Well, Christian, I end every conversation with a question from the person I'm speaking with. Yours was one of the best. You asked me, how are you making coffee these days? And I have a very detailed answer for you.
I'm certain that you do.
to the thing we never talk about, a podcast about personal finance for weirdos. My name is Tim Iseler. I'm a certified financial planner and I run my own independent financial advisory business in Durham, North Carolina. This show, like My business is for people who chose their professional paths based on following a passion or a dream.
That includes artists, musicians, authors, and anyone who decides to turn a skill or a talent into a career, rather than pursue more conventional, possibly safer options. But before I started my business, I spent 18 years in the music industry working as an audio engineer in both recording studios and touring with bands. Today's guest is Christian Frederickson, a founding member of the band Rachel's.
I met Christian when that band was mixing their record Systems/Layers with Bob Weston at Soma Electronic Music Studios, where I worked at the time. And sometime in early 2005, if memory serves, Bob recommended me to mix the band's upcoming tour. That was literally the first time I had toured with any band in a professional capacity, and I have to say it was a tough way to get started.
Rachel's had viola, cello, piano whenever available and vibraphone, but it also had a full drum kit and bass guitar through a bass guitar amplifier. And that's a tough mix of instruments to figure out. But I must have done something right because the band asked me back for another tour later that same year. So that's how I got to know Christian Even though Rachel's is not a punk rock band, a lot of that tour was done in a fairly punk rock way.
We played mostly in rock venues, but we also slept on people's floors, piled lots of people into hotel rooms, sometimes covertly so the management didn't know, and logged lots of hours in the van. I made next to nothing for those tours, but I totally loved it. Then some years later, Christian asked me to mix some live performances for a dance company called Palissimo in New York, for which he had written the music along with drummer Ryan Rumery.
This was the third of a three, three-part series called the Painted Bird Trilogy. Part three was called Strange Cargo. Our mutual friend and Christian's band mate in Rachel's, Jason Noble, had co-written the second part of that trilogy called amidst, with Christian and Ryan. Unfortunately, Jason was battling cancer at this time, and so when Palissimo was booked to perform all three parts of the Painted Bird in Columbus, Ohio, he was just too ill to participate.
Christian asked me to mix parts one and three, and play Jason's parts on part two of that trilogy for that Columbus performance. I took that assignment incredibly seriously and, tragically for everyone who knew him, Jason died before that performance could happen. It was by a million miles the most emotionally intense playing experience I've ever had. I don't mind admitting that I had to focus really, really hard on the music to not get choked up while we were playing it.
We also performed amidst again, the following year in New York and I mixed the third part, strange Cargo later that same year in Cedar Rapids, Iowa of all places. Which is the long way of saying that christian and I have shared some intense time together over the last 20 years. Most of it happy and some of it intensely difficult.
He's been a great friend to me, letting me crash at his apartment multiple times over the years, even when he had a toddler at home, and he regularly sends postcards that don't get nearly enough replies. So I'm really happy to share this conversation with you. It means a lot to me that he was willing to open up so candidly about his journey, about money, et cetera. In addition to being a professional violist and composer, Christian has also been teaching at MIT for the last five to six years.
Who saw that coming? We'll talk about that and much more in this conversation. Before we dive in, i'd love to do a listener mailbag episode in the future. If you have a question about money or personal finance, please drop it into the form at Iselerfinancial.com/podcast and I'll answer it in a future episode. Alright, here we go.
Good morning.
Good morning. How are you?
I'm okay, thanks. How about you?
I'm doing very well. do we find you today?
Today I am at work at MIT, but it's spring break. So the students are away. Everybody's happy this week. The students are off doing something and we have the buildings to ourselves.
Yeah, sounds like fun. Do you mind if we jump right in?
No, not at all.
Cool. do you tell people you do for a living? I.
That's a great question. I tell them that I'm a composer and sound designer for theater, which usually gets a little bit of a blank stare. And then I say, and I also teach at MIT and then they click in and then, then there's a little bit of confusion when they say there's theater at MIT? And there is in fact theater at MIT. And so yeah, it's, it's a little... a bit of a complicated question, I guess. I do a lot of different things.
Primarily for the last couple years particularly, I've been teaching full-time or working full-time at MIT, and that's been the bulk of my income and time spent. And then doing freelance sound design and or composition and or performance jobs in theater or contemporary dance, sort of sprinkled here and there where I can fit them in around a academic calendar.
You're a violist.
Yeah,
What's a traditional career path for a violist?
usually, well, when I was in school, the, the most stable, like understandable career path, full-time job was to get a job in an orchestra. And there are, I don't know, in the United States, there are probably, ooh, 20 to 25 orchestras that offer full-time employment with a living wage for their musicians, although it's, you know, almost all of them supplement with something else.
And then there are anywhere from six to 10 viola positions available, and most of them are once you're, once you win a job in an orchestra, it's a job for life. So, people tend to get that job and stay there for 30 or 40 years if they can depending on how old they are, when they get it I even in college, I never really saw that as a, a thing that I wanted to do. Mostly because when I met professional orchestra musicians, and talked to them, they all seemed pretty miserable.
