Today I had a few classes across the city and tomorrow is a pretty packed schedule too so I’ve gotta put music on hold. It can be a bit frustrating because right now I am so focused on working on this album but then if I rest properly and keep a realistic deadline the frustration turns into motivation.
Since I have a 45 minute train ride I put the song I am least comfortable with on repeat so I can really internalize the lyrics.
Last night I had some of my weak points pointed out to me by my partner and it was uncomfortable to hear because I don’t think she realizes how difficult it is to balance all these things at once. She has a tendency to leave her respect and love and positive feelings unspoken to be expressed in other ways besides words which I don’t mind because words are not everything. But the negative stuff is always put into words and so it can feel a bit discouraging at times.
It also doesn’t help that she was classically trained in music according to strict rules and I come from an anarchistic tradition of music and art where the rules are whatever you want them to be.
The fist band I knew many songs by was the Beatles. They couldn’t read music and hardly knew what they were doing other than the bare essentials (although I’m sure they picked things up over time and probably understood music a lot better during their solo careers). Most people don’t realize that.
The Beatles knew how to mess around and captured it and went over and over it to find meaning and beauty and wit inside of a mess of random ideas they were hard workers and they were talented but they didn’t follow the rules at all, they didn’t even know the rules very well. They had producers to clean up their mess at the end, plus four members so they could all focus on their own role.
That was just a prelude to the chaos.
I come from the tradition of chaotic emotion being slowly carved into something powerful, in more ways that I even realize, because I grew up with the Beatles as a kind of North Star even if I wasn’t a huge fan myself. Not only that I had Nirvana an grunge music on TV and melodic punk as my own weapon of choice at the time. Not only my favorite underground bands but the bands I heard on the radio or that my classmates were into broke all the rules as I believe artists are meant to, at least when the rules are blocking the passage of honest expression.
Then Bjork came and showed me what it means to appreciate life as an artist, an untethered wild soul who lives life as a child, the way we were all meant to. I suspect Bjork understands music theory relatively well and knows how to produce her own work as I am trying to do, but she creates her own rules for her art.
When I listened to Medulla in the car with my father, he said “this isn’t music!” But my ears disagreed…on half the songs….and on the other half I kind of agreed. Until I spent more time with experimental artists and learned to go out of my comfort zone and appreciate sounds and disharmony the same way I appreciate melody and traditional instruments.
Have you ever hated something at first but sat with it, either of your own will or of someone else’s and come to love it! That’s how I fell in love with At the Drive in and later Mars Volta, with Xiu Xiu or Animal Collective or Tom Waits.
Until you come to love something that you once hated, there is a huge aspect of art that you will never understand.
One of the simpler surface joys of art is to reflect back something about humanity that you can easily appreciate. Raw talent, songs that stick in your head, vivid colors. But when art can help you appreciate something that you never appreciated that’s when you really start to see how powerful it is, and it completely opens your world to beauty all around you.
I think I had the right films and anime and games in my life too to help me realize this. American Beauty and Shawshank Redemption really stuck with me and reinforced this idea that life itself is magical.
Ya there are people into modern art and noise music just trying to assert their “superior taste that you couldn’t possibly understand” but then there are those with a deeper appreciation for life who have trained themselves to find beauty where others refuse to look.
I am not particularly attractive to gruesome bloody things or complete chaos that just tries to shock or overwhelm you, but I love imperfections, I love pain being transformed into something else, I love tragedy that gets to the core of why we feel anything at all, because beauty exists everywhere!
You only feel sad to say goodbye because you love someone. You only feel exhilaration from adventure because part of your soul wants a challenge. Imperfection and challenges are part of the story.
And so I know my voice could be better if I trained and maybe I will one day, and I know I could show off my guitar skills more, I know I could hire someone to hide all my imperfections too, but I’d rather leave them exposed to whatever extent I can find beauty in them.
One of my main goals as an artist is to learn to love myself and to share that journey with other people. So while I’m always striving to be better, perfection can go fuck itself 😝
I’ve taken note of all my weak points and aim to fix them one at a time, but I’m not going to obsess over what’s lacking now or wait another 10 years until I’m ready because you are never going to be good enough if you judge yourself like that.
When I put out my fist EP last year I made a promise to myself, that I’d stop trying to make things perfect and just focus on growing and evolving in a way that felt exciting to me.
The live album that came after that felt like a big step up and now what I’m recording feels like an equally large jump forward.
All I know is that I’m listening to my own music more than I ever had and I get more and more excited to make something new!
A live album APPEARS!
