From many failed attempts, I know when to cut my losses, push projects out and understand when something is excellent enough that it can exist in the world.
Many projects could be improved; several could have had five more passes to
make them truly sparkle. That time would not have been insignificant; sometimes
it would have been an third on top of an already significant time sink.
Pushing a project out in a perfect state, every single time,
is not possible if I’d like to start new things before I die.
One thing this does not seem to apply to is writing my own
music. I can trawl through five years of stored recordings and only find a few
I have shared with a friends.
This trove contains many duds. Half formed ideas, voice notes
from singing in the shower or a lame attempt at an “avant-garde” cover of a pop
song. These will never see the light of day; they are terrible. However, if one
does something hundreds times, odds say that there will be at least one or two interesting
creations.
I have some music that is at the “sharable stage”, yet my body
tells me to keep putting in many hours polishing. I’d never release a single
project if so.
All the works that I can say are excellent, are not perfect.
I can give personal dislikes about them, and probably can their artists, but
they released them anyway because perfection is not the same as being proud of
a piece of work.
What is my problem? Why the stark difference, just because
of a change of medium?
Maybe the iterative improvement that comes from software development,
where a new version can be released to add new features, tweak and rebalance,
is what I miss. Putting out a new piece, just because someone has nailed down a
minor change is not even worth it this is release ten of 2021.
Is it because music is more personal than a piece of
writing?
A piece of writing can be more direct, though context leaves
it to the reader to gauge what was not written; the choice of certain words
over others. The same idea can apply to the lyrical ideas in a song, but even
more acutely. Lyrics can be more florid, beautiful, but ambiguous and can imply
so much more that simply a set of lines on a page.
I sit on so much music, possibly because I hate what I write. Could there also
be a mix of wanting to constantly polish it? The final product not comparing to
the artists I hold in such high regard?
Does a song expose more personal thoughts than I realise or do I have some
misplaced sense that it would not hold up in the arena of public scrutiny (when
people probably would not even care)?
I am able to put music out there, but not any where in the
short term.
