After leaving his career as a biologist to pursue songwriting full-time in the late 1970's, he often had to support is family with odd jobs while waiting for small royalty checks from his songs. Today, his songs are found on more than 52 million records, most sung by Garth Brooks. A songwriter can count on performance royalties, but that's the only thing we can count on. Bastian says the problems facing his profession, however, don't deter most songwriters. We can't see anything but that rainbow - even when it's raining on us.
All songwriters have ups and downs in their careers.
Sometimes you can go for a long time without earning anything. I've been poor several times in my life. Sometimes I would have to take odd jobs to catch up on the house payments or keep them from coming after the car. Doyle advanced Bastian money and introduced him to Garth Brooks. Garth went home with me, and we wrote five songs in five days.