And music had been become a real grind of a job and I, you know, was super idealistic and never wanted music to be that for me. And so I, I had studied with a, a teacher for undergrad who was through a high level freelance chamber musician. There are chamber music festivals sprinkled throughout the country and throughout the world. And so he would play those, and also taught it at a music conservatory. And that was how he made a living. And I, I thought that sounded pretty great.
And in fact, I, I think he said to me at one point, and I agreed with him, that one of the best things for me if I were to have stayed in classical music would've been to play in a string quartet. And I did for a time, but, yeah...
how did you find yourself outside of conventional classical music? How did that transpire?
That happened because I met a mutual friend of ours, Jason Noble, completely, it was a, a complete coincidence. A group of my friends and I were going out sort of sightseeing, exploring in Baltimore where we were in school, and we met Jason and a group of his friends who were doing the same thing on a bus. And, we started talking and his, he and his friends were going to the art college that was nearby. And we struck up a friendship and, eventually, we would go to each other's things.
So I think it was specifically Jason came to see a, a viola recital that I played, like a standard concert. I played, I don't know, Bach and, and other classical composers. And after the concert we were hanging out talking and, and he said to me that he had an idea for a music song that, a piece of music that, that he thought strings would be really good on, but didn't, didn't think he had any access to string players to record it or to put it together.
And I said, well, I know a lot of string players and so we should, we should do something. And so we ended up, in the, I don't know, in this early spring of 1991, recording a song together that we sort of collaborated on He wasn't, he didn't write music pretty much ever. He, he kind of, he tried and, but it never really connected with for him. I think it just sort of slowed him down.
So we wrote out some, some music for these string players to play and, and worked out an arrangement and recorded it at a independent studio in Baltimore. And that recording eventually turned into a bunch more recordings that we, we did two years later. And in the meantime, Jason was starting to play with a, a rock band that eventually became a band called Rodan. And they were heard by the, the owner of Touch and Go Records in Chicago.
And he put out a record of theirs, and Jason handed him some of the recordings that we had been doing, some of which had been released on a tape called Rachel's Halo. And corey Rusk, the owner of Touch and Go, was interested in putting those recordings out as well. And so the band became Rachel's.
And we functioned in a really unusual place at the time, I think, where we were not really a rock band and we weren't really a chamber music ensemble, but we functioned more like a rock band than a chamber music ensembles. And we recorded our own music and and played in rock clubs. And were really fortunate. We, we've had a lot of, of early success that allowed us to keep doing it for about 10 years. And we toured a lot. And it was, for me it was, it was a real, really ideal solution.
I was, I, I had access to music at a really direct level where we were actually creating it. And it was a small ensemble and we got to play a lot. And until the music industry sort of imploded on itself, when file sharing and streaming started happening, we, we did okay financially.
Yeah. How was it for someone in your position coming out of music school, out of classical music school? How unusual was that for you to be in a rock band setting and or, or even just writing your own compositions and then recording and performing them?
I think it was pretty unusual. There were, I mean, there were precedents that we really admired. People like Philip Glass and Steve Reich, who were composers that formed their own ensembles. You know, later on, Julia Wolf and Michael Gordon formed the Bang on Account All Stars in a similar vein to, you know, where as young composers it can be really hard to get your music performed in the, in the classical, I don't know, the standard classical world.
And so their solution was to essentially form a band or ensemble of musicians that would play and record their music. But it was definitely not a traditional career path. Yeah, I didn't know anyone else who was doing it.
You mentioned that Rachel's band, the band called Rachel's, which has a member named Rachel,
Yes.
That Rachel's made some money, you know, you did all right for yourselves. What did you do in addition to that to get by?
So in 1997, I moved to Louisville because many of the members of Rachel's were based in Louisville, grew up in Louisville, and, and so I was traveling there so often from either Baltimore or New York, or Seattle where I moved after grad school. We were busy enough that it, it was made more sense for me to live there. And so in Louisville, I started teaching classical music, viola lessons and chamber music, coachings.
And, and so I first got a job at indiana University Southeast, which was a, a branch campus of Indiana University just right across the river from Louisville in southern Indiana. And then, a year or two after that, I started teaching at the University of Louisville at both places as, as adjunct faculty. So I was really part-time. But I was also, whatever, 25 years old, so,
Yeah. What did your financial life look like then? Was it like you had enough money to pay the bills and so life was good, or were you thinking bigger than that? Beyond that? I.
Yeah, more or less. I, I had enough money to pay the bills and, and that was good enough yeah, that was, that was basically where I was.
How did you find yourself composing for and performance?
So in, in 2001, Rachel's met a theater company called the SITI Company, S-I-T-I, which is an acronym for Saratoga International Theater Institute, which was sort of the genesis of that company. Rachel's met SITI in Louisville, where they were fairly regular performers in the Humana festival of New American plays at, at Actor Theater of Louisville.
And they had been using some of our recordings, both in their studio work and then they used a song that we wrote in one of their productions at the Humana Festival. And, so they were a group of actors and directors and designers from New York who were in Louisville pretty regularly and kept raving to people at the theater about this great band from Louisville that they loved. And at some point, someone at the theater said, you know, they just live up the street. Like we know these people.
