My Music

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.