My grandfather had all kinds of amazing things scattered around his property when I was a kid. The man finished a lot of things, I’m not passing judgement here, in fact it ruined me/saved me like all great realizations in one’s life. I seem to remember a half-built 2-seater plane without wings sitting between the tomato garden and the rabbit cages on my grandparent’s property in Macon, Georgia but I may have imagined that. I definitely saw the schematics for building an airplane that he’d ordered in the mail. I just can’t remember if I imagined the actual plane and somehow concluded that it would be wingless, rusted-out and forgotten. Regardless, I remember seeing a wingless, rusted-out and forgotten plane.
I love to experiment and for a long time I’ve just accepted it as a core part of my musical craft and exploration. I was lucky enough to go to design school and work alongside incredible practitioners of experimentation at the highest levels of their fields like Stefan Sagmeister, James Victore, and John Bielenberg. I love the freedom obviously but what embracing experimentation does for me is it gets me going creatively. I know where the lines are when I need to corral everything and that makes experimenting almost too safe sometimes, but it’s given me the ability to let loose and know that if I find something worth structuring that I can pause in the madness and start to impose a structure on or a destination for the music. One way I destroy all of that safety borne of experience and practice is to tune my guitar to a tuning I’m not comfortable with or better yet, playing and writing on an instrument I can only barely play or can’t play at all.
Zen mind, beginner’s mind they say in Zen Buddhism. First thought, best thought. It’s only true however if you’ve put in the work and are “enlightened” or practiced. Otherwise, beginner’s mind looks something like a toddler: putting everything in your mouth and crawling around in a diaper on the floor.
But those experiments don’t always get finished and when they do get finished, they don’t always work. In fact, they rarely do in my case. I’ve spent six hours working on a sound with a dozen soft synths acting the fool with one another and only ended up using about three seconds of the twenty minute piece. That’s actually not a failure I guess because I’ve spent almost as much time on some things I didn’t use at all.
It can resemble a graveyard but those dashed attempts are actually monuments to a kind of bravery and you always learn from trying. You may learn that you have no business trying what you just tried but you’ll still be miles ahead of where you were when your idea was only that, an idea.
“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.” —Friedrich Engels
Here are some things I started but never finished:
One Sentence a Day:
I lasted less than 2 weeks. To be fair I did this on a typewriter that I left set up in a coveted slab of real estate in the studio so it was probably inadvertently covered up by something. Out of sight, out of mind.
09 SEP 2022
12:37
1. I listened to some new tracks while I walked the dogs and thought about lyrics still in need of attention.
2. Thinking constantly about Emerson Watts1 these days..
3. Emerson & Ray are BOTH addicted to something because of war..
4. Cooler nights have arrived and once again, a new season surprises me.
5. I'm going to call my car, an M37X, M3, like it's a droid..
6. I sometimes feel weird having this space in our backyard and it makes me think I might need a support group of others whe have such a space-owning guilty complex.
7. Josh Ritter said that words were the thing that filled the available shape whenever he writes but the intent is always the same: to communicate the human experience.
8. I would like to find a new instrument this weekend.
9. I did not find a new instrument this weekend and in fact, I didn't even look for one..
10. The grass grown around the eaves the man been dead so long.
11. He sometimes found it hard to stop thinking about certain ex-girlfriends.
12. To his frustration, he never seemed to ruminate on the exes that he remembered fondly and so he knew he had only himself to blame.
13. It wasn't that he was to blame as much as it was that he was the one broken and in need of attention, not them.
It reminds me a little of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress but I didn’t sustain it for hundreds of pages so I’ll never know what it was going to be or what I learned from it if anything.
But so what? A few hundred words smashed into a typewriter isn’t much of a time investment so there’s not much cause for uproar over wasting time on a failure when the stakes are that low.
I have a novel/screenplay/series bible2 I’ve created called Kingsgrave about an illegal Ibogaine clinic run by a retired combat medic in a cave system in the Carolina mountains.
I have a novel/screenplay/series bible I’ve created called Field Hymnals about musicians and song collectors in around the Battle of Atlanta in the US Civil War.
I have a book of poems called Since the River took Emmylou that is basically finished and may be good but no one will ever read it. No one reads the poems of actual poets so why would I bother trying to force that into an uncaring world?
I saw this timeline meme and felt ridiculously banal and un-gifted to say the least. A person’s life isn’t as simple as the three phases of that timeline but there is truth there, even if it is truth from a thousand foot view.
The thing is, this sort of thinking only matters when you try and make other people happy or try and meet their expectations instead of yours. I would be an “old weirdo with a home studio” at this point in my life regardless of how the the first two “eras” played out. The very words “gifted,” “disappointment” and “weirdo” are all judgement calls handed down from on high at first by those around you and eventually by your own internalized, self-hating subconscious so they’re not worth much as far as words go. I’ve disappointed others before for sure but I’ve never disappointed anyone as much as I have myself I bet.
I’ve never been disappointed in music though. I’ve been disappointed in musicians, bands, albums, venues, instruments, recording studios, and the entire musical industry (even the underground, which is an industry) but I’ve never been disappointed by the music. Even if I hear music I don’t like I learn something from it. And I can always find at least one thing in a song to hold on to or that reminds of music that I actually enjoy. Music doesn’t hurl ultimatums your way. Music doesn’t judge you for your anger or your sadness, it jumps right in and propels you in the direction you want to go: up or down.
I’ve let down music I’m sure but she’s never complained about anything specifically to me so I keep trying. I’m playing my first live show in over ten years on October 14th at The Oakhurst Porchfest Festival and though I’m preparing like I’ve never prepared for a show before, there is an enormous chance I will fail. And if I do it will be in front of my Atlanta friends and their children, my wife and kids, and a bunch of complete strangers. But you know what, I truly don’t care. I want everyone to have a good time and be entertained but the only person I have to prove anything to is myself. I’ve watched musicians perform at Porchfest before and always thought “I can still do that. I used to do that. What’s the big deal?” I guess I’m going to try and find out. I’m also playing at Eddie’s Attic in January and I’m working on a tour in February with a buddy of mine who will headline but also play with me in opening sets. But this show on the 14th is the launchpad I guess. I will probably do an open mic or two before the 14th as well but I’m not telling anyone about those.
So fail please. All of you. You’ve read the perspiration versus inspiration quotes and you probably have a vague idea of how many failed inventions came out of Thomas Edison’s laboratories but those stories are legion and cliché for a reason: they have the annoying smack of truth in them.
A character in a screenplay I was writing.
When I get stuck or bored I sometimes switch it up and write short stories about characters from the show bible so I can flesh them out more so the various forms of writing tend to pile up.