You Need to Shelve Your Art Right Now
OK before you protest today’s blog entry just know that this is coming from years of experience in art. It has been my experience through my own dealings and works, talking to other artists, talking to musicians, all this kind of stuff, the number one thing you can grant yourself for better art is a grace period.
So you’ve done a bunch of work. You’ve painted or you’ve recorded or you’ve drawn or you’ve pooped something out, whatever. You need to put the work away for a specified amount of time. I don’t really know how long that is, but that’s something you’re going to have to figure out for yourself.
It can be super short, but you have to cleanse the pallet. You have to have a wafer. You must have some ginger. Get totally away from it and totally back to where you’ve forgotten some things about it.
Sometimes I’ll come back to a piece of music and I don’t remember making it at all. So for a while I’ve kept pretty good notes on something, but I never read them.
This is kind of that thing where for me, and one thing Sebastian Mullaert told us when I went over and took a class with him, he just records his master and doesn’t worry about the tracks. Besides removing a whole bunch of stress in your life, the commitment aspect is fantastic.
I was doing a track yesterday and I remember saying to myself I sure do hope this ends well. Like I feel like it’s gonna end well. So it wasn’t really hope, it was just I was pretty confident that the way things were going it was going to end well.
And lo and behold it did. It actually ended kind of funny on a weird arp and I was delighted with that.
That’s because I’ve done it enough and I have faith I’ll end up in that kind of place.
But the real point here is that you do have to put it away if you’re going to present the stuff for judgment for other people.
By the way, 75% of my stuff will never see the light of day. They may hear a demo on SoundCloud, but for release I go with the top 25%. Even if I think 50% is good, I cut out what I feel is the worst good stuff.
It’s a ratio that works for me for no reason. I may change it tomorrow. You may read this blog tomorrow, I hope you read it tomorrow, and you may find out that I’ve changed all the rules, which is an argument for my personal rules being meaningless expect at the time of application.
It reminds me of that meme, the picture of the Milky Way that says "you are here arguing with people on the Internet about synths."
I think about that when I’m making music because I'm a nobody-cares kind of guy. I don’t get sad about it. I find great comfort in the fact that nobody cares, because if you can drag somebody across the line and they start caring, that’s when your life starts to change through whatever it is that you're making.
Because I’m not unconvinced at 54 years old that I may have more music ahead of me than less. Nothing tells me that this is not the case.
Anyway invest some time to figure out what your personal grace period is. It pays off in spades.