Creativity isn’t a asset or a tool. It’s your life force. I am just starting to understand that now.
For too many years I had a strong ideas about the kinds of songs I wanted to create and such high standards that I ended up blocking myself off from the flow.
It’s too easy to compare yourself to your favorite artist and feel that you’ll never be good enough to come even close to what they’ve done.
That’s what I did with the majority of my energy. I planned on becoming something that I had no idea how I would ever become. It was foolish. Understandable but foolish.
In school, we learn to plan things, we learn that hard work is where results come from, but there are different kinds of hard work.
There’s hard work from a place of scarcity, where you feel not enough and you need to get better at all costs otherwise there’s no such thing as success. This might work if you put in more time than anyone else and work as efficiently as you can. That’s a very competitive game with more losers than winners thoguh.
And then though there’s nothing that really makes you stand apart. The hard work itself doesn’t build your character.
This is where exploration and fun come in. You’re curiosity will take you places that no one else is going. It makes you interesting. Without it you’re nothing really.
Hard work from an inspired state, the kind that doesn’t feel like hard work, that’s how you become something special. When you stop worrying about being good enough, you start to like yourself more because the things you share are things that no one else could express.
For years my creativity just barely trickled.… a new song every year or two and musical evolution at a snail’s pace, goals piling up without any real progress. Then for a long time I focused on low stakes, only posting here where it was safe, and never building anything to last more than a week. Now, as if someone a switch, I have ideas coming to me every day and a lot of these ideas are solid with a ton of potential to grow over time.
I embrace my lo-fi imperfections. I finally I feel like I love making things, writing songs, jamming, making videos like these and putting my ideas or feelings into words.
I may not be Prince but I think I can finally understand the artistic headspace it took for him to be able to write a song a day. One song a day doesn’t sound hard to me at all right now.
Of course, giving it time to breathe, going back and revisiting it from a different headspace, playing around with it and testing out to see what works and what doesn’t can yield even greater results, but I feel like right now, if I sat in the studio for a week with nothing else on my schedule, I could put out a pretty decent album.
If I didn’t have other things I wanted to do, I could do that nonstop, each release greater than the last.
It’s sometimes hard to imagine making something as incredible as some of Bjork or Tom Waits’s work. But that’s because I am not Bjork or Tom Waits. I have my own voice.
It’s impossible to imagine what my best work would sound like until I am in the middle of making it. I know I’ll make it when I’m having fun, not stressed out about not being where I should be as an artist. Neither Tom Waits nor Bjork were likely fully content with their abilities when they wrote some of their best work. Even if they were, there surely were other geniuses who weren’t.
You learn how to be ready for it and you start making and it keeps getting better, or more in aignment with what you are moving towards.
I’ve decided to take another stab at the vlogging and podcast channel that I started during the whole Covid era. I had put up a few experimental shorts a few weeks ago, but this is the first long form video I’ve made in over a year.
It combines my music, ideas and feelings similar to what I share in a blog, and my experiments with video editing. The result is still lo-fi but I feel it’s much more powerful than a lot of the polished work out there on the internet and way more in line with what I enjoy doing than previous vlogs.
It goes more into this whole topic about how I am coming to approach creativity and art. All likes and comments appreciated, and I hope it helps someone who is feeling a lack of confidence in their work.
I Was Doing Art Wrong:
And keep an eye out for a new live album from I+Everything next week!
