The Musical Schizo

(note – Just some thoughts. I wrote this piece back in March, but am finally publishing it now. Not sure why I never hit publish.)

As someone who has spent the majority of his musical life as background music for people getting drunk, it’s hard for me to relate to what it must be like to actually create music as art. Sure, I’ve written my fair share of songs, and I have pretty strong opinions on what I like and don’t like about things I and others have created, but I’ve never seen myself as an artist, or my work as artistry.

I wonder sometimes if that’s just me avoiding actually putting myself out there for judgment or if it’s putting art on a pedestal, or a mix of both. I definitely am proud of some of the stuff I’ve created, and I’m definitely proud of some of the ways I’ve put my stamp on other people’s work through my experience in cover bands of various types.

I’m inherently not a precious person when it comes to creating musical things, which is to my detriment, I think. I do believe I’d have something to offer as an artist. I just carry this inbuilt suspicion and animosity toward the very act of being precious, with the notable exception that I’m all in if it’s an artist I love – they can be as precious as they feel they need to be and I’m still eating it up. But I wonder if it really does come down to fear that nothing I could ever do would measure up to the things that I like.

Stepping away from music for a bit – when I was first creating audio productions, long before I worked in radio production, I was very particular about things being “just so”. I really crafted the things I created with a lot of care. When I started making commercials, I would do the same, and take tons of time just trying to get them perfect. Once I worked in radio production full time, I learned that I simply did not have enough time to spend hours on one 30-second commercial. I really had to speed it up to get things done. Then I became a production director all by myself, and had no time to be precious about it – I just had to get things done.

One might think I’d be able to carry over that “get it done” attitude to music, but the lack of hard deadlines in music has kept me from really feeling like I’ve ever accomplished anything. People flog the “art is never finished, only abandoned” cliche, but it is a real trap if you think you can keep working on something forever. That’s what I’ve been doing with a lot of my own music. Nothing feels good enough for me, and almost every time I’ve shared something, it’s mostly met with indifference, which reinforces the idea that I’m simply not doing anything interesting. Which is largely true, if I’m being brutally honest with myself. I have my retread pop punk-style songs, and my retread power pop songs and my retread sort of singer-songwritery songs. Nothing is all that “me”.

I grapple with the whole “me” thing as a writer. It reminds me of a time in high school. I was doing my normal thing of talking in every voice but my own (doing accents and characters and basically being a teenage Dana Carvey wannabe) and my best friend Brandon had grown tired of my antics, grabbed me, and said, “What do YOU sound like?” It’s funny how much that resonated. It went far beyond just doing a surfer dude voice followed by a fey German accent. It sticks in my head to this day, but it’s morphed into something even bigger. Perhaps even something menacing for me as a creator. What do I sound like? Honestly, I’ve been avoiding that for years, mostly because every time I create something, I really hate what I sound like when I’m not basically doing a style impression of some other artist I admire. Who am I kidding? I hate that, too, because it’s not original!

Which brings me to the whole point of this spiel: Artistry. How does one define it? I struggle with it all the time, because I feel like 25 years playing in cover bands has basically robbed me of any artistry of my own. I am a pretty complete musician, because I’ve played many different genres of music and can slide into most musical situations quite comfortably, but I never feel like an artist or feel like anything I do is truly artistic. I’ve gotten close to it from time to time, especially during improvisational performances at jam nights, and coming up with parts to complement the crazy ways we redo things in Chandler and The Bings, but with the music I’ve composed, I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten there, to a place where I’d consider it art. I’ve definitely tried.

Thanks for reading!
TMS