(Forgive me if this is rambly; I’ve just gotten motivated to release a piece of music that’s been sitting around mostly-finished for months, and I wanted to be kind of transparent about a few things alongside that release. To do so, I don’t really want to plan or edit all that much. So this is may be a messy post. Scroll towards the bottom if you just want the tune.)
In all honesty (and I’m significantly less depressed about this than it will sound), it’s very hard to—in a number of senses—find the energy required to create and release music.
The least depressing reason for this (not that it’s super rosy) is that a major motivation for me in any creative avenue I’ve explored is being inspired by the thought “[x, y, or z] doesn’t exist yet; I’m not going to wait for someone else to make it”. But, with music in general and music that I like…
Between what seems to be my ever-expanding tastes and the ever-increasing availability of music (via sites like this and others), I’m just never like “oh, there’s not enough music in the world; I should make some more so the world has more”.
Not to be “back in my day” about it, but there was something very inspiring in the 2000s about sitting at home with my Death and Cynic CDs and being like “man, it’d be cool if there was more music like this” and going ahead and doing everything I could to make more music like that myself, as Chuck Schuldiner definitely wasn’t going to and it really seemed like Cynic wasn’t going to either (though they eventually did). But now… not only are my expanded tastes far less exhausted by what’s available, but—and I mean this with vanishingly little self-pity—I don’t think I’m the most qualified to make more of what I like.
I mean, more of what I like is sitting around waiting for me in extensive “play later” playlists on my streaming site of choice. I don’t need to make music I like to hear new music that I expect to like. There is no lack of good music available. (And like any self-deprecating artist, I’m not always super high on my own music. Listening to others’ music is way less time-intensive, way less work, and way lower risk.)
Also, there is the interrelated matter of attention. Because of the absurdly convenient availability of almost all recorded music from forever and tomorrow and the next day, it’s hard to end up listening to the same music more than once. In the streaming age, there are bands I’ve fallen in love with and then—after two weeks—almost never thought about again. And these are prominent artists. So considering that landscape as one in which I’m trying to get listeners’ attention in some way… it’s extremely discouraging (in a literal, not-exactly-mopey sense of the word).
Finally, in all honesty: releasing music is not a satisfying activity. Not for me, anyway. And again: I’m far less self-pitying about this than it sounds; I’m honestly just realistic about, like, what my brain is going to release dopamine for, you know?
Making music is often pretty fun. But even just noodling around has some barriers to entry. And sometimes it can be a little frustrating or unsatisfying.
And there’s a very thin line between making music in a playful way and working on music in a pretty dull way.
The main point is this: at least in my adult life, I have never expected to make a living with music. I hoped (did not expect) that it could become a hobby that paid for itself. With (again) vanishingly little self-pity, I think even that is extremely unlikely at this point. So the only incentive left for me to release music is the intrinsic satisfaction of it.
It’s not satisfying. It really isn’t. My “discography” is fairly modest in runtime, but even short pieces of music represent hours of effort. You would not believe how much time I spent on “The One With the Skull On It and Clavinet”. It’s 90 seconds of music and it really demanded a lot of time to compose and produce, and after I released that piece of music I vowed to streamline my workflow because it was just really deflating on the other side of its release.
And so, again, just sort of “planning ahead” re: dopamine (as it’s all that’s at stake for me anymore), I know that I just will not tolerate a full, careful production process at this point. It’s not fun enough. I’m not saying it’s the most painful thing ever or that I don’t enjoy aspects of producing and releasing a track, but because so much of it does feel like work and I only have so much free time… making music becomes—like—a fourth-place pastime. I need to have gotten bored with the three hobbies I like better to end up working on music, and realistically I will have run out of free time for any given day before I start getting within striking distance of exhausting hobbies one through three. Then the novelty on everything sort of resets.
And even though I do think that over time I’ve become humbled by the lack of success I’ve had in music, I cannot emphasize enough that I’m ultimately only so self-deprecating about my music. I decided to release a rough version of a new song (“If the Sun Ever Rises Again”) because my music streaming app played a Dereification tune on shuffle and I got in the mood to listen to a bunch of Dereification. And you know what? I sincerely like a lot of it.
But like I’ve been saying: it’s only so satisfying to make my own new music when I have nearly limitless amounts of new music from other, more motivated people that I intend to listen to.
Listening to music is way easier than making music. And whatever gap there may be for me between the pleasure of listening and the pleasure of making… it’s just overwhelmed by how much time and energy it takes to make new music.
I’m not saying “hi, here’s this demo, bye forever”. I’m saying “I happened to have the energy to mostly make this track back in August and now it’s November and I’m doing the bare minimum to get it out the door because I’d rather watch an old All Japan Women’s Pro Wrestling match after work than tweak the EQ on drums or adjust the volume of vocals by a decibel, especially when almost nobody is listening to my music but me”.
Accordingly, I’m not daring to ask for money for the demo (I mean, it’s a demo). You can pay for it if you want.
And, to be clear, I don’t dislike this track at all! I just don’t feel like working on it more than I already have, but I don’t really want it to never see the light of day (no pun intended). I wrote the lyrics the day after watching a particular movie (which one is pretty obvious to those who have seen it). I was on a really prolific streak of both writing lyrics and falling back in love with Death, even with Schuldiner’s sophomorically angsty lyrics sometimes making me cringe a bit. (Full respect to Schuldiner who is one of the absolute most influential musicians for me, but… like… some silly lyrics to be sure.)
These lyrics (along with some other songs I wrote at the time… one of which I’ve recorded but don’t like the state of) felt pretty angry (not that this particular song was actually written out of anger; it’s from the perspective of the protagonist of the movie) and I was listening to so much Death… it was easy to want to put together a song that felt like it wouldn’t have been out of place on Individual Thought Patterns or some slightly alternate-universe version of it.
So here it is! “If the Sun Ever Rises Again”. I really wanted to get a good chorus out of it and I think I achieved that, which is big for me because traditional song structure with lyrics has not generally been the goal of this whole Dereification project. It was intentionally strictly instrumental for a long time, but I think I can only get so much satisfaction out of that mode of music-making now. The poetry and storytelling of lyrical songwriting is a challenge that is one of the few things that can get me motivated about music lately, so while instrumentals are not off the table at all… it’s probably songs with words for the most part, from here on out. (Which unfortunately just adds to the complexity of making music, which just makes it more discouraging to do, etc etc.)
I do hope that I find the time and energy to sporadically release (at the very least) demo tracks, because being a musician has been such an integral (if inconsistent) part of who I think of myself as being, and there is an element of needing to prove it to the world somehow with either performances or releases. I have almost zero interest in performing in public, so I hope this isn’t the last you hear of my music. But I did want to express “boy, it’s not super fun to make music anymore and it’s typically hard for me to wanna” almost as much as I wanted to express whatever it is I wanted to express with “If the Sun Ever Rises Again”.
