Tim Russell did the corporate thing on someone else’s terms. Now he’s setting his own direction. He spent his early career traveling around the world developing international business strategies and offices for education companies, with his longest tenure as vice president of NewsBank’s international division, but he always brought his music with him.

“ I did pursue an executive career,” said Russell. “I had a number of positions overseas, but music was always so important to me that no matter where I went, I always made sure that I had music as the outlet.”

It began at an early age, when his mother set him up with a guitar lesson for day camp. He said his first songs were “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” and “Micheal Row the Boat Ashore.”

“But that was the hook,” he said, smiling, “Like a lot of kids, I never really put it down.”

He kept on playing through high school and college — playing in bands along the way, and finding gigs in bars where he could. His international experience started straight out of college, where he found work in Taiwan as a kindergarten teacher. There he also developed curricula and textbooks for English as a second language learners. As he intended, music remained a fixture in his life. 

“It was kind of a big thing for Taiwan at the time,” he explained. “But on Sunday afternoons, I’d go out in front of the museums and just play on the street and draw a crowd. I’d put the guitar case out and was able to make a fair bit of money — enough to sort of support being able to travel around Asia for a couple of years.

“Playing Simon and Garfunkel and Tom Petty was such a novelty out there,” Russell said with a chuckle, conceding that as a Caucasian American travelling in east Asia, it was a unique experience for many of the locals seeing someone like him busking and playing Western tunes.

As Russell traded up the corporate ladder and moved to other companies, he brought the guitar with him, continuing to play evenings and weekends wherever he lived.

“ I had this sort of, this double life,” he recalled. “ The buttoned-down, conservative corporate executive thing, but at the end of the day, the tie comes off and I’ll bust out the guitar and play in a bar and or do recording.”

When he was in Sydney, Australia and Hong Kong, China in the early 2000s, his home studio was his outlet, and as his talents and experience grew, songwriting and studio production and recording became a much larger part of his creative expression. That first foray into production culminated in his first album, which he released about 10 years ago. 

The expansion of the internet around the world opened doors to long-distance collaborations that weren’t possible for a producer before, and more recently, Russell has worked with musicians from places like Ukraine and Bucharest. But his creative process involves a more iterative approach over time, allowing the music to lead his production.

 ”One of the greatest things about the creative process is you can sit down with an idea in mind and you never know where it’s going to take you,” he said. “And that journey — that’s the fun of it. I mean, I love nothing more than kind of following that path.”

The shift to a focus on production came on the heels of Russell reflecting on how he would spend his final stanza, and he set his sights on an eventual career shift in the years leading up to retirement age. He began to realize that before he retired, he wanted to spend the last decade of his working years in positions giving back to the community, as part of a foundation or in government, maybe the Peace Corps or the UN, he thought.

“If you’re working for a publicly traded company, your mission is to increase shareholder value,” he said. “And that’s what you go to work for — I mean, you go to work to pay your own bills, of course, but your contribution to society is increasing shareholder value. As I got older, I just realized that there was more purpose to life than putting another dollar in somebody else’s pocket.”

Russell set that as a goal, and continued following the career trajectory he was on, always honing his music and following that love. In the mid 2010s, Russell and his wife found an opportunity to move to Moore County. His current job allowed him to work from anywhere, so they took it and, in 2017, the couple made the move. 

Initially, the move didn’t change much for Russell. He worked. He played. And he turned his sights back to the goal he set himself in his 30s. He became more involved in the Moore County music community, forming the Moore County Musicians Facebook group in 2019, and eventually stepped away from his job in January of 2024, into semi-retirement, but that didn’t last long. 

At one of his regular gigs, Russell heard that the position of executive director at the Sunrise Theater was vacant. 

“ My wife Natasha said, ‘Oh my gosh, this would be like the perfect, perfect job for you,’” he said. “I’ve always loved the Sunrise. From the minute we arrived here in Southern Pines, I felt this connection, this bond to it.”

He thought it was a long-shot, but he began to examine the Sunrise through a different lens. He wanted to better understand the challenges the theater had faced, he said, but also to find the opportunities. He believes that the changing demographics of the area create a space to “exponentially grow” the arts. He was named the Sunrise Theater’s new executive director in November 2024.

“ When the first first public opening about the executive director role came in, my resume was in five seconds later,” said Russell. “I think it’s the perfect fit for a lot of reasons. I love the theater and it has such a special place in this town. I really feel like there’s so much we can do, so yeah, it’s really like a dream come true.”

As executive director, Russell finds himself in the role he dreamt for himself two decades ago. He sees his new role as an extension of work he and other musicians have been doing to broaden and deepen the community’s experiences of art and music. The role of any director of a 501c3 nonprofit organization is to ensure the future of the organization through operational efficiency and primarily through fundraising. In the case of the Sunrise Theater, much of that fundraising happens through programs like First Friday and other live music, theater rentals for events, live theater productions and even movie tickets. 

Russell said that movie tickets are a great example of the challenges the theater has faced in recent years. As the market’s tastes and methods for watching movies have shifted, theater ticket purchases, once one of the main sources of revenue for the nonprofit, have declined. In his initial assessment and discussions with his board of directors he found some core aspects of the theater mirror some of his corporate experience, at least operationally, and that creates opportunities for him to draw on that experience to improve operations. 

However, he said that like him, many people are involved with the theater not for a paycheck, but because they care, and one of his short-term goals is to find how the theater can reflect those interests to show the organization’s appreciation for the support it receives every year.

“ This is the community’s theatre and we want to serve the community,” said Russell. “We want to be here and provide the kind of programming and the experience that this community wants. We’re going to do a big survey in the early part of the year to really gauge and, hopefully, get a lot of community feedback in terms of what they want. So we can see as many people as we possibly can at the theater.”

Russell is ready to let the community lay out the path for the theater to follow. 

He said he’s also in the final stages of his next album, possibly readying for release in early Spring. The as-yet-unnamed album will span styles of music that he has drawn inspiration from over the years, “ an eclectic, schizophrenic mix of song styles from rock to jazz to bossa nova to R&B to big band to swing to country.”

Whatever the music, Russell is done playing the melodies of the c-suite, and now he’s ready to riff on his passion.