Updated: May 30, 2023
This week I got back the first draft of the full set of masters for The Queen of Time!...
The first listen was an amazing and bewildering experience, hearing everything for the 1st and for the 1,000,000th time all at once. Overall I think the tracks sound GREAT and I'm excited to get things released as soon as possible!..
But over the next few days, I started feeling less and less sure that everything was as good as I I wanted it to be... There are a few sections of a few tracks that I find myself wishing I had done differently. "If I just made this one different mixing decision," or "if I hadn't changed this one line..." what if *that* would make the difference between a track you want to skip, and track you want to download? Will I regret it forever if I let my song get published, when I know it could be better?...
I very nearly decided to delay things and go back to the mixes and make a few changes... but at this phase in the project that just doesn't seem realistic. Addressing the things I want to fix would take at least a couple months and now that other people (and money) are involved, it would not be frugal.
As an artist I've always struggled to know when the project is done. Honestly, the anxiety I'm currently experiencing is the thing that's prevented me from releasing work in the past. Yes, I've heard the platitudes- "-your own worst critic", "- work is never complete, merely abandoned." All true, lol... But I feel like being your own worst critic can also be a super power- It compels you to constantly improve and make better stuff. And the more you listen to it- the better the work gets!..
But I also have to understand that I'm constantly growing and changing as a person, and my tastes and preferences and ideas will change over time. If I let the project incubate forever, then the project never feels finished, and it continues rolling forward with me, and never quite catches up with who I am, or what I'm capable of... The decisions I made about a mix last year are not the same decisions I would make now (for better or worse).
There is always going to be *something* that I feel like I want to improve about a project... It's very tempting to keep fixing the next worst thing until... What? I'd like to believe "until everything is prefect" but that's simply impossible. By the time I've truly perfected the original idea, I've moved on as a person, and I may not even be able to recognize what the original idea was.
Ultimately I'm still deciding whether or not to release it in its current form. I don't feel amazing about it, but I know that I almost certainly never will, and that's okay. We release work not so that we can bask in the glow of a job well done- but so that we can learn from and appreciate the human experience of others. Publishing the project means allowing people to actually see this thing I've made, and that's really exciting! But at the same time, I really want the project to be as good as it can be. I'm certain to continue to grow and change as an artist, and publishing this project- calling it done- allows me to do that, but delaying it might allow me to feel more confident in the finished product- which is also really good for the project.
Over the last week, I’ve been doing a lot more reflecting on what it means to publish work.
I heard an interesting perspective recently- A content creator named CJ the X said in a video, “To never publish your art is selfish.” I’d never really considered it that way. I have a lot of work that I’ve never published. For me, I’ve never seen much of a reason to share work publicly- Who cares anyway? Nobody is looking, what’s the point?… I’ve started to realize— The point is that someone else *might* find meaningful value it.
All my life, I’ve been inspired by people and stories and works in the world around me, and experiencing those things has helped me understand myself and grow as a person and an artist. Every artist exists in a big long line of influences from other artists, and from the culture surrounding them. (These lines are more like a web if you really think about it…) If you never publish work, does the line end with you? Do you exist as a point on the web from which nothing else attaches?
It’s not about being self important, it’s about being responsible for the work you’ve consumed and the things you’ve been able to realize about the world through the work you’ve created. It’s about understanding that if you’re going to spend your time and energy making something meaningful to you… you owe it to everyone who put time and energy in to you to present that thing so that it might contribute to someone else’s life, too.
Sometimes I think about what it means to go to space. It didn’t just take 20 years (or however long) to develop and build a rocket, It didn’t even take one lifetime, it took hundreds of years of compounding human existence. It took generations of math and engineering- it took infrastructure, and the entire lives and energy of the people who built the infrastructure. It took the people who work in restaurants so that all those people would have somewhere to eat. It took the entire world and everything it took to create that world to make it so building a rocket to space was possible.
I’m not in a hurry to get massive popular attention. I’m realizing that I need to be seen if I want my work to touch and enrich the lives of people. I’ve never been (and I’m still not) infatuated with the idea of being famous just to be famous. I want to grow a following because I want my work (if it means something to people) to be in a position where it can be seen by the people who might actually get something out of it.
Updated: May 19, 2023
This week, I've been continuing to make sure everything looks and behaves like it should before people actually start looking at it. I connected various social media pages together, and published the bare-bones version of my Patreon.
I did a little research on content filtering algorithms last night, and I'm beginning to understand the importance of good tags and metadata. I've definitely been neglecting this kind of stuff so far, but honestly I'm not expecting things to take off right away. Personally, I'm much happier building up a body of work that I'm comfortable letting a general audience see, before trying super hard to get a lot of people to actually see it. I know this is pretty counter-business brained, but I have no reason to rush right now.
Existing more online over the last few years, I've realized that stuff that just gets people to click on it is not actually that important. The creative people I really admire are able to make a living by developing a consistent (if smaller) community of supporters, rather than creating viral nonsense just for the hell of it. I think if you make something that's high quality and rewarding to engage with, you'll be able to develop a community of people who enjoy it.
A big part of this project over the last year or so has been building all the *extra* things (like this website, the social media accounts, this blog, the merch shop, the secret merch shop...etc...) At first, I didn't quite know why I wanted/ felt I needed to make these things. It felt like something you had to do to be taken seriously as an artist/ musician/ creative person in the world right now. But I'm beginning to realize that these things are important because they contribute to the overall experience I'm creating through the work. Creating a satisfying, interesting, worthwhile thing is something I think a lot about as an artist, and this pursuit should be no different. Creating and understanding the context of a piece of work contributes a lot to how it will be appreciated. I've always put a lot of care into the details surrounding how/when/why an interaction with a work of art happens, and I hope this kind of intention shows and is felt in the final product.