You could meet them and tell them in person how great you think they are. So they invited us to see the, the show they were doing that year. They did a play about Orson Wells, and then the following year they were back in Louisville in the springtime and they invited us to come and work with them in the studio a little bit and think about starting a project with them. And, and we didn't really know what that was gonna look like at the time.
We just knew that they liked our music and we started working in a different way for us, which was much more improvisational and in the, in the moment. Our process previously had often been that someone would bring, maybe not a fully fleshed out composition, but a fairly well worked out idea and present it to the others. And we would sometimes improvise to find our own spots in that composition. But other times it was just all written out.
And so we were, we were playing it, we were performing it like any other piece of written music. And working with the SITI company, we were kind of doing a combination of DJing where we would play our own recordings or other people's recordings. We were working with live sampling and, and then performing, playing our actual instruments, but much more responsively to what the actors were doing.
So that started a process that continued for a couple of years where we gradually built a, a piece of theater together called Systems Layers that we performed a few times. And also Rachel's recorded an album of that music. And then in 2004, I got married to someone that I had met through the city company. Tara was training with them, the first summer that Rachel's went to Saratoga Springs to, to work with SITI. And she is a actor and performer and was living in New York City.
And I somewhat naively felt like I could do all of the things that I was doing in Louisville, which was teaching and playing chamber music and working with Rachel's i could do all of those things in New York City because they all exist there. I was just overlooking the fact that there were, you know, several hundred other people who were, if not thousand other people who were all trying to do the same thing in New York City.
So anyway, I moved to New York and really struggled to find a place for myself musically. But I knew all of these theater people, both the SITI company and then their sort of constellation of former students. And the artistic director of SITI also teaches directing at Columbia University.
And so I was connected with a, a fairly large community, all of whom had, who had been sort of, I inducted into the cult of how great Rachel's was and, and so I found a lot of eager and interesting collaborators in the world of theater. And, yeah, that was, it again, it was a, it was something new to learn.
I feel like if there's one, there's one constant in, in my professional life, it's been change and, and, you learning sometimes, sometimes related, but different fields, going from music to theater and now to academia to some degree.
Yeah. So, uh, obviously New York City is much more expensive than Louisville, Kentucky. So just your, your day-to-day expenses went up and you had to find a new way to make work or to find work to create work for yourself. so I, I, I assume that initially it was a lot of hustling, a lot of just like whatever you could string together.
At what point, if ever did it start to feel like even though it was sort of one job to the next job, to the next job, like how, when did it start to feel like, okay, like, I've got this, I it's stable enough, or did that ever happen?
It did, it was not for a number of years. You know, I was yeah, hustling a lot. I busked in the subway a fair amount. You know, I'd go in the early morning and play Bach and make something, and also practice kept my tools sharp. But yeah, it was a lot of hustling and, and nothing stable for a while. Until I, I think probably 2009, 2010, I started finding myself pretty much employed full-time, where I was able to string jobs together and keep busy, keep income steady.
The other thing that we did was we bought a co-op apartment in Brooklyn, and that stabilized our, our monthly expenses a lot. Where we were paying, we were paying a loan, a, a mortgage. It's, it's different 'cause it's, in a co-op, you're not, you don't own the floor, you own shares in the company that owns the building. But it translates. And so that was fairly stable, I would say, you know, for, for a number of years. Things were fairly stable.
And then we had our first child and things kind of went, went crazy again for a while.
Less stable.
Less stable. Yeah. Mostly because we, we somewhat foolishly like, decided to sell our, our apartment. And so we sold in 2013. And the market was, was basically it, it was recovering. It started to recover from the 2008 crash. But, but it's, it definitely went up after we sold. And, but we thought we needed a bigger place. We had a, a fairly large one bedroom apartment. Yeah, we, we wish that we had held onto that for a little while longer.
We thought we needed a second bedroom, which it turned out we didn't for a very long time. 'Cause babies are small. They don't really need their own space until they get bigger. But so yeah, we sold and and then have been renting or rented, in Brooklyn. And we moved to Tarrytown, New York for a few years. We had some friends who recruited us and we almost bought a place there with the money that we had made off of the sale of the apartment in Brooklyn.
But then we realized that we didn't really wanna live in Tarrytown long term. And during this time, I guess we were, we were spending that money that we had made off the sale of our apartment to, you know, fill in any expenses that we had, moving and we had a car after we lived in Tarrytown. And, so yeah, we looked for a place in New York City to buy and came close a couple of times, but ended up renting there as well. And then Covid happened.
What did you do at that point, you and your family?
Well, we, I was, I, again, fortunate, I started working at MIT in the fall of 2019. So I,
that happen?
A friend of mine, a playwright who teaches here as well, sent me the job listing. And when I got it, I, I thought that I wasn't really interested in the job, mostly because it's in Boston and we were living in New York. At that point we had just crossed the, the kindergarten divide with our older son Toby. Which, you know, I think in any big city is, is a big deal to like land your child in a kindergarten that doesn't feel terrible. But yeah, he was in kindergarten in a school we liked.
