The following is a guest post by a new acquaintance and fellow musician, W. Paul Pulsipher. He suggested a collaboration, part of which involves swapping blog posts, and I said, “Why not?” So, here it is. Paul’s essay is a testimony of how his adventures in pursuing his goals in music business have parallelled his faith journey. You can find his contact information at the end of the essay.
The last several years of my musical career have taken some unexpected turns for me. I’ve been playing piano for over 30 years, writing music for almost as long, I do amateur guitar, a little vocals and percussion. Anyone who’s been doing music for as long as I have should know by now to expect the unexpected when you are trying to accomplish something you’ve never done before. After you’ve learned to drive and you take your first big road trip you notice things about the journey that you never would have if you were only the passenger. The same thing has happened with me recently in both long distance driving and in trying to drive my music business forward; and before I really dive in, let me clarify there will be a lot of “we had plans and then God had better plans” throughout this.
When I began my Associates Degree in Music Recording Technology at Salt Lake Community College, I found out that I would need to take two music business classes in order to complete the program. I thought, “great, that’s what I want to do anyways.” At the very beginning of the first one when we were talking about the financial, social and personal impact of starting a music business, I thought I would just dive in head first and see if I could swim. I registered a new business name with the State and just got busy trying to apply the marketing skills I was learning in that class right away. It took a while to gain any momentum and I learned through trial and error (more often error at first) about volume, what a good sales pitch looks like and how to balance catering to the masses while still staying true to my own artistic expression. I learned from a conversation with a Youtube star that gone are the days when you can just approach a talent agent and say, in a manner of speaking, “hey, sell me!” You have to build up your own solid content, followers, subscribers on social media, or whatever else you think you would want an agent to help you sell and then go and basically say to them “I have tons of awesome content for you to use to help sell me and make something from it as well, let’s team up!”
So that is what I started doing. You can find out just how much work I’ve done in that department with the links at the bottom of this page. Fast forward about two years as I graduated from SLCC with a newly developing skill set in composition, recording, mixing, production, songwriting and all that stuff. At first I was confident this was how I wanted to continue, and be done with school. I had spent a long time in a prior season on my life proselytizing the Christian faith, knocking on doors, learning how to approach complete strangers and relate our collective life experiences to any desired subject matter, so surely I could work hard, get into the good old “pounding the pavement” habit and grow my professional presence there in Northern Utah. This is where I begin to get to the “God had better plans” part of this.
After finishing at SLCC, my wife Collette had asked me if I had any intentions of completing another two years to finish a bachelors. In response I kind of poked around with no serious intention of continuing on with more school, but, again, God had better plans than me. You know how it goes with Universities. You send even a whimsical email to a school just kind of poking around to see what they offer, and once you’re in the system, you are “in the system” and they don’t stop emailing you. Well SUU sent me one of those emails and one of them happened to be about their marching band. I had sort of a pleasant, nostalgic laugh about it at first because I was the Pit section leader in my high school marching band about 20 years prior and we won state two years in a row back in the day. I forwarded the email to Collette joking that if we ever when there that might be fun. Her response kind of shocked me. She said she felt the Holy Ghost very clearly say we were supposed to go there!
What!? I was kidding! *Looks up* Really, God? Um… okay I guess! But You’re going to have to make this happen financially because we absolutely do not have the funds to make a move like that anytime soon. It really shocked us both because she loved her job teaching pre-school and did not want to move. I took a leap of faith and registered for fall classes at SUU and, thanks to one miracle after another, a lot of faith and support from family and friends and donating a lot of plasma, we made it down to Cedar City, Utah. We barely made it by for the first little while. Collette’s new job actually ended up falling through because of a really stupid, careless lie from the hiring crew, so we had to rely on welfare type services to get us through our first few months while she found a more sustainable income (which she did) as I continued school in fall of 2023.
