The farther you go, the closer you get: thoughts on the creative process
Hello friends!
I can't believe it was eight years ago today when I released my first album Not Amazing.
Up to that point, I had spent years playing in bands, and had cobbled together three of my own synthesizer-and-percussion recording projects at home under the Elementary Foreign Languages name, but Not Amazing was the first project for which I rehearsed a band and brought it to the studio.
The album ended up being about half live band and half productions I created with special guests at home, and it has remained a blueprint for my overall creative process.
I've learned so much about music production and technical performance since then, but the emotional expression of that first record is always motivating me to dig deeper. Also the project's mixture of jazz-inspired explorations and beat / electronic-based tunes has proven to be an essential part of my artistic DNA.
I've been reflecting a lot on my past work as I gear up to launch new projects, and I wanted to share some thoughts on the creative process today.
Gather, iterate, repeat
Consistency and documentation are essential parts of the creative process for me. I've never regreted going the extra mile to document an idea, even if the expense of documenting it doesn't end up amounting to something I want to release publically. Listening to recordings of my groups allows patterns to emerge that I can then use as the foundation for an artistic or emotional statement.
While some of my best projects (in my opinion) have emerged from seemingly disperit musical snippets, I've come to realize that the time dwelling in the disconnectedness is what leads to the real magic.
I find that I'm almost always working on an emotional concept and a technical concept--and they usually start as separate things. For example, when I was working on Not Amazing, I was both focusing on being an electronic producer and starting to get my chops together as a jazz drummer, but in life I was experiencing lots of frustration coming into adulthood and still feeling that the world was unwilling to know me beyond my blindness.
My technical goals of being a better producer and drummer filled my computer with raw materials with several different sonic textures. As my thoughts about what I wanted to say about my current worldview solidified, the music I had sorted into separate sonic piles started to take shape into a cohesive album structure. Looking back, it really was a raw emotional outpouring, and I created it the best way I knew how with what I had at the time.
After Not Amazing I still wanted to be a better songwriter / producer and a better drummer. I channeled my song and producdtion impulses into Listening, which I think is the most effectively concise and catchy thing I've done to date. And around the same time I put my expanding idea of drumming and instrumental improvisation into the Calculated Discomfort album, which was a big departure for me that was pivotal in setting my direction for the future.
I find that the creative process isn't linear, but more of a constant alternation between expansion and contraction. For every larger scale project that synthesizes several musical concepts under one emotional banner, there are a couple projects that target a specific musical idea or a specific way of working with a group.
In my experience, it's all worthwhile and feeds itself. The only bad experiment is the one you don't run. My only regrets are the times I sidelined my experimentation or failed to document a one-of-a-kind show.
As I've been reviewing my past projects both released and unreleased, I hear more commanalities between them all. The musical tinkering is all just getting me closer to the emotional root. In these uncertain times, where lots of what we're exposed to is controlled by an algorithm anyway, I say there's no better time to just go for it. Dive into your far-out ideas. I think you'll find that there' less far out, and more central to your identity than you think they are.