"I'm Too Old and Inexperienced" Said No Successful Person Ever

Feb 23, 2025

Grimy, cold basement with a makeshift desk, poor lighting, and a wooden plank masquerading as a bookshelf. I can go on about the inefficiencies of the room where I created a record label and wrote the majority of a book in, but you get the idea.

In 2016, at 43 years old, with a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter and an infant son at home, I was laid off from my corporate job. Angry and disillusioned, I remained in my industry as I went to work for a former customer of mine. That experiment lasted for a year and I was miserable. I gave the industry one more shot and found work with yet another former customer and that lasted about 8 months.

Mid-life crisis time? You bet!

Writing was always something I incorporated into my life. I wrote song lyrics and poetry as a teenager and then freelanced as a music writer, reviewer, columnist, etc. beginning in the early 2000s.

Music was the source of my happiness from the time I was about six years old and has remained one of the most important things to my soul and psyche through this very moment.

I began toying with the idea of starting an independent record label around 2014/2015 and my sudden loss of employment seemed like the perfect time to stop toying with it and start doing it.

But how? I was a middle-aged, married father of two very young children with no money or investment potential to launch such a venture, and oh yeah, no fucking clue as to what it would take to start a label.

So the logical conclusion was to immediately start looking for artists to sign.

The balls on me…I know.

In 2017, SoundEvolution Music was formed. I had two partners, two artists, a few ideas, and a lot of hope. Two artists turned into four and we wound up with five releases (a digital double album with a jazz-fusion bassist, a digital single and video with a Riot Grrrl punk duo, a vinyl single with an alternative, dark-pop, singer-songwriter, and a vinyl EP, a vinyl LP, and two videos, with an Americana/blues punk rock artist.

A whirlwind of chaos for sure.

It was fun, scary, exciting, maddening, delusional, hopeful, illogical, psychologically challenging and satisfying, and everything in between.

We sold records in over a dozen countries around the world and lost a lot of money. Five figures…we’ll leave it at that.

And I don’t regret a single second of it.

In April 2020, I was a month away from my 47th birthday and living the strangest life I’d ever lived. The COVID-19 lockdown was in full effect and I was standing in my backyard watching my dog play who was completely oblivious to the surreal, almost dystopian world in which we all now lived.

Earlier that day someone had mentioned the year 1991 on a radio show or podcast I was listening to, I can’t remember which, and while thinking about nothing in particular in my yard, the mentioning of ‘91 came back to me.

It dawned on me that at that moment, we were less than a year away from 2021, which would mean that we’d be 30 years removed from 1991. For a music guy like me, with the kind of music I listen to the most, 1991 is always somewhere in my consciousness because that’s the year, commercially anyway, that culture was turned upside down and everything changed.

Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and what would eventually be dubbed “grunge”, had taken over youth culture with music, style, attitude, and ideology. For me, and millions like me, the late 80s through the mid-90s, with 1991 being the catalyst, were absolutely thrilling times.

I went back into my house and began writing down notes, thoughts, opinions, etc. of days gone by. I was longing to be “free” again because 2020 felt like anything but freedom, so why not harken back to the best times of my life?

Over the next few weeks, something told me that these notes, now many pages long in a document on my laptop, could become a book.

A book? Who the fuck did I think I was?

Well, 30,000 words, a couple of years later, and a meeting with a publisher pretty much convinced me that what I had in that document, was indeed a book. Or at the very least, a terrific starting point for one. It needed more focus, structure, and editing for sure, but it was well on its way to becoming a book.

On December 14th, 2024, about four and a half years after that day in my yard, the first shipment of books arrived at my home. The picture that kicks off this article was taken on that day.

SLACKER - 1991, Teen Spirit Angst, and the Generation It Created, published by Inspired By You Books (an imprint of Inspired Girl Publishing Group) was largely created in that crappy, dank, poorly lit basement.

Since its arrival, two-plus months ago, it has sold several hundred copies as an early release, with worldwide distribution set for June 3rd, 2025.

I’m supposed to be too old and inexperienced to have done this.

As I get older and the world gets crazier and more insane by the day, it’s becoming abundantly clear that the term, “If not now, when?” should apply to anyone with an idea, a passion, or a drive to do something they’ve always wanted to.

What is holding you back? Age? Lack of experience? Some corporate job that society told you you needed? Bullshit. That’s defeatist and it’s a terrible mindset to have. How much incredible art would we have missed out on if some of our favorite writers, musicians, poets, actors, directors, etc. had given in to society’s made-up rules?

I wish I didn’t wait until I lost my job to follow my path but I was a slave to that defeatist mindset my entire life. It was gripping, and I lacked the will and/or strength to get out of it.

But I did.

And trust me, if I can do it, anyone else can as well.

Slackers Unite

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