And anyway, I didn't think I wanted to work in Boston, but Tara, my wife, encouraged me to, to try for it. And yeah, it was, it was an interesting process of sort of not starting out really thinking I didn't want the job. And it wasn't until I until I came for a campus visit that and saw the building and met the people that I was gonna be working with. And additionally, at MIT Music and Theater are, are sort of one department.
So I have a lot of colleagues that I work with who are musicians as well. And so I, after coming here, I, I started to think that, that I really did want the job. And I was really fortunate to get it especially when, in 2020, the, the whole live performance industry shut down more or less overnight, and pretty much indefinitely. And so I had a, a full-time job with benefits that really sustained us through that time, because I, you know, all of my, all of my freelance income was completely gone.
And so we, we were in New York City, in, in Manhattan, for the first couple months of Covid and, and really feeling like it was gonna be a while before New York City was was recovered. MIT was pretty conservative about their assessment of what Covid was really gonna be like. You know, when in March, 2020, we all got sent home and, and what we were hearing from the government was that it was gonna be three weeks and everything would be fine.
And MIT very quickly said, we're not coming back this year. You'll teach the rest of the semester remotely. And we're like 95% certain that the next year will also be remote. So I knew that I wasn't gonna have to travel to Boston for, you know, until the fall of 21 at the earliest. And we had dreamed for a long time of owning a, a second home in the Catskills, in the Northern Catskills.
Again, friends from the SITI company had summer houses there, and we would go every other year or so for a weekend and, and fall in love with this area all over again. And so we started talking about, you know, if we weren't staying in New York, where would we go? And we decided that we would try to sort of make lemonade out of lemons and, and try to go to the Catskills, find a place, live there for a few years and, yeah, kind of try to get our finances a little more under control.
We were definitely struggling again in New York with two kids and, and sort of relatively full-time freelance work, but still nothing predictable. So we were using savings again to, to cover those gaps. And so we thought, yeah, we would go and buy a house and sort things out. And we did buy the house and it was not an expensive house but I, I think we were, I, again, just a little bit naive about I, what the, what the realities of owning a house are.
And particularly in a place that has really severe winter weather. And the Northern Catskills, I'd never lived anywhere like that before where the temperature in January, February and a good chunk of March rarely gets above freezing. The high temperatures are generally below freezing, and there are a few times every winter where it gets down in around zero Fahrenheit or, or lower.
And it snows most days or it does where we lived at 2000 feet, and our house is an old farmhouse that's super drafty. And we definitely struggled to keep it warm. And yeah, worked, worked through a, a couple of different solutions to, to make that happen. But yeah, it's expensive actually to own a house.
Yeah, you know, winter aside, I think that's a good point. A lot of times people, when they're deciding whether to rent or to buy something, they're just kind of looking at the sticker price and what that works out to in terms of the mortgage. But gotta do all that upkeep and you know, if you've gotta draft the old house, that's a lot of upkeep. If you live anywhere close to the ocean, that's a lot of upkeep. I I think people don't count on that.
And taxes and insurance and all of those things that, you know, as a renter, you, you don't take into consideration at all. So, we do love the house and we still have it. We're not living there currently, but we still have it. And, you know, we'll see. We hope to keep it, but it may, we may hit a, a wall with it
Are you using it as like a summer place now?
yeah. Yeah, that's the idea. And we're getting there occasionally on the weekends. So this past fall we moved to Boston. I was commuting from the Catskills once MIT resumed in-person classes, which, you know, is way better. Education is much better when everybody's in the room together.
Yeah, definitely.
But I was commuting and staying with friends primarily. So I wasn't renting another place here. I was fortunate to be able to do that. But the schools in the town where we were in and the Catskills was weren't gonna cut it long term. And we realized that there's a system of, I guess they're called the exam schools in, in the Boston Public School district that are, there are three, really great public schools that students have to test into.
And they, they all begin in the seventh grade, and our older son, Toby, is in the sixth grade this year. So we moved, mostly for him to be able to qualify for those schools. And so he, he is qualified for those schools. We'll see which one he gets into, if any of them.
Exciting. And those are just magnet schools, like public schools, but better equipped.
Yeah. I don't really know what the rationale is exactly. One of them, the Boston Latin School is, must be one of the oldest public schools in the nation. You know, they have alma mater like John Hancock and John Adams, you know, those founding fathers types. And just have a, a, a tradition of excellence. And I, so I don't know how they sort of were set aside from the general public school system in Boston. But they are so...
cool.
yeah.
You mentioned a minute ago that before you got the MIT job, or when you were interviewing for the MIT job that you had been working freelance, and obviously if you've been doing that for a few years with some study work, you know what to ask for more or less when you're quoting a job or what, however, however it works. how did you know how much you should ask for to give up that freedom? You know when you went to interview with MIT?
Hmm. That's a good question. I don't think I really considered that. Honestly, I, I joked at the time, but, but it's true that MIT is the first quote, unquote, real job I've ever had. I've worked really hard, you know, on all kinds of things and had a, a lot of freedom, as you say. But I never had a real job before that, you know, paid me regularly and gave me health insurance and retirement benefits.
