Open-mike nights in the UK. Indifferent audiences in smoky Irish venues. Paying your way to the US, hiring a car, then chasing the headline act from town to town - and battling a storm to drive down the New Jersey turnpike to Baltimore only to play to the road crew.
It takes resilience, determination and perhaps a little masochism to lay your life on the line only for it to be trampled on. Susan Enan, a Belfast-based singer- songwriter, seems to be that type of person.
Originally from Oxfordshire, Enan has been living in Belfast for the best part of 10 years. A degree in music obtained in Liverpool brought her and her love of Woody Guthrie and traditional Irish music to Belfast to stay with friends of friends.
Enan says she has such friends all over the world, so it's no surprise to hear she plans to move on soon. She is ambitious to head somewhere fresh and new, somewhere, she intimates genteelly, equal to her sense of adventure.
"I've come to the conclusion over the past few years that Belfast is such a small place, and nothing in my life or what I'm doing at the moment has involved the city except me living there. I don't have family, and it's very hard to gig there." She has, she says, friends in Nashville, where she has spent time of late. "You can't swing a cat without meeting someone involved in the industry, and I'm at a point where I need the likes of a proper booking agent and a lawyer. I'm never going to find one where I am."
For the past couple of years Enan has been popping up in Dublin and beyond at the most inopportune times; support slots can be a hellish proposition for the ambitious and the truly talented. Beery voices belonging to people who have paid good money to spoil music fans' enjoyment are something Enan has had to put up with for some time.
Not that she shows she minds; it's all part of her very individual journey, which appears to be equal parts spiritual and temporal.
Last year she gave more than 100 performances, including touring in the US with the cultish and highly rated Over the Rhine. "That was amazing in some ways but also very difficult, in that it was a huge learning curve about the music industry.
I found out about some things that people intent on making a career in music really don't want to know about: the business side, the harsh reality, the fact that you suddenly realise you need a lawyer."
Equally, she knows what makes her music tick: layers. "Any good form of art should have something you see on the surface, but then underneath there's more to see - if you want to see it. That's the great thing about television shows such as The Simpsons: kids can laugh at it, but adults can detect certain references. That's essentially what I'm aiming for in my music, to try and write simple stuff that's very accessible to people right away, but if they want to keep listening they can get more out of it."
How does she do that? Simple, she says. "It's not necessarily keeping simple the words you use but keeping your subject matter very, very clear. It's what someone like Bono does: he tends to say the same things over and over again but writes them in a different way, using different images."
Enan has a firm idea of what she wants from life.
"The further you get into it the less you want to give it up, especially when things get better. I'd be lying if I said that when I was in the States there wasn't one time when I thought, what am I doing? Driving from New York to Baltimore through snowstorms and getting to Baltimore to a venue where hardly anyone came because of the bad weather - and I'd had enough, I was exhausted - that was a low point. You think if this is what it's about, then I want a better quality of life. But then you get back to normal life and you want to do it all over again."
Is she lucky, plucky or both in her pursuit of her songwriting career? "If you want things bad enough," she says, "you'll find a way."
