Be Where You Say You’ll Be: Xander Smith and Baron Grafft on Managing Your Music Career (Episode 51)

You learned how to make music. Nobody taught you how to make a living making music.

Xander Smith is a guitarist, singer and songwriter who also happens to love logistics. In Episode 51 of The Career Musician, Nomad sits down with Xander and his good buddy Baron Grafft, the friend who connected the two of them, for a long, fun conversation about music, life, and how much the business of sales has in common with the music business.

Xander has played, recorded or written with a long list of artists, and he ended up managing Herb Alpert's band. Baron works in sales. Put them together and you get a real masterclass in managing your music career, your band and your brand. Here is what stood out.

Show up like a pro before you ever play a note

Nomad knew Xander was a career musician before he walked in the door. Xander answered every discussion topic in Nomad's email, one by one. Then he showed up early, with all his things together. Nomad's rule: on time is late, early is on time.

Nomad opened the episode with Xander's own words: be where you say you're gonna be, when you say you're gonna be there, and be on time with a good attitude. That is the basic MO of any career musician. Nobody books you twice for your licks if you are late and hard to reach. Reliability beats virtuosity.

Xander's studio etiquette is just as simple: always arrive early with your own bottle of water, keep your eyes and ears wide open and your mouth shut, and wait to be spoken to, unless you are the producer.

Fall upward: every side job is a skill set

Xander didn't plan a management career. He kept watching poorly run bands and couldn't stand it. So band by band, project by project, he took on more. Why pay a road manager when he could do it himself and get paid for it?

Between record deals, broke, he took a cash gig selling T-shirts at the House of Blues because a buddy threw him a bone. Bored at the merch table, he wandered over to the lighting guy and asked how it worked. That turned into sound and stage work, and eventually a job as stage manager. One day he was a runner, sent to take Judas Priest's laundry to the fluff and fold. He noticed they wore the same outfit every night and washed it every day. Lesson learned: you don't need all that stuff.

The Herb Alpert gig came the same way. Xander told a sound engineer friend, the one "normal person" he knew in the business, to call him if he ever landed something good. Nine or ten months later, the friend called: he was doing sound for Herb Alpert and needed people. Work begets work.

What Herb Alpert taught him about people

Xander figured working for a jazz legend part-time would be an easy side gig. Instead, Herb changed how he approached the business, and himself. Herb told the band to check their schedules and play shows whenever they were all free. He made his players a priority, so they made him one. That is how a part-time gig got the kind of loyalty usually reserved for salaried crews.

Herb also talked him out of a bad gig. A three-month tour came up with an artist Xander had been miserable working for before. Big paycheck. He asked Herb what he thought.

"He goes, 'All you can see is that paycheck... You're never gonna finish that tour, because you're either gonna quit or you're gonna get fired, because you're not on the same page as that artist.'"

Xander Smith, 1:21:57

Xander said no thank you. Nomad's point: your gut instinct gets ignored too often. Usually it is right.

Never pitch your band. Let the work speak.

To get studio time for his band, Xander made a deal with the owner of a famous LA studio: some cash, plus taking a Russian band out on the road as their tour manager. He never said a word about his own music. The drummer played it for the singer in the back of the bus, and the band asked, "You didn't tell us you have a band?"

"I'm a professional... I never told him about my band. I never hustled them."

Xander Smith, 1:06:08

They became big supporters and brought his band to Russia. Their first open-air festival had roughly a hundred thousand people, two weeks after playing to maybe a hundred at the Viper Room. Everything you do is an audition. Xander was auditioning the whole time he was just doing the tour manager job well.

Read the room, then make it about them

Later he went back alone to open in a hockey arena in St. Petersburg in front of about 12,000 people who came for the headliner. Minutes before going on, he realized a guy with an acoustic guitar and no hits is just annoying to an arena crowd. So he sized up the room and changed the plan.

He told them a short, true story: his mother's family is from Russia, and she gave him a guitar and a Beatles record when he was young. Then he played "Yesterday." By the middle of the first verse, people were singing. Going into the second verse, he stopped playing guitar altogether.

"They could hear themselves singing and they looked around... I made it about us and not just about me."

Xander Smith, 1:16:22

He was given a short slot and played about 16 minutes. That is judgment, and it only comes with experience.

Sales lessons from the guy who isn't a musician

Nomad always says there is a lot of sales in being a musician, because you are selling your skill set to the client. Baron backed it up. Most people don't love telling you no, so you have to give them permission. One of his best lines in sales: maybe we're just not a good fit. It doesn't provoke anybody, and nobody's a bad person.

His other favorite saying:

"Some will, some won't, so what, next."

Baron Grafft, 1:31:16

Baron's other point hits hard for musicians: when someone has already shown you who they are, stop expecting them to be different. Go in with your eyes open, know the paycheck, and decide if it is worth it. Then you respond instead of react. And Nomad's ask for everyone in the business: reply. Even if the answer is no, tell people. Silence makes everyone assume the worst.

The takeaway

Xander's career moved between guitarist, artist, road manager and stage manager, and every lane fed the next one. Show up early, be easy to deal with, learn the jobs around you, trust your gut, and never take a no personally. That is how you Make Music Your Business. Hear more from Xander at xandersmithmusic.com, and if you are ready to land the next gig, grab the free Get the Gig guide.

Get the gig. Keep the gig. Build the career.

Watch on YouTube or find every episode on the TCM Podcast page.