Over the course of this pandemic I have had a lot of time to think. I don’t know how universal that has been for everyone, but I have come to think of it as a real gift. A gift with some very problematic wrappings, but a gift nonetheless. It has changed my relationships with art, technology and day-to-day life in some irreversible, and very welcome, ways.
One major change is the amount I’ve reduced the internet’s role in my daily life. It all started with some experiments concerning my phone, which I had strongly come to resent. I know a lot of people enjoy their phones, and this is not meant as a judgement in any outward way. But I started asking myself the question: Is this making me happier? To answer that question, I did an experiment. I removed the apps from my phone, one at a time, each for a week, and noted whether my life was improved or diminished at the end of the seven days. I’ll skip to the end -- none of the apps were reinstalled. My phone has returned to a phone. I use it to text and call people I actually know, and it can take pictures, which I rarely do outside of capturing reference images for paintings. My favorite function is that it works as a remote control for my recording software, so I don’t have to get up every time I screw up a piano take.
I still have access to all of the things I removed, just at my desktop instead of in my pocket. Sitting at a computer is an act with some deliberation. That might sound small, but I don't think it is. That layer of deliberation changed the way I interact with all of these platforms. I find I’d rather do something worthwhile at my desk instead of idly clicking around, and my tolerance for time-wasting is far lower. I’ve also realized, if I’m being brutally honest, that my phone was mostly a digital pacifier -- a compulsive object used to override discomfort, or to simply kill silence. But I like silence. I’m not sure when it turned into a nuisance. Perhaps I had just gotten uncomfortable with my own thoughts.
These changes in my habits didn’t leave me with some unfillable void, though. New habits quickly took their place. Where I used to flick through my phone while I was waiting for the oven to preheat, I began keeping my book near me. I’ve been going through a book a week ever since, sometimes two, with no particular sense of effort. Where I used to keep tabs on the never-ending drama of news and politics, constantly dealing with outrage and an anxiety that I can take no actions to alleviate, I’ve instead been thinking much more about what I am making, and what ways I can contribute. I have been a lot more productive, and with more fulfilling results. And I find myself no less informed for only checking the news each Sunday. In fact, not one change has been for the worse. It’s been a unilateral improvement. Mystery solved.
There has also been a very noticeable spillover into my work. I feel like I have more free time than normal while simultaneously tackling my largest project ever. This current one (called “Into The Woods”) involves very elaborate world-building, both visual and written. The album is 30 songs long, with some tracks surpassing the ten-minute mark. I’m doing hundreds of paintings for it, as well as writing it out in prose, all of which will come together in a book. I’ve never attempted this scale of work before -- working in three mediums at once is a really full plate! -- but it somehow feels manageable. I attribute it to this newfound sense of brain space. I think about the project all the time, so I constantly have ideas for it. Constant ideas mean there is always something to work on, but again, without this sense of effort that I’m used to. I know it will take thousands of hours to complete everything, but instead of that being daunting, it feels like more time with something I really enjoy, like getting even more time to hang out with a good friend. I’ve been looking at the long road ahead with a sense of real pleasure.
I don’t think this will be temporary for me. I want to maintain this as long as I can, even as we ease back into some sense of normalcy.
But nothing is ever quite so simple, is it?
It’s been interesting watching the world change around me while feeling myself move in the opposite direction. As I step away from the internet more and more, the world is only barreling further into it. People are increasingly living out their lives digitally, and if you would like your work to be seen, you have to as well. But I've been feeling very protective of this newfound pace of life. I’m making some of my favorite work I’ve ever done. I like how days have a slower shape than they used to, and how I can spend time simply looking out the window, or laying in the grass and listening to a record. I feel more connected to things than I used to. So I’ve been strategizing methods to maintain this. I recently hired someone to help me keep my social media active, since it’s not something I enjoy looking at and don’t have many ideas for, even outside of the issue of time. This new person has way more ideas for it than I ever would, and it’s been a relief. Trying to perform in a space where you have no particular instincts or skillset is a surefire way to make you anxious.
But I have also been working out ways to keep up with this new pace of being a musician.
