It seems that everything I do is a works in progress. Whenever I try and do something creative like music or drawing or whatever, each item gets to a point and I stop. I am afraid that whatever next step I take with it will ruin the kind of interesting but certainly not complete work that I have done. I have stacks of drawings that are abstract, but incomplete. I would like to finish them one day, but the fear gets the best of me.
I have started a Works In Progress Bandcamp page to put music that I have recorded but needs to be worked on more. I will add "completed" pieces here whenever one is created. These works fall in the same problems that said drawings fall into. I have always enjoyed creating multilayered loops, and are always meaning to come back to and do something with them. The works on the cassette that came out in late 2018 lived in those forms for almost up to twenty years. I figured they lived in those forms for that long, that they deserve to be released like that.
I fell like most of the music that I do is like a skeleton, there is no meat, no muscle, no skin, no organs, no nervous system. But skeletons themselves are unique, so I'm not saying that I dislike what I make, I just sometimes wish that I could flesh them out more. The other issue I suppose is that most of the loops are dense enough that it is hard to put flesh on them.
I feel like Jerry was this way sometimes. He would be writing constantly, but I don't feel like I have a lot to show for how much he wrote. I have two novels that I am not sure which version is the final version of either. He also said "fuck my novels" when I asked him about them in the hospital. I think for some people its the love of the journey and not the destination that pushes them forward.
I also have days that there is no reason to be doing these and putting them out, no one really listens to them, no one truly enjoys them but myself. But I also feel that there is an audience for everything (maybe...), you just have to find it.
OK, a couple of things: Carl Newman said on Twitter about a song he had just released: "It's done, that is, I've stopped working on it." And I felt like I knew just what he was saying. My own songs tend to follow a trajectory that entails them getting a little closer to what they are supposed to be each time I play them, and the ones I grudgingly call "finished" are the ones that don't seem to want to casually change much anymore. (Notice the passive voice as if I don't make those decisions myself).
ReplyDeleteAnd the other thing is that I remember reading an interview with Andy Summers about the album he had just made with Robert Fripp where he said something like "I am the bones to this music and he is the flesh." ...Which is what came to my mind while reading your description of your music.
I like the tracks you have uploaded.
I have also found that making music is one thing and doing anything with what you have made is quite another, and that I never seemed to develop the same obsession for the using of the parts that drove their creation...
It was good to hear from you again.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
Thanks for the reply and the listen Doug! I appreciate it!
DeleteI need to work on stringing ideas together, I tend to find something circular to play, even just acoustically, and tend not to be able to add to it. Part of my problem is lack of musical knowledge, but I also like having a lack of it too. Very much an internal fight. Musical knowledge is kinda like religions for me, the more you know, the less interesting it gets to a degree. i kinda like not knowing what I am doing, but can be frustrating as I go through time periods that I feel like I am playing basically the same thing each time I play.
Peter Gabriel has always said that he needs someone else in the studio with him, or he will continually rework songs for years on end. I think with So, Daniel Lanois had to say stop, that it was finished.
Thanks again for reading and listening
Jeff