April 11, 2021
I’m at home right now. I’m drinking coffee. I’ve been working on my song for the open-mics. That’s basically what I’ve been doing with my time. I’m just trynna memorize it. That’s the hardest part. I’m pretty close to getting it all down. It’s kinda this enormous thing that has like 6 songs squished together. I’m trynna just refine it and remove parts that feel sticky. Right now the last part that feels kinda funny is the song ‘Loving Bri’. Something about that one just doesn’t feel right yet. I’m thinking of removing one of the first verses. Maybe two actually. It plays through 4 times. That’s probably too many times. I’ll do 2- one where it’s just the chords and then one with the lyrics. Then the chorus. I like the chorus but something about it doesn’t feel quite right, like there’s just one chord too many or something.
I think I got an idea. The 3rd last chord should be similar to the 4th last, but just one of those chords that’s almost the same but slightly ‘elevated’. I don’t know what the word is but Beatles and Beach Boys do it a lot. I think that will help because that’s around the section where things start to just feel a little too much.
I’m not trynna make this perfect before I go out and perform. I don’t want to fall into that trap. It’s more about just wanting stuff memorized. I can continue to refine it. But I really don’t want to to be up there forgetting chords and lyrics and shit. I want to have at least one 10 minute set that I can fall back on at any time. I just gotta get this one memorized and start performing. Then I can write more stuff if I want.
One of the nice feelings is that I don’t have this feeling of needing to ‘make it’ anymore. I don’t have any desire to have someone want to sign me. I’m not working towards that goal. I’m not looking for a producer.
I feel so fortunate to have spent 2 years in my room just trying endlessly to ‘make it’ on the internet as a ‘bedroom producer’ or whatever. I acquired soooo many skills and become extremely self-sufficient and confident in my abilities, but maybe more importantly I had my ego totally decimated. It just felt like I got punched in the stomach every single day. I got beaten down a little bit more day after day after day, until by the end of it I just didn’t care anymore.
Just about every single time I uploaded a song, photo, video,I was SURE that this was the one that was gonna go viral. I don’t mean just slightly hoping it would explode, I was pretty confident it would! I remember thinking that the ‘Isolation’ video in the bathroom was gonna explode, the ‘Christmas Shopping’ video, the ‘Love Me Do’ cover, the ‘Radio Foozeball’ video, especially ‘The Avocado Song’ video, and pretty much every other video! Every single time! Over and over again! Nothing ever happened. I remember actually losing followers over time. It wasn’t like I was plateauing. People were leaving.
And thank God.
I think that was the best thing that could’ve happened. For one thing, when I watch some of those videos now I cringe so hard. It’s so clear to me how hard I was trying. I’m so happy that so few people saw most of them. I still love all the music. That stuff makes me really proud, but the videos cringe me for the most part, especially the ones where it’s just me. I’m trying so hard and it’s so fake.
The thing that was really good about ‘not making it’ was that it confirmed something that I was unsure of. I always used to wonder if the only reason I made music was because I wanted people’s attention. I used to always wonder if I’d ever pick up the guitar if all the people on earth disappeared. The fact that I kept making these songs and really really putting in effort when no one was watching, kinda confirmed for me that I actually genuinely like music. I enjoy it a lot.
So my ego, to some degree, was just nuked, and I find that veryyyyy freeing. I don’t have the same expectations now when I go on stage to perform. I’m just trying to improve. That’s my only goal now. The only thing I care about is improving. I don’t need someone to sign me because I don’t need to be promoted. I don’t need a producer to agree to work with me because I’ve learned how to produce myself. All I wanna to do is improve!
The other ‘failure’ or lesson I learned that’s been super helpful has to do with doing creative stuff for money. I learned that something weird happened when I would do freelance videos for money. This slight unpleasant feeling would arise, and it would get stronger and stronger to the point where I dreaded having to edit for other people. It turned something I love into chore. As soon as someone agrees to pay you they basically own you, and they have a certain level of control. I fucking hated that feeling. Collaboration is good, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that in some circumstances money is the quickest and surest way to insure that the ‘fun’ dies very quickly.
So having learned all that I don’t really have a desire to get paid for performing. It’s not that I don’t want to make money, it’s just that I don’t want to have to perform with someone else’s expectations. I don’t like how I feel when I know I’m getting paid. I was thinking last night how a payment I would really love would be that if I performed at a restaurant but instead of getting money at the end I was allowed to pick anything off the menu for dinner. That would be cool.
I think it might be important to continue doing jobs that aren’t necessarily creative, like working at the Fox. There’s something a bit humbling about that and I don’t at all feel weird about making money that way. Something besides the Fox, though. Something new. Working for Yoga at the Taco place sounds great.