Embracing Imperfection
or how to actually enjoy the music you make..
If you’d like to listen to this letter please hit the play button in the Substack player above.
🎵 but if you’d prefer to read rather than listen, here’s something to accompany you…
The Artistic Struggle for Self-Appreciation
As all artists — regardless of the medium they work in — will no doubt relate to, it tends to be quite easy to dismiss the art we make as not being perfect enough. After it's finished, we don't want to spend a second longer engaging with the thing we've spent all of our time and energy creating. Whether that's a piece of music, a story, an illustration or whatever—usually because seeing all of our mistakes makes us cringe intensely, right?
Recently, someone made me think a bit deeper about this when he said "I think once you have forgotten what you were trying to capture, when you come back to these photos, you will be delighted with them."
He was talking to a photographer at the time but I feel the same thing could be said about any creative pursuit.
When you stop comparing your work to what you wanted it to be, or obsessing over the mistakes, only then can you finally enjoy it as an audience member.
Taylor Deupree; musician, legendary mastering engineer and all-round creative genius doesn't even listen to his own music after its release for god's sake. In fact, he only goes back to it when there's been a long enough of a separation that it feels like he was not the one who wrote it. The music Taylor makes is painfully beautiful, so I feel like if even he has these thoughts then it must be a fairly universal feeling! Here he is on Twitter earlier this year:
He also said in an interview:
I am extremely hard on myself when it comes to my music, very critical. As a result, I cannot ever listen to my own music because I will only hear the flaws. It takes maybe 2-5 years before I can listen to my own work after its release. This is the amount of time it takes me to forget the specifics of how I made it and to be able to engage with it more as a “listener.”
The Positive Influence of Deadlines
I felt this exact feeling he describes recently when listening back to old episodes of my Soundscapes Radio series. Soundscapes Radio was a collection of sixteen albums (I called them episodes at the time of releasing) that I composed between 2019 and 2021. The project was conceived as a way to force myself to write brand new music every month, as I wasn't having much luck writing anything at the time.
Each episode/album was posted to YouTube on the first Friday of the month and I was intentionally vocal about that schedule on social media. This ultimately meant that I was holding myself accountable. 30 minutes (at least) of brand new music every month with a few breaks here and there for life stuff that got in the way. Having such a short deadline forced me into not worrying about achieving perfection—I didn't have time for it. Instead, I felt the freedom to focus on experimentation and small improvements.
YouTube • Bandcamp
The series turned out to be a neat way for me to carve my sound as a composer, but also proved to be a great way to get out of the creative rut that I found myself in at the time. I hadn't really written anything good for about 10 years to be honest. Not since my debut EP Anthem, back in 2009, had I written anything I was proud of.
In my desperation to make something before I started Soundscapes Radio, I even bought an OP-1 — one of those small (but overly expensive) synthesizers that all the cool kids raved about. It was a feeble attempt to kick-start my music writing again. And I thought "Hey, if it worked for Bon Iver, it could work for me too right?" But eventually even that became a beautiful and dusty paperweight.
It wasn't until I forced myself to write something, anything, that the shackles of creative block were slowly released. And that's why deadlines became useful. They give you no choice but to release something. Telling people about the schedule also helps solidify things.
The first episode of Soundscapes Radio came just after I'd taken part in another challenge, #Jamuary2019. Jamuary is a yearly challenge to make music every day in the month of January, hence the name. I recorded everything quickly each day and threw it up on Instagram that evening. Most of my uploads were short loops that weren't great but I didn't have the time to question whether the track was good enough or not. I forced myself to post it regardless. It taught me to write quickly and focus on idea generation rather than sweating the details.
Here's an example from that first round of Jamuary that I did. I archived most of them but here's one that I've kept up.
Completing that Jamuary challenge turned out to be the perfect segue into Soundscapes Radio, which forced me to keep on writing month after month, and spend time improving my production skills little by little without getting too bogged down by the fear of sharing something far from perfect. Each episode got me that little bit closer to the sound I wanted to achieve.
But back then I could barely listen to the albums after I finished them because it was far too easy for me to hear all the flaws. I could hear in my head how I so desperately wanted it to sound but didn't quite know how to express at the time.
Now that it's been almost 5 years since the first episodes though, I can finally listen without remembering all of the mistakes that were easy to spot at the time because the composition process was so fresh in my mind. Now I can finally enjoy them as a "listener" again.
What’s next?
In a way, I guess what I'm doing with Substack now is a little bit like what I did with Soundscapes Radio. Forcing myself to post every Friday regardless of if I'm fully happy with what I've written or not. I'm holding myself accountable to become a better writer by just getting out there and writing. All the while, hoping that someone, at least one person, likes it along the way!
This is my very public promise that I will write something here on Substack every Friday in 2024 and by the end of the year, hopefully be a better writer for it.
Thank you for being here. Please share this with anyone you think might enjoy it and if you'd like to support this newsletter please buy one of my albums over on Bandcamp, or consider becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. My music is also on Spotify and Apple Music.
SJF