It’s been a long while since I’ve written about some of the music that I’ve created. In fact, as I wrote in my post “Where’s The Blog?”, I simply gave up writing entirely so I could use the little time I have to actually make music.
Super smart decision, right?
Well, as I mentioned in the aforementioned post, I recently read Austin Kleon’s book “Steal Like an Artist”, and then promptly “Show Your Work!“, both of which are incredibly brilliant and inspiring. These are must reads for anyone that creates!
Specifically, in “Show Your Work!“, Austin Kleon describes how important it is to share your work — not for rabid self promotion, but to allow others to discover your process, with the hope of inspiring them to learn from your work and create something of their own.
Although I still think I made the right decision to focus on making music, I also neglected the act of sharing any of the process — something that I believe other creative people find value in. To me, learning about other artists’ processes is the most interesting part of the creative journey! From getting a glimpse into the background or inspiration of a song, to learning about the setbacks, unexpected surprises, mistakes (and potentially how they were turned into something brilliant), to how the end result was ultimately formed is fascinating to me.
So…I missed my chance to share the process as I was living it, but certainly can do a retrospective of the last several years and share what I have been working on.
“But is this really useful to anyone Brian?”
It’s very possible it’s not. But if there is even a small possibility that there are other people out there struggling to find time to make music and this blog is at all a small spark of inspiration to them to continue at it, then I feel it’s worth it!
To quickly summarize, here are my stack-ranked priorities in terms of musical endeavors:
- Mastery (aka practice, practice, and more practice)
- Short Stories — My children’s music album (Apple Music, Spotify)
- Songwriting
- Becoming an amateur again (learning new instruments)
- Collaborations
In my following posts, I’ll describe each one of these focus areas in a bit of detail, with the hope that other musicians out there may find value in learning about what I’ve been working on.
And as I mentioned, I delight in learning about other individuals’ processes, and would love to hear your story. Feel free to leave a comment.