur adventurist, I also play a lot of music. My main instrument is the guitar, but I also play piano, saxophone, and pedal steel guitar to a reasonable degree of competence, and can stumble through a few others as well.

What?

A life centered on music, though cobbling together a few other things as well. There are a few different tracks within this, which I think will organically flex up and down based on what’s appealing and what’s going well. Here are the tracks:

Music that I want to play

My top priority is to perform music that is artistically appealing to me. That will probably be some combination of beautiful, harmonized folk songs and songs that I write.

I’ve written a handful of songs over the years which have mostly been fairly personal, but I’m looking forward to getting into the flow of writing for its own sake, so I don’t need to be so tied to each individual word as if it exposes the inner depths of my soul. I’m pretty quick to write chords, melodies, and harmonies, but writing lyrics is more challenging for me. We’ll see where this takes me. I also really don’t know what genre it will fit into, if any. Most of the stuff I’ve written so far has a singer-songwriter feel to it, but that may just be because I’ve mostly just performed it solo on a guitar/vocals. Most of the musicians I know in San Francisco are in the bluegrass community, so there would probably be some element of that, but I also don’t want to confine myself there either.

As I get into the flow of writing music, I will also start assembling some other musicians to record and perform said music. That’s a big unknown to me, but I’ve seen plenty of other musical peers around me go down this road, so I think if I just take the initiative to do it, it’ll lead me somewhere.

Music that other people want to hear

If you’ve seen me at a wedding or a party or something, you’ll know that I’m not shy to whip out a guitar and belt a banger or two, from the Beatles to the Backstreet Boys. I will parlay this into playing in bars, weddings, and wineries, where people want to hear music that they already know. Funnily enough, being in the City, I’m not sure there are so many bars where I’d get away with playing unoriginal music, but I think there are bars in suburbs where live music is valued even without the artistic quality of playing mostly original work. I’m counting on this being a substantial money maker for me, relative to some of the other concepts I have.

Teaching

Giving guitar lessons seems like a flexible and relatively low-effort task. Let me know if you’re interested!

The wider Fire In The Mountain community in Wales has been a really big part of my journey to this point, so I hope I can make it professionally relevant as well, through (either/both) performing at the main festival in early June, and teaching at the music camp in July.

Organizing

I’m planning to start hosting living room concerts at my house in San Francisco, starting in about a month. It’s a pretty great space, so I think these could quickly attract slightly bigger artists who are on tour through San Francisco. There’s a concept kicking around also to do a sort of Tiny Desk-like series and put it up on YouTube. If you’re interested in hearing more about events, get on my email list!

I’m also open to artist management, though I have no experience outside of the corporate world (which is perhaps more relevant than it sounds).

Other

I’m actually remaining on the payroll at NERA, but on an hourly basis, so I expect I’ll still be doing occasional consulting work when it appeals to me. I’m also very heavily involved in my family’s business running a lodge in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and am looking forward to spending more time there without needing to keep one foot in my day job. Finally, I’m heavily involved in organizing a few different communities, largely centered around the UC Davis community. I also look forward to having more time for those.

Where?

Based in San Francisco/Northern California, but a lot of my life/identity is in Europe still, so I’ll probably spend more extended time there. I will try to establish a small professional presence in London and Berlin, so I have places to perform while I’m there.

When?

As of the time of writing this sentence, in about two hours.

Why?

Gosh, this is a big one, and maybe I’ll give it its own post when I feel inspired. But I’ll give it a quick attempt below.

I’ve been playing music my entire life, starting in kindermusik as a toddler, with piano and saxophone lessons starting a few years later. Big shoutout to both of my parents, neither of whom are musicians, for prioritizing music for me and my siblings. When I was 12, I starting teaching myself guitar, and it’s been with me since then, through many different iterations of music and lifestyle.

Ever since I was wrapping up high school, it’s always been a question in the back of my mind whether I should pursue music-making as a central component of my life, but I always kind of dismissed it on the basis that it might be less fun if I was relying on it for my livelihood.

A couple of things have happened in the meantime, though:

First, I’ve had a lot of really incredible musical experiences over the last few years which have given me confidence that I could make a little bit of money playing music in a way that would definitely enjoy. There are too many people who have been part of that part of the equation to name them all, but a special bit of recognition goes to my partner Theresa, all of my siblings, the Doherty family, and Adam Price, all of whom have been rock solid and enthusiastic musical collaborators and/or guinea pigs over the span of many years.

And second, through working a corporate job for over a decade while still living a relatively bohemian lifestyle, I’ve saved up enough money such that I don’t need to fully cover my living costs in order to feel like this is a successful rebalancing of the work-life balance.

How?

Through good humor and tenacity.

A little anecdote on this: early this year, I tried to get a band I’m quite keen on to perform in my living room. Despite my best, but somewhat misguided, efforts, it didn’t happen. Reflecting back on that whole process, I realized that the enjoyment I got from imagining it working out was much larger than the disappointment I felt when it didn’t. So as long as I continue to take enjoyment in my failures, I think I have an endless well of energy to keep the journey going.

That’s all for now. I’ll check back in periodically on how it’s all going!