Wealth & Money Quote by Jim Messina

Messina’s line reads like road wisdom, the kind you only earn after watching a “small” decision metastasize into a week of chaos. The plainspoken phrasing is doing the work: “eat up” isn’t poetic, it’s bodily. Time and money don’t simply disappear; they get consumed, fast, by circumstances that feel almost predatory when you’re unready. For a working musician, that image lands because the margins are real. Tours, sessions, gear repairs, crew pay, travel delays, studio overruns: the industry is a machine that runs on logistics, and it charges you for every moment you don’t control.

The intent is practical, but the subtext is about professionalism as survival. “If you weren’t prepared” is less a scold than a confession of having once believed talent could outrun planning. Messina came up in an era when rock was becoming a business with serious overhead - the shift from scrappy gigging to corporate touring, from friends-in-a-van to schedules, contracts, and budgets. Preparation becomes a form of creative protection: you plan not because you’re boring, but because you want the music to be the risky part, not the infrastructure.

There’s also a quiet psychological tell: “I realized” frames the lesson as a turning point, implying prior denial. It’s a musician admitting that freedom has a cost, and that the fastest way to lose artistic agency is to let preventable problems make decisions for you.