And I would say I was reaching a point with working in theater where, sometimes I describe it as I, I had solved most of the problems that I felt like I needed or wanted to solve. And so there was a, a certain amount of repetition Many things were different. Everything was supposedly different from job to job, which is something that I really valued about the, the work is that, you know, each production is different people.
But there are some fundamental things that a composer or a sound designer does in, in most theater productions. For example, at the beginning of the play, you have the audience sitting in the theater, talking to each other hopefully, and the lights are on, and maybe there's some music playing, which the sound designer chooses. And then the sound designer and the lighting designer in concert have to figure out how to get the audience to stop talking to each other and enter the world of the play.
So that sort of meta problem is, is very similar. You know, the, the same sort of thing works over and over again. The details are different, but, but it's kind of the same thing over and over again. And so that kind of thing, you know, I, I, I think I was starting to feel like I had, I had done the things that I really was interested in doing.
And I would value having more stability Hopefully that would also lead to me being able to say no to the things that I was gonna be bored doing and yes to the things that I was more interested in, even if they didn't offer as high of a fee, where I could say, yeah, that project is fascinating.
You know, you can't pay me what I would normally get to do a, a, a play at a regional theater, but I'm interested enough in working with these people who are on this project that I can, I can afford to take a pay cut because I have this steady job. I don't know if it's exactly worked out that way. I, I do, I have had to say no to some interesting projects and, and to people that I love working with because I can't, I get away for the, the three weeks or whatever.
I can't be away from school for that long. But for the most part, I, I think I've been able to keep a professional practice active with things that I'm interested in doing.
Yeah, so obviously the income stability and the benefits are a huge plus. And that thing you, you just described is like it's a secondary benefit of you. You have more flexibility about saying no or things like that. Have there been any other maybe unexpected benefits to your quality of life that aren't directly related to, you know, making more or less money or a reliable amount of money, but because you do that now, things have become easier or, or different in a pleasant way.
Well, as I described at the beginning of our conversation, you know, my job is legible to a wider array of people, a stupid thing. But when I say I teach at MIT, people say, oh, oh. You know, you must be smart or talented or something. Mostly, mostly our students are smart and talented. Let me think.
I mean the, the, I don't know if this is exactly what you're asking, but when I left Louisville and left the teaching jobs that I had there, which was a similar thing, I, I will say, where I felt like I had done the things in Louisville that I, that I wanted to do, and that maybe it there would be a, a lot of repetition if I stayed there. And that's a sort of outside of Rachel's. Rachel's was something that I, I saw as continuing to expand, until it didn't.
But what I really missed about those teaching jobs was access to, to space and time. And yeah, and having space and time that I could invite others to use, and to, you know, come play with me or, or make something together. And so having that access again at MIT has been really welcome. And I've been able to do a couple of exciting things. I had Palissimo, that dance company that you and I worked together on, came for a residency.
That was really crucial and in the development of the last piece we made together. I hosted a number of sort of concert events for friends and acquaintances and people I was hoping to get to know better in Boston. And made a, a large scale installation piece with Greg King, who we both know also. That was video and, and sound installation in our, in our theater space here.
And so all of those things are benefits that, you know, aren't on the contract, are not in the job description, but are things that I really love about working for an institution like this.
It sounds like there must be some flexibility then, like if the theater is not in use or if the performance spaces are not in use, you can stage your own projects in there.
Yes. Yeah.
Excellent. That's actually how I learned to record. I went to school at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and I studied mathematics, but while I was there, I also played in a band, and it was the, you know, mid, late nineties. So recording your own band was not an unusual thing. And that's how I started learning how to record. But there was a set of four recording classes you could take that was part of the music school, but you couldn't get a major or a minor in recording.
You could just take those four classes the studio was adjacent to the recital hall where all of the music school students did their, their end of year performances. Right. End of semester performances. if there was nothing going on in the recital hall, you could use the studio. So I would I would invite my friends bands in to come from whatever, 8:00 PM until 6:00 AM we'd get to be in there and, you know, sometimes in the recital hall space and sometimes in the recording studio space.
But that's, that was completely to me learning how to conduct a recording session.
Yeah. That's great. I, I mean, I love those stories. I, I love that, that access that, you know, I feel like there's, there's so much unused space and time in our world that there's a theater project in New York that was doing for a while, they would get donations of vacant storefronts and they would have performances there. And oftentimes they weren't even really, like, they were more like an installation, I guess, where, you know, it, it wasn't necessarily happening at a specific time.
But it was also accessible to just the random passerby who would walk by and see this weird thing happening in a storefront. But that's cool. I didn't know about that, about how you got into recording.
Yeah. Yeah, it was the, those free hours were totally critical.
Yeah.
What one thing that you wish your students understood about either just about money generally or about the careers that they are studying to, to learn?
Well, most of my students, you know, nine, I would say 99%, maybe a hundred percent of my students, won't go into theater as, or music as a profession. They're here to learn electrical engineering, computer science, mechanical engineering, physics, aeronautical en engineering. They're amazing kids. Really, really bright and hardworking people.
