A Diary Made of Sound
Every once in a while on a walk — which I do daily, over 2000 days now, but that’s another entry entirely — I get brazen enough (courage is too strong a word) to listen through some of my demos.
One of the cool things about recording a lot of music, which I’ve never seen anyone talk about anywhere, is that you know you made it, but you have no memory of making it, if you do enough volume.
Like: “Hey, I remember that guy,” especially with instrumentals. I don’t know the notes. I don’t know when I did it. (This is why I’m trying to keep better notes on my music.) But I definitely know that I did it, and I can remember the feeling.
It’s like this other level of diary — a diary of feelings — that’s really hard to explain. It’s totally like hearing an old song from high school or when you were a kid and remembering exactly how you felt. Except this time you’re the one who made the thing.
I’d say it’s better than a written journal, because you can shape words, edit them, idealize them, clean them up. And if you’re anything like me, you’re always convinced there’s some dastardly person trying to steal your innermost thoughts.
With music, especially the wordless stuff, the feelings are totally protected. They’re sealed inside the sound.
I do wonder if people listening to these demos can connect with the feeling. I think the answer is yes. That’s one of the real points of music: trying to share those feelings with other people. And it’s on another level if there are no words. You can connect to words in a deep way, sure, but the instrumental world is something else entirely.
And as you can tell from this entry, it’s basically impossible to describe.