It's gonna hurt me
It's gonna kill when you desert me
This happened to me twice before
It won't happen to me anymore...
—Weezer
What is the purpose of this pursuit, really? Prove my chops, serve my ego, assert my will on others, earn indie cred? Do I have anything of worth to say about life or relationships or social issues or ________? Can I, a person who's studying to become a scientist, make art? And can I, a Christian, make legitimate and original and good art?
I assure you there are a lot of little reasons I just mentioned (and probably a few I don't quite know yet, good or bad), but the simplest answer is that there's a sound in my head that has been swimming around for years, and it needs to pour out. Whenever my defeated mind tells me I should just play music with whoever wants me around and not worry about it, my heart reaction is NO. Recently, as I've attended more shows in Seattle this year than the previous three years combined, I would watch a band on stage and... THIS is what I came here for. This is where I belong.
Overcome @ Cornerstone Festival, 2010
The guitar blog completed from last year to a few months ago had a low amount of risk associated with it—Come listen to me talk your ear off about components and watch me make something legitimately cool. But writing music? There's a whole world of criticism out there waiting to find you. I had to learn to take that criticism well, and to filter out the voices of trolls and naysayers, when I started posting tutorial demo videos on YouTube in 2009. Perhaps I just figured that songwriting would be a hundred times worse. Fear can stop you, but that doesn't negate the drive nor flush out your ideas. I'd like to think that time, age, a few dozen rejections from women, and those YouTube videos have made me a more resilient individual, such that I'm ready to tackle a much more personal project and release it to the world.
Alright, enough talk. Over the years I've amassed a library of guitar riffs and chord progressions using the most crude software (Cubase AI, Audacity) and microphones (Shure SM63 into a XLR/TRS converter, smartphone). Recording was just never a world I wanted to get into. The idea of dropping enormous amounts of money on gear and software, just to have it all go obsolete in a couple years' time with another Pro Tools update, was something that kept me at bay.
I have all of my files arranged by date as YYYYMMDD and loaded in my iTunes under my own name. Narcissistic? Maybe. But it makes for easy access:
I'll start with these files and see if there's anything interesting there that will spark any new ideas. And I've got plenty more sound files between two different smartphones, too.
Speaking of ideas:
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