It’s been an odd couple of months.
At the start of the year I finally tested positive for Covid. I know exactly where I picked it up. I was on the train and a man was folded in half, visibly sweating, coughing his brains out. I turned to my partner and said, “If we get sick soon, this was the moment.” Later that week we tested positive. Our symptoms weren’t too bad – more uncomfortable than worrisome – but mine went on for a long time. I tested positive for a little over three weeks. Two months out from all of that and I’m still not back to normal. It seems I’ve got some long Covid symptoms. They aren’t debilitating, but I have noticeably less energy and it’s slowed me down. I’ve always had a lot of resilience when it comes to work. 10 hours in the studio is pretty normal to me, and I rarely take days off. I can now do about 6. I was painting two images on my art days before this, and now it’s typically one. And I have to rest more in between.
It’s been an adjustment, but not an entirely negative one. In some ways, I’m appreciating the change. It never feels the best when it isn’t a choice, but I’ve always had trouble slowing down. I’m understanding the root of this as I get older, and I’ve been slowly adopting more free time into my schedule over the past couple years. I guess long Covid is just fastforwarding my progress. But a side effect of my new pace is that I’ve had more time to think, which I definitely needed. I’ve been at a bit of a crossroads lately.
I’ve been making music for a long time. I started writing songs over 30 years ago, and I’ve been doing it (mostly) full-time for about 20. I still really enjoy what I do, which I’m grateful for. I’m not confused about why I like making things. But there have been a lot of changes to the industry since I first started, and a lot of them just aren’t for me. I’ve had a growing sense of dissonance over the past five years or so. Slowing down has helped me put my finger on the cause.
The simplest way I can put this is: my personal self and my creative self are no longer in line. Allow me to explain.
Like everyone else in the modern world, large parts of my life have become increasingly digital, sometimes against my will. The result is a very mixed bag. Some things have improved, and others have definitely degraded. I constantly wrestle with the balance of these changes, and I try to be mindful about them. But this is the hardest to do where it intersects with my work.
I’ll start with streaming. I did not come up on streaming. I’m in my 40s, so by the time I was buying music of my own it was the early 90s and I had cassette tapes. Then came the CD, then mp3 players, then streaming and cell phones. The last change has affected how I interact with music the most. Since streaming became the norm, I listen to music a lot less. I know my age is a factor here, but streaming has killed a lot of my desire to explore. I still love to hear new music, but I’m basically 100% recommendation based at this point. I never browse platforms like Spotify. In theory, having all of recorded music available at once, for a monthly fee that’s less than what a single album cost 30 years ago, would be a feeling of abundance, of infinite possibilities. But the actual result is just being overwhelmed. Sifting through hundreds of thousands of tracks that aren’t quite doing it for me just sounds exhausting. So I don’t use it very much. I can’t remember the last time I actively searched for new music on it. And passive things like algorithmic suggestions and playlists have not filled the gap.
I also work in music, so I’m always suspicious of how much that colors my opinion. But I feel the same way about film these days. I used to really stay on top of movies and shows. Since the streaming model has taken over, I have that same overwhelmed, agitated feeling I get from the music platforms. Scrolling through all those films and shows, with their auto-playing trailers and automated recommendations, just makes me turn the tv off. So I rely entirely on recommendations here, too, and I have no desire to explore.
It’s been strange watching former hobbies and sources of joy turn into chores, or even things I actively avoid. I realize that a lot of people will feel the exact opposite here, though. I don’t think this is unanimous by any means. But this is how it has turned out for me, and it has made what I do for a living feel really strange.
Because I no longer enjoy these platforms very much as a user, releasing work has become increasingly dissonant. How do you make things for platforms you don’t personally enjoy? I’ve never had this issue before now. I liked buying albums. I liked going to record stores, where they had curated selections, and hunting for something that I wanted to take home with my very limited funds. So the idea of creating something that would be packaged as an album, that someone else might discover in a shop and decide to take home, was really motivating. It served as a mental model. And while I liked going to shows sometimes, they weren’t what made me want to write songs. I was all about records and the process of finding them. I cherished my tiny little collection, and the idea of being a part of someone else’s was really cool to me.