And, I think that I would, and this is maybe not good financial advice, but the jobs that I've really valued in my life are the ones that I've worked with people that, that I respect and, and enjoy spending time with. And so if you find yourself working with people that you don't respect or don't enjoy being with, regardless of how well you're being compensated for that time, I would not do that.
And the, the jobs where I've been trusted and allowed to express myself however that may be, have been the best jobs for me. And you know, in, in my case, that's usually, that's usually music in one way or another, whether performing or, or composing or even just working with sound. So those are the kinds of situations that have been most rewarding for me.
And often I found that, those situations have, the circumstances have allowed me to do my best work, which has meant that the project in general has been more successful. And so, you know, I, I, I do believe that, if the circumstances are such that people can find themselves doing really good work, then that can be financially successful as well.
It, it seems like what you're describing is almost like, a way kind of like resume building. Like you do the thing that's very satisfying you're getting yourself established, and then you use that satisfying thing and the work you did to demonstrate like. I can do this kind of work and that gets you more, more work in the future. that make sense?
Totally. And yeah, and not all of that work is gonna be the, you know, that same satisfying, like, exhilarating making new things. That's where the repetition comes in. But it's not bad to get paid for repeating things that you do well and and work for other people as well.
Yeah. You mentioned a couple of real estate decisions that you, you know, in terms of like getting out of that co-op. You said maybe you regretted that a little, or that when you got the place in the Catskills that perhaps you were a little naive about what it took. So I'm not gonna say that... I mean, whatever you're living with a regret necessarily, but is there anything when you look back, financial decision, that stands out as being a particularly excellent one?
Let me think.
It can also be something you decided not to do.
Yeah. I don't know. I've always, I've never been a, like a, a planner at least in terms of money, I, I have never really, it's never engaged my imagination very much. Yeah, it's, it's almost like, you know, you're the title of your podcast, the, The Thing We Never Talk About. And for me it's o often not to my benefit, I would say, but it's the thing I, I never think about unless I have to. You know, I do think that I took out loans for, for grad school, and that has benefited me for sure.
I, I don't know if that's true for everybody, but I wasn't ready to get that orchestra job or whatever after my undergrad. And I was fortunate to be admitted to a really prestigious grad school that again, you know, opened doors for me later in life, where I could say I went to Julliard and people again make assumptions about my, my abilities based on that. And that, that's a helpful thing.
So I think in my case, just because, you know, again, resume, material, getting that degree from, from Julliard was, was a good thing. And, you know, required loans to, to do it. And I, I have a, I have another friend who, who has a, a, a similar story where she went to Columbia for grad school and is a stage manager and we know each other because she worked with the SITI company as well.
And she fairly bluntly described it as she paid for a, a degree from Columbia and met the SITI company and started working with them. And that also was her bridge to a, a professional career. So not necessarily for everybody, but it was a benefit for me.
Yeah, I, there's a lot of people talking these days about how obviously the price of education has skyrocketed and that not any usefulness anymore in participating in that system. And I guess my feeling is that when it comes to the undergrad, if you've got the money to throw at, you know, an Ivy League, whatever, like do it. But if, not, like, I don't think anybody is disappointed if you go to a more school for your undergrad.
But I think where it really matters is if you're going for a postgraduate degree and then. You know, nobody cares about a business, you know, an MBA from State, but they care a lot about an MBA from Harvard or Stanford or whatever. You know, it's like then having that on your resume, really, it really a value add.
It's an indication of, of a certain competence at least. And that was that, you know, I was a direct that was said to me directly by the woman who hired me to teach at Indiana University Southeast, who was also a Juilliard grad who said, I know what you went through. You may not be, you may not be everything, but I know you, you know, I know what you did. So yeah, I, I, I agree with that. And I think it's also about building connections, often with, with your fellow students in those places.
And maybe those have to be maintained like, I left New York for eight years, and when I came back I didn't know anybody or the people that I knew had their own networks and their own things built and didn't really need an extra viola player or whatever.
Yeah. You mentioned a minute ago how you just sort of don't think about money until you have to. Is there anything you think you do especially well in your financial life? I.
I would say I generally don't spend money needlessly. Yeah, I'm fairly frugal. I guess I.
How much is that is like just your personal aesthetic of like, you know, I just don't need a lot of stuff versus so many years of having to hustle and living cheaply.
It's a combination for sure. Yeah, I, I think I in general have more stuff than I need already, and having kids only like quadrupled it, if not more. So yeah, I, I often find myself thinking, you know, I'm excited about this thing, but, but I don't really need it. And then, yeah, just trying generally to keep that in in mind for myself of, do I really need it? How much, how happy is it gonna make me? Or, you know, is it a tool that I can use going forward or, yeah.
Yeah, reading a lot about that lately in terms of spending for, you know, we can just call it fulfillment versus happiness, I guess. Like, you make a new purchase and it makes you feel happy for seconds and then it becomes another thing that's on your shelf or in your closet or whatever and you know, are you gonna get repeated use or repeated satisfaction out of it?