It was shifting gears socially, professionally and geographically. But we made it! But during my first two semesters at SUU, things took a turn that actually made me really nervous me at first. I had entered their relatively new Commercial Music program with the intention of getting into their Masters of Music Technology afterwards and then moving back up to Northern Utah where we already had established a strong social and musical network we could easily return to. In my first few semesters of conversations with Dr. Tebbs (head of Commercial Music there), my intent to enter that Master’s program came up one day in his office. Among other things, he mentioned that his observations of my learning style made him think I would do better in an in-person learning environment rather than the online program they had. He was quick to clarify “don’t get me wrong, we have a really good program here, but I wonder if it’s really right for you or not?” After some deliberation, he sort of began to wrap things up by saying, “well, regardless of what you do if you even get a masters degree or not, I think you would do really well professionally in Nashville.” I was a little blown away by his confidence in my abilities and, upon my doubting that out loud, he doubled down and said Nashville would love my Contemporary Christian composition and songwriting style. Well, I was thankful for his confidence, but mentally brushed it off again. But then I walked out of his office and felt the Holy Ghost say very clearly, “I told him to say that.”
Again, I looked up again and thought “What?!… are we doing this again?! Well, okay, but once again You’re going to have to make this work financially because, once again, there is no way we are in a financial place to make this happen on our own any time soon.” This was not just a 300 mile trip within the state. We’re talking about a distance more than 5 times that over the mountains and to a place where neither of us knew anyone at all. I talked about it with Collette and, once again, she got a first impression that surprised her, too, that we were supposed to move in the Spring of 2025 right after I graduated. So we trusted, exercised faith and prepared the best we could. I continued to work on my business and schooling through the next summer (of 2024), got all my Gen Eds out of the way that summer, and got quite a few course overrides with the Music Department and the Honors office to stack several classes on top of their prerequisites, with about 10 classes each semester that fall and spring to graduate by Spring 2025. This was important because she had also gotten an impression from the Holy Ghost a month or so before I finished at SUU that her last day at her job (as a cook for 150 kids a day) was supposed to be May 16th. The only time before this where we had received an exact date like this from God was when we were married… in 2020… during COVID… when every place we wanted to get married was closed on May 22 (our anniversary date). God made that work, too, the place we were married opened up 2 weeks before our planned date and it worked out! I figured He must have a plan to make this work out, too.
Graduation was fantastic. I graduated with Honors, member Phi Kappa Phi, Summa Cum Laude as a part of the very first class of Commercial Music Graduates from SUU. I had found out among all the graduation celebrations and Honors banquets and events. etc. that most of the other Commercial Music grads also had plans to head to Nashville, so no pressure there! But I learned that when you act in faith, God responds. About two weeks after graduation, we still didn’t see any way financially to make such a huge move possible, but then Collette suggested we just act in faith and start packing, even if it’s just stuff we don’t really use a lot. So I did. I began boxing up books I knew I wasn’t going to read any time soon and then crazy started happening! And when I say crazy, I mean it in a very wonderful but stressful way. Things got a quick shove from “whenever” to feeling like “let’s do everything RIGHT NOW!” That very night when I boxed up those books, we got a call from someone who asked to remain anonymous who made an offer I could hardly believe. They said they had stumbled upon some financial resources they didn’t know they had, thought of us, and knew we were trying to find a way to move to Nashville. They basically said “we will cover all your moving costs.”
Once again,. I looked up again, feeling something like “You knew all along, didn’t you?” May 16th was about 2 weeks away at that point so we had to move fast! I won’t go over the whole story, but let’s just put it this way. Getting everything else packed up, my business ready to move, Collette set up with a new job, finding a place that could get our housing application processed fast enough and everything else was a total whirlwind. God made it possible, so it was time to do a huge gear shift both personally and mechanically over the next 3 weeks.
Followed by a series of even more complications and associated miracles from the Lord than I have time to discuss here, we’re in Nashville now, but here are a few key lessons I learned.
1. When God tells you He wants you to do something on a timetable you think is impossible, believe me, He will make a way for it to happen when you act in faith.
2. If you are really serious about wanting to see God work miracles in your life, you need to be ready to accept that your own greatest ideas are most likely not going to be the same as His best ideas.
3. You can make all the plans for your life you want, but when you’re really dedicated to your music and discipleship to Christ, He’s going to ask you to do things that rarely align with what makes sense to you, and believe me, His plans are always better than ours. You just have to be open to making very unexpected changes.
When you are on the gospel path in music, just be ready to shift gears when you least expect it.
For those who want to hear any of the fruits of the Lord’s work through me, click here or look me up on Spotify under W Paul Pulsipher. If you live near Nashville and want to collaborate in person, fill out my contact form at pulsipherproductions.com