This time of year always feels like a fresh start. Everything changes from dead brown to magnificent green in what seems like a few days, the daffodils in our overgrown garden explode with a golden vengeance, and all kinds of birds start filling the morning air with calls that I'm pretty certain mean, "WHO WANTS THIS MAGNIFICENT SPECIMEN? YOU KNOW YOU WANT IT! COME ON!" It's great.
In the midst of the renewal, I always feel any increased urge to clear out old stuff. I'm constantly trying to get rid of things, but my threshold for clutter suddenly gets lower around the end of April.
One thing I'm trying to clean out this year is something I've overlooked for way too long - my music queue. There are a bunch of songs that I've written and recorded over the last decade in my home studio, that I've never released. I know I touched on this in an earlier blog post, but I'm finding as I get older and more mature as an artist, that it's really important to not get overly precious with my work. That's something I'm very prone to - especially when I'm producing everything myself (and in turn not accountable to anyone else's due dates or timing or constraints).
A few weeks ago, I put up an album on Bandcamp that my band Honest Thieves recorded back in 2013(ish). We had spent a few months in the mixing and overdubbing process when we slowly dissolved due to life commitments and changing priorities. Listening back with some distance, I hear a pretty fun, energetic debut album. It's not perfect - there are lyrics I'd have like to have rewritten, parts I could definitely sing better now... I'm sure my bandmates Jon and Justin could both find issues in their parts as well. But this was art that was good enough at the time, but I held on to it because I was intent on ironing out every last flaw. And looking back on it, that was a mistake.
So I'm hoping to learn from that mistake and make sure that 10 years from now I'm not sitting on recordings that would have been good enough in 2022. Clean out the closets and the queues. Finish some songs and share them with people. Whatever your own creative pursuit is, I'd encourage you to do the same. Believe in your art and put it out there for the world to see... just maybe not as loudly as the horny blue jays in my yard.
Comentarios