I know the spirit of Album Month is not to get hung up or precious about anything in particular. But, the creative process is strange and unpredictable. That’s sometimes the most frustrating thing about it—creation from nothing to something has its own pace unrelated to your own schedule and preference. That’s been true of the last week of Album Month. The scope of the song I’m working on now has grown far beyond my initial conception and is taking far longer than I expected it to.

A few posts back, I described the strategy of moving fluidly past roadblocks by moving on to something else with the intention of, like skipping a hard problem on a timed test, coming back to it later if there’s time. Every extra day I work on this behemoth of a song, I wonder if I’m violating my own self-imposed rule of fluidity. What stops me from moving on is a desire to explore. I’m not actually stuck. I’m exploring. I’m exploring different arrangement ideas, exploring production and mixing techniques, exploring ways to increase the quality of my work with the tools at hand, building skills and honing craft. The value of Album Month—for me—is to impose motivation, consistency and discipline on a process that has traditionally been none of those things. Ten songs in a month is a guiding principle, but not to be achieved at any cost. I want to be proud of my work when I’m done. I want to learn along the way. I don’t want to rush through it and have ten new songs that the world doesn’t need to show for it.

Ebb And Flow