The premise
Twenty years of answering to a title, and forgetting the person under it
“I’ve spent roughly twenty years as a music director and keyboardist, leading bands across Pop, Country, and Rock. I’ve stood in front of a few hundred people and in front of tens of thousands. I’ve circled up backstage more times than I could ever count, said the same chant before more shows than I can remember, and built entire careers’ worth of forty five minute sets out of nothing but a set list and a deadline.”
“This book is not really about touring, even though touring is the only language I have to tell it in. It’s about what happens to a person when the job becomes so big it starts answering questions that were never really about the job at all. Who am I when nobody needs anything from me. What do I actually believe, underneath the title on my badge. What have I traded, quietly, over years, without ever deciding to trade it.”
“Those questions don’t belong to musicians any more than they belong to nurses, teachers, parents, or anyone else who has ever poured themselves into a role until the role and the person underneath it got hard to tell apart. If that’s you, whatever your version of the road looks like, I wrote this for you, not just for people who’ve ever set foot on a tour bus.”
You were a whole person before any of that started, and you still are one now, buried under it or not. From the introduction
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Be there when it lands
Leave an email and you’ll hear when More Than The Band is out, plus early excerpts and where Aaron is speaking next. Nothing else, and you can leave any time.
Speaking
Bring the conversation to your room
Aaron Farmer is a composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist based in Nashville, and spent nineteen years as a touring Music Director, and has worked with Backstreet Boys, fun.’s Nate Ruess, Florida Georgia Line, Mat Kearney, Tyler Hubbard, eaJ, and Forest Blakk. He runs Sumari, a boutique composition and sound design studio, and is a repeat guest speaker at Berklee College of Music.
He talks about what the road taught him about people: how crews burn out quietly, why rest is infrastructure and not a reward, and what it costs to become the role everyone depends on. The talks work for music schools and conservatories, touring and live-event teams, creative agencies, and any organization asking a lot of a small number of people.
- The cost of always onWhat sleep debt does to a team long before anyone calls it burnout
- Rest as infrastructureBuilding recovery into a schedule instead of hoping for it
- Leading without burning people downPeople-first direction under real deadlines and real pressure
- Who you are when the role endsIdentity, transition, and coming home from a long-haul career
- Mental health in creative industriesTalking about it honestly, without a clinical degree or a slide deck full of platitudes
Tell me the date, the room, and who’s in it. Keynotes, workshops, panels, and campus visits.