Watching a number occasionally go up on an app I personally try to avoid isn’t quite the same.
So this has left me in an odd spot. The private, creative side of art still resonates. I still love being in the studio, or figuring out a painting, or working on lyrics, and so on. But when it comes time to start packaging and releasing it, my feelings turn negative. And it’s not just streaming. It’s also the current state of the internet.
I’m not a social media person. It’s yet another tool that I don’t enjoy as a user, but I’m expected to use for my work. I have no desire to figure it out, but the industry I work within has created a fear that everything you make will simply disappear into a void if you don’t post pictures about your personal life, or what food you buy, or whatever. I have personally seen no difference in listeners whether I post or don’t, but that’s the pervasive dialogue. I didn’t mind social media when it was just one aspect of the internet, and it was largely just for that first word, “social.” But it slowly became the everything place, and now it’s bite-sized versions of news, art, ads, politics, obituaries, health advice, crimes against humanity, kittens, low-rent humor, messages from friends, soft-core porn, go fund me campaigns for medical bills – all shuffled up and shot out at random, like the mind of some psychopathic narrator. I see no place for anything I do there. And like the transition from albums to streaming, I enjoyed the former iteration more. Websites are self contained. I go to a news website to read the news. I go to an art website to look at art. It doesn’t feel like chaos to me, and I like that sense of organization.
Which leads me to another issue – stability. I think we all feel how rickety these platforms are. Tech companies are constantly changing the way everything functions, even down to their core purpose. They’re so busy copying each other that they all forget what they were good for in the first place. I’ve always loved visual art, but watching painters and photographers try to come up with video-based gimmicks to stay relevant on platforms like Instagram has made me not bother anymore. Spotify is now constantly pushing audiobooks and podcasts, neither of which I’ve ever searched for on the platform. YouTube is trying to be TikTok, and TikTok is trying to be YouTube. And on it goes. So anyone trying to reach people on these platforms has to become almost entirely reactionary to survive on them. For deeper work that takes time, this doesn’t make sense. The rules will have changed by the time you finish anything you’re actually proud of.
So here I am, writing on my website. And you know what? I still enjoy this. I would actually do it far more were I not also juggling a bunch of other platforms and sources of input, or trying to incorporate things I deep-down don’t care about. Which led me to my current question – then why don’t you? If the idea of creating something for my own space is more inspiring and interesting, then why not go that way?
So I’ve decided to do just that.
In a practical sense, this changes very little. I only have an instagram and two YouTube accounts (one for Radical Face and one for all my side projects). When I finish songs, I’ll upload them to places where people listen to music. When I have larger projects done, I’ll be sure to share release dates. Instead of a forum, I’m using Discord, so it’s there if anyone wants to hang out online or ask questions. But I’m going to start really leaning into my website again. This will be the place for my deeper thoughts, essays, larger pieces, and all the things that don’t function well on all the current platforms. I’d like to start writing essays on the creative process and what I’ve learned from it. I no longer have an art account on instagram, so instead I’ll just upload visual work over on the art tab of this website. I’m currently finishing a real bio, instead of those industry ones where they just list accolades and try to make you sound way more popular and influential than you’ll ever be. I’m going to stop putting what I think of as the actual results of my effort into platforms that might just disappear or become unrecognizable overnight. Instead I’m going to put them here, with the occasional post to let people know they exist.
But I want to be clear about something: I don’t believe this will “work”, or that it’s where things are headed. I don’t expect people to flock back to websites. This isn’t marketing, and it’s not even something I’d consider a sensible strategy. I’m just looking for something that motivates me to share again, and to stop dreading my releases. I’m looking for a space that rewards long-form, that has some depth, and that doesn’t make the end result feel so valueless and short-lived. And I’d also rather invest in something I can own, and be proud of, instead of a platform that makes every single user look and feel the same, where I personally see more harm than good, and I can’t even build short term plans around.
So I’m investing here, and I’m going to see how nice of a personal and digital museum I can come up with. Maybe it’ll be seen and maybe it won’t. But it sure as hell sounds like a lot more fun.
I hope this finds you all well. Until next time. Which will be much sooner.