Now that streaming is the dominant model and tech companies are in control, there have been a lot of changes to how this all works. The current model, as of today, is that you need new material about every four to eight weeks to keep your profile afloat. It’s all a game of appeasing the ever-mysterious algorithm, in hopes that it will favor you for a moment and you see some kind of boost. This is perhaps reasonable for other styles of music. Modern music production, for all of the most popular genres at the moment, is relatively quick. Since it’s based around samples and very little of the instrumentation is actually performed, things can be compiled faster than ever. Entire instrumentals are commonly built in the time it would take to me to simply mic up a drum kit. This is not a knock on those mediums, as all art requires taste and style, but there is simply no comparison in terms of labor.
I personally think of a lot of modern music as collage art, as opposed to something like painting. A large part of the labor is done for you, by the photographers whose work is being repurposed, so it leans more into taste than craftsmanship. If someone asked me to do a collage a day, I’d say that’s doable. But if I was asked to do an oil painting a day, it just isn’t. But to stretch the metaphor a bit, collages are the style of the day. They are far and away more popular, no comparison. So it’s no real surprise that they are setting the pace of the modern music world. But where I am personally at odds is that I like to paint. I can enjoy collages as a viewer, at times, but I get very little satisfaction out of making them. Or to return this to music, I like playing and recording all the instruments, with as much analog equipment involved as possible. I recently rebuilt my studio back into a predominantly analog setup and I love it, even though it’s a lot more laborious. I can enjoy toying with samples every once in a while, but it’s really for a change of pace. It’s not where my heart is.
But there’s also another hurdle to overcome, one that is far more troublesome to me. Allow me explain to you the concept of “laneways” real quick.
Laneways are shorthand for how your music profile is sorted on streaming platforms. Everything you do is tagged, from instrumentation (acoustic or electronic), major or minor keys, common moods, even down to average tempos and song lengths. If you have some success with a couple tracks, the streaming platforms use those song’s tags to define your profile, or what is considered to be on brand for you. A major downside to this is that stepping out of your laneway -- as in, using some elements that are not found in your most popular tracks -- means your new work will likely not be supported. Platforms like Spotify won’t notify your followers or consider you for playlists if they deem your new work to be too different. Since those notifications and playlists are the only ways to earn an income in a world where streams have very little value and direct support is almost non-existent, this means you probably can’t get too adventurous if you want to earn anything. If you are someone who only really enjoys a specific genre, or the key tropes within it, this is probably not a big issue. For someone like myself, who really dislikes genre in general, it’s stifling.
I can personally deal with not making money. The majority of my work doesn’t amount to much financially, and I have a successful song that's gone wildly beyond anything I’ve ever imagined, and it continually pays for me to keep going. So I feel pretty free to experiment, consequences and all. But this stokes a more general worry in me. I take issue with technology so heavily influencing what, and how, art is made. I think the tech should serve the artist, not the other way around. But I also realize that none of this is up to me. How people like to receive art, and how they value it, is a collective issue. Of course I wish people valued and supported art and artists more directly -- the current era of calling artists “content makers” and treating their work in such a disposable and valueless way is nothing I even remotely agree with -- but I can’t expect the world to mirror me or my values. I just have to decide how I wish to interface with it.
To that end, I have been peppering my profiles with content as best I can manage. But for the past three years, in the background of all these smaller, low-commitment releases, I have been building “Into The Woods.” It will likely be another year before I am completely finished (but I will be releasing it in chapters, so it will start coming out before then). I can’t create the type of songs I’m doing for this album under the time crunches and parameters of sample-based music and tech-company algorithms. I work on it every day, and I’m a pretty prolific guy, but it still takes me years to sort a deeper work like this, to give it everything it needs. I also know that I am not within my laneway, so my chances of any kind of notifications or support upon release are slim. But despite all of that, it’s absolutely a worthwhile trade to me. I genuinely love what I am doing right now. It’s gotten me back in touch with why I started making art in the first place, and the days where I get to fully enmesh myself in the work are wonderful.
And I am going to do everything I can to protect that feeling. It’s a large part of why I will be moving somewhere more affordable this year. It’s why I’m going to keep building a team to keep up with all the new demands. If the modern world keeps adding jobs that I am not any good at, like maintaining social media, I will keep finding help until I can’t afford to. We are increasingly becoming our own marketers, producers, financiers, press agents, copywriters, photographers and video makers. But all I ever really wanted to be, when you get down to it, is someone who makes things. I’m figuring out the rest as I go. Wish me luck.