And, I don't really have a unified theory of that, but I almost feel like as an experiment, if you just spent for fulfillment for, call it three months and almost didn't worry about the dollar amount, but just not consumerism, more purchasing to make your life genuinely better.
I wonder if that wouldn't work out being a, a really smart financial decision anyway, because lots and lots and lots of stuff that seems really exciting that you could spend your money on, really move the needle in terms of your quality of life.
Yeah, I mean, I, it just makes me think of my kids and that are like, just little acquisition monsters that, you know, they, they go in a store and particularly my younger son will just, he'll find something that he really, really wants. And two days later it's in the back of the closet. But I, I, I, I'm not opposed to spending for pleasure. Like, I, I do think a treat every once in a while is, is a good thing in the, in the world.
Yeah, totally. there anything you know now that you wish you knew 15 or 20 years ago?
I think that yeah, I'd, I'd like to say I wish I had known to, to start putting, to start investing some money even minimal amounts, a longer time ago. I didn't, I never really invested and so now I have a retirement account that's that's doing okay that, that MIT is thinking about for me.
And I was told, my parents told me, but it, it was just never something that I could get any real enthusiasm about or, or sort of interest in following through or making the phone call or finding someone to help me with.
Yeah. I didn't know about it at all really until my early thirties, I would say. And I always felt like that was something that other people with normal jobs did, or like, you know, people with 4 0 1 Ks or like that's for other people and it's not for people like me. So
yeah.
have the same feeling. I've, I grew up a farm and I started working very young and I was always good at saving money and could keep money in my bank account, but didn't know anything at all about investing. I wish I knew that you could do it. I didn't even think it was possible for someone like me to do it at all.
Yeah.
What's something you really enjoy that's cheap or free?
Hmm. The library. The library is awesome. I like riding my bike. That's pretty cheap. And walking, yeah, walking outside in the Catskills and nature is, is always pretty great.
Can I ask you this? It's kind of skipping back chronologically. I know most classical musicians really prize and have a close relationship with their instruments and for that reason, often they're not, they're not getting the, the pawn shop guitar. They're getting like a very expensive sometimes pedigreed instrument. How did you choose that and, and how did you afford it?
My parents, my dad particularly, was forward thinking about, about saving and investing. And he started putting money aside for an instrument, I would say fairly soon after, after it was apparent that I was serious about it. So I think it must have been in my freshman or sophomore year of high school, they bought me a nice student instrument, which at the time I think was in the neighborhood of 2,500 bucks, which was, you know, not a insignificant amount of money for my family at the time.
But he was, you know, he was putting money aside from his business as he is a electrical contractor. And had gotten some advice from his accountant, I think essentially to, we were, all the kids and my mom, were on the payroll of Frederickson Electric, from a very early age. So he was putting us, you know, paying us as much as he could and just making a savings account for our expenses, like clothes and, and then they really became instrument funds.
And I worked for him for a couple summers and saved a lot of that money for a better instrument. But I played that viola all through high school and undergrad. And it wasn't until grad school that I found the instrument that I'm playing now. And I think was a combination of, of saving and just I think my dad particularly putting money in regularly and probably making up the difference. I don't recall the exact details when I found the instrument that I, I'm playing now.
But it was, yeah, it was like, I had a teacher who, my high school teacher who said, you know, your first professional instrument is probably going to cost around the amount of a new car. Like not a nice new car, just a, you know, a Toyota Corolla or something like that. And that was about the price range when I, got that viola in 1994, I think. So yeah, really just fortunate to have my parents sort of setting me up with the tool that I needed for, for a career as a musician,
Yeah. Is it common or do you know people, classical musicians who or collect multiple instruments, or is it kind of like you get your one and that's yours for the rest of your life?
some people definitely do. Yeah, some people, I think collect them. or, Usually most people, I think string players have a, a primary instrument that's the, the one they use most of the time. But yeah, I've known, definitely known people who acquire them and sell them regularly. And they tend to appreciate, is my understanding. You know, they, the older they get, the more valuable usually.
Cool. Well, Christian, I end every conversation with a question from the person I'm speaking with. Yours was one of the best. You asked me, how are you making coffee these days? And I have a very detailed answer for you.
I'm certain that you do. But I am really curious.
It starts with the roast. So I roast my own coffee. I have a very entry level coffee roaster. I'm spacing on the name of the company, but it's sort of like a glorified hot air popper. It's shoots air and spin in a circle and I roast my own coffee and what I do because, in the pandemic I started having real problems with sleep. So I cut way back on my caffeine now, so I roast half regular, half decaf.
And I source my beans through Sweet Maria's, which is pretty much the only place for consumers to get green coffee beans in the us. There's not really another, as far as I can tell, not really another competitor to them, and they get pretty good beans. But I, I roast 400 grams at a time in four batches of a hundred grams and it's half decaf, half caffeinated. And I'm doing all pour overs. I still have my old espresso machine, but I seldom if ever use it. So I'm doing pour overs.
