Harvey Church's Log

I will never release any music?

25-11-2021

 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.

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