Inspired by a Quora answer I gave today. Do I listen to my own music?
I’m currently in a phase of listening heavily to my own music. Particularly my work-in-progress.
And really enjoying it.
In
fact, I’m probably not sufficiently objective or critical of it. I find
the slapdash sketchiness of it charming rather than problematic. ;-)
It
does what I want from music, it has the kind of tunes I like, against
the kind of instrumentation I like, and rhythms I like, and
experimentation I like. Without anything that I don’t like. Or which I find unnecessary.
Now, at the same time, I wish it was better.
I wish it was more skilful. I wish it was less repetitive. (It is, I
have to admit, very repetitive, made on looping DAW software). I really
wish I was better at music. I wish it was more sophisticated. More
elegant. More trendy and more admired. And certainly I wish it was
better mixed and mastered to sound better on other people’s sound
systems.
But I no longer wish it was different.
I don’t wish it was somehow closer to genre norms, or more like artist
X. It’s exactly like artist ME, in the kind of messy between-genre that I
make. And that’s exactly what I want to make and want to listen to.
I
struggle to be objective. I see flaws. But I don’t know how to improve
on them. Every time I go to change something I feel that I’m losing
something as well as gaining. And that’s hard to handle. I know that
hurts the objective quality. I’m sure everyone else will hate the music
because the flaws glaring at them.
That’s
the (possibly not very) strange paradox. I simultaneously don’t trust
the music is good enough for anyone else to like. But it’s the only
thing that I could like this much.
