New music! Click here to give it a listen.
Well I did it again. Another song-a-day challenge. This time, I cut it up into two two-week blocks because in between those two blocks I did psychedelic therapy. It was roughly an 8 hour affair and MDMA was the medicine.
Basically, I told myself I loved myself for 3 hours straight. I was speaking out loud, repeating the same ~30 things over and over and over again: I love myself, I'm amazing, I'm so talented, people love me. Things like that.
The effect it had on me wasn't immediately obvious, and after about a week of integrating my experience I began my second block of song-a-days. Very quickly, I gave myself a rule: I commit to the first thing I like.
A lot of times I might begin a song bouncing between the 1 and the 6. And I might also quickly judge myself for such a simple progression. But now, if I liked it, then I stuck with it. Sometimes it was a single chord, sometimes it was an idea to use more syncopation in the percussion, sometimes it was a sound. It never took me more than ~3 ideas (and over the course of only a few minutes) to find something I liked each day.
It's hard to say what exactly this rule did for me, but I will say that I'm more satisfied with the second batch of songs than the first. In fact, all three of the songs on EP02 come from the second batch! Perhaps it's because I had learned a new, more loving way to talk to myself. Or maybe it was this new rule I created for myself. Or maybe it's all the same thing. Who knows?
I can hear the growth in these set of songs from EP01. I think my voice is much more present and hopefully more emotionally expressive this time around. I also learned and used more recording and production tricks. The biggest one was to limit myself to a certain number of takes, especially for vocal parts. To me, recording is just like a performance -- it's something I want to get perfect! But psychologically it's not that easy because I know I can always do one more take. So this time around, I told myself "three takes maximum" and then I comped the best of what I had. I think this made me treat each take with much more reverence, the same way I might treat a performance -- trust that I've practiced the technical things enough, and then just let rip the expressiveness.
Hopefully you like the music 💖
Today I'm sharing music I've written and recorded over the past couple months. Click here to give it a listen. The rest of this entry consists of ramblings about creativity and expression.
I went to my first Burning Man in 2023 and it was the first time I was surrounded by people who valued "creativity" and, to be honest, I had no idea what they meant and even thought it sounded hokey.
A couple months after I got back to the real world, I went to another art festival of sorts and partied my ass off for three days straight. Sometime in the middle of it, I looked at my friend (who was high as shit) and saw how wide-eyed he was at the energy around us. I thought to myself "I want to be able to do something that makes someone look like that."
I got back to the real world (again) and asked myself what I could do that was even remotely creative. I answered myself with "music." I took piano lessons as a kid and thought maybe I'd pick it back up. So I signed up for lessons with a local music school in January of 2024. My first lesson I told my teacher "I want to write songs." 😂 I don't think I knew what I was saying.
Well nearly two years later I've done it. Somewhere along the way, a friend told me "no one ever said art has to be good." And I realized then that I could easily write 100 shitty songs. Pick a chord progression, put some words to a melody, et voilà . So back in November of last year I challenged myself to write a song a day for 30 days.
As it turns out, my friend was right. I didn't love all my songs. In fact, I didn't like most of them. But what I learned was that the commitment matters most. I don't know if he's the first person to say it, but I recently came across a quote from Jeff Tweedy saying "writer's block isn't being unable to write, it's not liking what you write."
So power through I did. And you know what? Even if I didn't like all my songs, there was something about each day that touched my heart. Some days it was the harmony, some days it was the beat, some days it was a single lyric. There's a lesson in there somewhere about presence, or fear, or Buddhism, or some shit.
Anyway, the three songs that make up EP01 are the ones that I both loved the most as well as needed the least work from their original day's recordings. I'm both extremely proud of myself as well as extremely humbled. I love writing but I hate recording and editing. I think I've gotten much better on the keys (and also who knew I could come up with such tasty bass lines??), but I so desperately want to be a better singer.
I don't know if these songs will make you wide-eyed, but I hope they make you smile at least. And if they don't, then take a bunch of Molly and you'll be fine.
Extreme special thanks goes to my teachers Daniel, Julia, and Ray. Sorry lessons turned into therapy 💖