You know, I’m starting to get used to never truly being happy with what I make.
Did another song. Here it is.
Like, I know there’s things I wanted to put into that song that never made it in. And I know there’s aspects of that metaphor that could be expanded on to better flesh out my feelings on the matter. And so forth and so on.
But I learn by doing, not by getting it perfect the first time. I can only tell myself that the next song will be better and so on ad infinitum until the day I die.
Would that be “ad mortem”?
Not that I think today’s song is terrible. Far from it. But as the creator, I can feel how much better it could be and it occupies my mind.
Eventually this “little dissatisfaction” will burrow itself deep into my subconscious and inform the inner workings of my petulant but brilliant muse and that will, in time, lead to making better songs.
It’s kind of amazing, really.
Today’s been okay so far. I enjoyed writing the lyrics to that sad lil song up there. I think I am slowly getting to the point where I can stick with things and fuss and fidget over them as I try to make them better.
You know, the way sane people make art.
I’m still pretty impatient. I want to blaze across the sky, not tinker and labor away in some subterranean atelier.
But I’m learning. And I am growing impatient with feeling embarrassed by what I make and its slipshod and sloppy half-assed nature.
I am tired of “getting away” with turning in first drafts. I know that I could do so much better and that I should stop resting on my enormous laurels and coasting on my ability to impress people and start turning out some seriously professional work.
I mean, most of the time I don’t even remember to stick my “like and subscribe” thing at the end of my videos. That’s got to end.
I should even start putting a link to my Patreon in the descriptions of my videos. And come up with some sort of reward tier thing.
Gah, it all seems so needy and pathetic. Self promotion is always hard to do but it’s especially hard when you are from a generation that hates promotion in general.
Look, like my shit or don’t. Whatever.
But I want money and that means getting the fuck over myself and doing the things other, way more successful YouTubers do to drum up support.
I could make merch, I suppose. Very snarky merch. T-shirts and coffee mugs and decorative wigwams with sarcastic, cynical slogans.
Or maybe a very obviously fictional T-shirt for my “band” (which doesn’t even have a name yet) with tour dates at like, the gates of Hell and Magical Pony Land and so on.
No idea what I’d call myself, and it’s not like I’d tour. I’m not even a real recording artist, I’m just some AI aware poet making songs with Riffusion for fun.
Still, it would be awesome if some actual band wanted to play one of my songs. Riffusion could be seen as the ultimate way for songwriters to demo their songs when they can’t sing or play an instrument.
I’ve Googled whether there’s a tool out there that will generation backing tracks based on existing vocals and the answer, astonishingly enough, seems to be “no”.
It’s so counterintuitive! AI can generate entire songs based on my lyrics but it can’t do the seemingly much simpler task of making music to go with my singing.
Oh well, I am sure someone is working on it. It could easily be something every aspiring singer is going to want, especially if it comes with vocal cleanup and autotune.
I mean, what the hell, the professionals use them!
More after the break.
Life at the bottom
My mood is fairly “down” right now.
But like I told Joe recently, being “down” doesn’t necessarily mean feeling “bad”.
There are few assumptions engendered by modern society quite as harmful as the idea that we should be happy all the time and if we’re not happy, something is wrong.
Either with us, or with the world, or both.
And this assumption causes us to fight the natural downshift in our mood cycle and it is this futile fight that does us the most damage.
Smart, sane people just let their mood go up and down. They know, intuitively, from their life experience, that moods go up and down. Sometimes we’re “up”, and sometimes we’re “down”, just like sometimes we’re energetic and sometimes we’re tired.
In general, we in the West need to make peace with the cyclical.
The world turns. The sun rises and falls. Night become day, day becomes night. The seasons change as the Earth goes ’round the Sun. The Sun goes ’round the galaxy, and the galaxy dances with all the other galaxies in an endless dos-y-dos.
Even our very lives rise and fall and wax and wane, just like the Moon.
We live in circles but we think in arrows.
Especially me. I’m a future oriented pragmatist and that inherently means that I want to move from absolute position A to absolute position B via “progress”.
This is deeply fundamental to how I think. There has to be at least the possibility of improvement. I can’t imagine living in a world where everything returns to first position and the same things happen all over again.
But I recognize the cyclical nature of things. No matter how hard we try to travel in a straight and logical line, the best we can hope to do is go up the spiral staircase.
And you know what? That’s good enough for me. Straight lines are overrated. As long as we’re trending upwards, I can learn to accept the highs and lows.
I’m working on it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.