Extended Play Extended Release
Music? Pharmaceutical? Arbitrary Date? Uh huh.
I’ve written before about realizing I might be a perfectionist when I learned that the actual definition of the word describes someone who is never happy with the fruit of their labors. I’d always assumed that a perfectionist was someone who didn’t stop until they are satisfied but there is no such thing as satisfaction for a perfectionist. It’s an unachievable thing that perfection yet we still somehow fool ourselves into striving for it. Human nature is how us modern-ass chimps explain this preternatural drive these days but who knows?
I do know that one of the things that make the great ones great is a dedicated attempt to progressing one’s vision and yet not ever really getting there. It’s this willingness to go on, to not be a perfectionist, that gets us the likes of Jimi Hendrix or Nina Simone.
“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."
—Winston Churchill
Well lately I’ve been thinking that, as well as being a reformed perfectionist, I may also be an acquiescent bum in need of a similar reformation at the other end of the scale. This is not new. I am forever on the margins of the pendulum’s beat. Hot or cold. Black or white. You’re with me or against me. I have been working on this and I have been getting better but who wants to read about that? Boring.
A lot of things have helped me temper my heat and keep my heart and eyes open at the same time because the trick is embracing your empathy but not letting the emotions it causes dictate your actions or your mood.
Becoming a parent helped. Well, being an invested parent who wanted to be a parent helped. The mass outings of grumpy old white men over the last decade or so has helped as well because it places the radical margins front and center and lets the entire world see how foolish and ridiculous such stone-walling and ‘my way or the highway’ belief systems are.
Lord, I’m a rambling this morning.
This is all a way of saying that I was supposed to release an ep of 3 or 4 new songs last week but I didn’t. The reason I didn’t is because I’ve swung from perfectionist to bum in the quality control department. Finishing and releasing Bellevue was due to abandoning those perfection hang ups and getting the damn thing shipped! Unfortunately, I’ve abandoned too many attempts at perfection and I’m not happy with the results. But I will be! Damnit.
I also randomly throw out dates of things to hold myself to finishing something and it usually works but this time I left the monkeys in my brain at the helm for too long and they can ship but they don’t work on the songs enough to make them worth shipping.
Here some things I found laying around recently for you to hear while I pop the hood on my music-maker machine.
Atlas (live)
Eddie Owens, of Eddie’s Attic fame, introducing me at his Red Clay Music Foundry. He says my last name like everyone says it where I grew up.
Believer (Jay’s House)
Man, I have some great stuff Jay Gonzalez graciously played and recorded with me…ABOUT 10 YEARS AGO NOW…which makes me an ass for still sitting on that stuff, but here’s what it sounds like when he plays drums, bass, and engineers. He doesn’t play keys on this one so you’re just gonna have to be patient and wait for that.
Roller Coaster Choir
I’ve been vigorously submitting music for sync licensing and the creation of that music generates so much runoff that doesn’t get used, like a soft synth choir on a rollercoaster drumbeat. And yes, these images were AI generated with the prompt: A gospel choir riding a roller coaster in outer space.
Good luck with your Monday.
xoxo
—BB