So I'm doing a fairly fine grind, not as fine as espresso, but fairly fine. And this is the ratio of beans to coffee that I'm at these days is I do about 10 grams of coffee for 250 grams of hot water, you know, for, for one cup. So if I'm doing two, I'll just double that and that's about where I am. And I am in a, in a way, I'm a little bit of like a jack of all trades where like I know how to roast my coffee and make my coffee well enough that I'm very happy with it.
And I know I could a lot of time into it incrementally better either by, you know, really getting into the roasting or whatever. But it's good enough for me. And it's the same as if I go to my favorite cafes in America, but it's at least as good as most cafes in America. So I'm happy with that.
Nice. Do you change the region that your beans are coming from around?
I do. There's places where you can find this with just a Google search, but what I look for is, you can find that correspond to calendars or calendars that correspond to maps that show you which countries are harvesting at during which months, and, and then. If you find a really good one, it shows the harvest, and then it shows the export time.
Hmm.
know, so if they're harvesting, I don't know, I'm, I, I don't have it off the top of my head, but let's say they're harvesting in Ethiopia right now. That means that we're not actually gonna get those beans for, you know, two weeks to a month. So you can't just look at who's harvesting now. You have to add in extra time to see like what's actually arriving, because you can, you could have a very desirable region, but end up buying like last year's crop, which isn't bad.
Green coffee stays good for a long time, and, but once it's roasted, it starts to go bad. So it's not like if you're getting last year's harvest, it's bad. It's just not, you know, the, the super fresh.
And the roaster, is that something that you use in your kitchen or do you use it in the garage, or where, where do you roast? I.
I do it in the kitchen. I, have in our garage a room off the back of the garage that right now is just storage, but I want to turn that into my workshop. And I think I will roast there because when you roast coffee, even though there's no smoke, there's so much particulate in the air that it sets off the smoke detectors. So I would like to be able do it somewhere where I don't have to get out the step stool and take down all the fire, the smoke alarms before I do it.
I totally understand that, and I set the smoke alarms off at least once a month with cooking. But
Yeah.
yeah, that's, that's something that I, it's high on the list of desirable things for me and in a house is, a, a, range top exhaust fan that actually vents outside and not just directly back into the kitchen.
Yeah. We could use an upgrade in that department. We've got, ours does vent outside, but it's mostly ineffective.
All right. Well, yeah, I figured you still had a, a very specific coffee situation, so I'm glad to hear that. And has the, has the half caf seen helped with your sleep?
It's, honestly, it's a combination of things like, it's really hard to point to just one thing that's helped. But try to not have any caffeine after 9:00 AM which most days I stick to that. I also, if I exercise and stretch and meditate, that helps. If I, you know, don't have alcohol after dinner, that helps. So it's, it's a combination of things. I couldn't say exactly that does the trick, but I know that I can't do I used to do, which was drink coffee at all hours of the day.
And, you know, when I was, certainly, when I was young and I was in the studio, you'd drink, drink coffee all day long, but then even on tour I would, know, be having coffee between dinner and when the show started. And I just, I can't do that anymore.
Yeah. Our bodies are, uh, not as resilient as they used to be.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have you heard this thing that, there was some study that came out last year that said there's, I don't know how many different points in life where you age really dramatically over a short period of time. And one of those periods of time was 42. And I think at the time that I heard about it, I was 44 and I was like, oh, that's why every time I hurt myself, like I used to just, you know, I'd hurt myself and take it easy for two weeks and be back to normal.
And now it's like, oh man, that, that tendon is still sore. It's six months later. How did that happen?
do you remember any of the other points?
Well, glasses, that's a big one where people, especially people who have never had glasses, you know, obviously if you've had glasses your whole life, then over time they get stronger. But I. You know, that was one of 'em. People who never needed glasses need them all of a sudden. A lot of it has to do with metabolism. So everything that you'd expect around what you eat and how much you exercise and things like that.
Yeah, it's been, it's been a number of years now, but reading glasses are totally necessary anymore for me.
Yeah. Cool. Well, thanks so much Christian. I appreciate your time.
it's great talking with you take care.
I will. You too.
Thank you. Bye.
All right. Bye. In terms of charting your own path, Christian really serves as a shining example in my book anyway. I want to emphasize again just how unusual it is for a professional string player to write, perform, and record their own music. It's sort of taken for granted that bands do that, but that's very far from the herd when it comes to what we might call classical music or classically trained musicians.
That level of dedication to independence is impressive, and I'm extremely grateful to Christian for coming on the show and sharing his story. All right. That's it for this week. Let's fire away some disclosures. The Thing We Never Talk About is for educational and entertainment purposes only. It's not legal, investment or tax advice. People on the show, including yours, truly may have interests for or against any investments discussed.
So do yourself a favor and don't make any decisions based on what you hear on this or any podcast. If you have a money or a finance question you'd like answered in a future episode, please drop me a line at podcast@iselerfinancial.com. Again, that's podcast@iselerfinancial.com and Iseler is spelled of course i-S-E-L-E-R.
If you like what you hear, please like and subscribe to this show wherever you get your podcasts, and you can get my insights on money and more delivered directly to your inbox by subscribing to my Keep It Easy newsletter at iselerfinancial.com/newsletter. Thanks for listening. I really appreciate it and I appreciate you.