Next month I’ll head off to the Northeast Regional Folk Alliance (NERFA) conference. Newbies to NERFA (including me, when I was one) often start the process thinking of it as an event that will immediately deliver you a set of gigs (or not, depending on how you do). You quickly learn that that’s not (entirely) how it works. Instead you make a bunch of connections with people – promoters, venues, fellow musicians – and they become important in your networking over time. Eventually you end up with new opportunities, new ideas, and better information because you know these people, but the payoff is over the long term, rather than necessarily immediately. It’s easy to forget that, not only about NERFA, but in any part of trying to make a music career. Every once in awhile it seems like someone bursts onto the scene, having recently been discovered, and that person is suddenly everywhere, getting every award and invited to play in every venue. Even when that does happen (and I’m friends with someone that is sort of happening to) it’s never as sudden as it seems . . . the person in question has almost certainly played piddly coffee shop gigs for years and worked hard to get noticed before it started happening more quickly. And for the rest of us, even folks I would consider successful in this field, it doesn’t happen even that quickly. It really is about getting to know people, making sure they still remember you and think of you when an opportunity comes up, and helping each other out when we respect each others’ music. Again, though, when preparing for NERFA, I briefly forgot that. A lot more of the creation of showcases is happening behind the scenes than has been true in previous years, and I’ve had moments of feeling like I’m not in the in crowd, when lots of the fancy showcases didn’t approach me (or didn’t select me if I approached them). I had booked some showcases, but not as many as I thought would be useful, and not necessarily ones that would draw crowds. And then in the last three days I got asked, seemingly out of the blue, to play three different showcases, all of them the result of long-term networking. One was by a musician whose work I love and who I first met at my first NERFA; we’ve shared a show together since then and really like each other’s songwriting. Another was by a full-time musician I met this summer in Utah when I was there as a finalist in a songwriting contest and he was there as a song school instructor. And the third was by a music presenter who booked me for my very first showcase my very first year at NERFA (which came about because a NERFA-veteran I know from Boston-area music recommended me to her that year since I was new). And she remembered me from four years ago. Not only is my dance card for NERFA now nicely full, but it reminded me that it really is, and will always be, a long game. All of these people I met, not instrumentally, but as being a part of this music community. I’m not going to rise meteorically to songwriting fame. But I am, if I remember to stick it out, going to have opportunities to play music for people who want to listen, by meeting and working with the cool folks who are working for the same goals.