You wear what you want every day of the week and nobody much cares. Frankly, it's gotten to the point where if I've got long pants on between Memorial Day and Labor Day, my kids want to know who I'm meeting with. (If I'm wearing a tie, they want to know who died.)

And so yesterday evening, when I arrived home wearing pants that weren't jeans and shoes that weren't sneakers, my family knew that something was up.

"Where'd you go today?," my ten-year-old son Brayden asked over dinner. I told him that I drove to see someone in Pickerington (pronounced "Pink-er-ington" for those of you not-raised in normal-speaking parts of the world), a city about 20 miles away.

"How long did it take you to drive there?," he asked.

"About an hour each way," I said. "Rounding-up the time and not explaining that there was heavy traffic while I was on the road.

I could see that the wheels were now turning inside Brayden's fourth-grade brain.

"Wait a second," he said. "Why did it take you one hour to drive just 20 miles, when we drove to New York City in 8 hours… and that's a thousand miles away?"

Now I was confused. Even ignoring the implication that my Ford Explorer could ever reach 250 miles per hour – something I doubt it could do if you dropped it out of an airplane – we live in Columbus, Ohio; New York City is only about 600 miles away.

So I asked him, "What makes you think New York is a thousand miles from here?"

"Easy. In that song Hey There Delilah , the guys sings: 'What's it like in New York City? I'm a thousand miles away, but girl tonight you look so pretty.'"

His reasoning was based on a bad assumption, of course, but I had to admit, in a kind of topsy-turvy, me-centric way, it almost made sense. (The thought crossed my mind that he may play an important media relations role in some future White House administration.)

For an eight-year-old, it's pretty normal to assume that the world revolves around you and everybody else shares your same perspective. Unfortunately, for musicians of any age, the same (flawed) assumption is often at work.

Here's what I mean. Many musicians – whether they say it out loud or even consciously realize it – work from the belief that the way they're organized, the people they've got on board, and the products and services they sell, are of keen interest to their fan-base.

It's a bad assumption. Here are some examples of how it often plays out:

• Your musical content formula matches the structure of your band. Time, Inc. publishes Sports Illustrated for Kids, Woman's Weekly and Land Rover World . And yet I think you'd agree that if they ever tried to combine the three into one magazine, they'd be very successful in appealing to nobody.

Settle on a clear, consistent, recognizable sound and stick to it time after time. Be willing to ignore certain groups of potential fans in the name of building a loyal following among others.

Yes it is. The problem, however, is that the minute your fans see you wander from the bright and cheery land of useful, unbiased information into the cold and calculating campaign bus of self-promoting half-truths, you'll lose them (sorry about the metaphors; I think I'm watching too much political coverage).

Remember, you're building relationships, not closing today's sale – and relationship building is a strategy which in the long run is easier, more profitable and more long-lasting than trying to work the room at every turn.

Here's the bottom line. If you want people to anticipate, open, read and pass along your music (and I'm guessing that you do), you need to put yourself in the shoes of your readers. Try to offer music that will help them live their lives better or will influence them in a way that you may never know, and your next fan will never be more than a few miles away.