Writing Songs Around a Day Job

I write most of my songs the way most people write a diary entry at 2 AM — honest, slightly embarrassed, impossible to stop once you've started. That's not a pose. It's just when I have the time.

I have a day job in finance. For a long time I treated that as the thing I had to apologise for — the part of the story that didn't fit the artist bio. Now I think it's the opposite. Writing in the margins forces a kind of discipline: you can't wait for inspiration when you only have the hours between 5 PM and 9 AM. You show up, or the song doesn't get written.

It also keeps the writing honest. When music isn't the thing paying your rent, you're not chasing a formula — you're chasing the truth of a Tuesday night. The album came out of that: real hours, real fatigue, real small escapes.

So no, I haven't «quit everything to follow the dream.» I've done something less romantic and, I think, more sustainable: I've built a second life inside the first one. «5 to 9» is the sound of that.