Thoughts for a stuck friend

I was talking with a friend yesterday … and he’s a bit stuck. He’s having trouble finishing songs. Hell, he’s having trouble getting much past starting them.

The proximate symptom is that he’s getting bogged down in sounds too early; he’s starting a song with a basic guitar part, and then he’s getting annoyed because he doesn’t like the guitar sound he chose, and then he’s messing around with the sound, and all of a sudden it’s bedtime and his momentum is gone.

I’m not a therapist, but it strikes me that there’s something deeper going on here; musical self-sabotage as proxy for unresolved feelings, perhaps, or something of that nature.

I know that, in my personal experience, if I’m not careful, I can spiral into unproductivity when I’m not keeping on top of my spiritual maintenance — taking my inventory, identifying things that aren’t working, figuring out what in there I can control and what I can’t, practicing radical acceptance around the latter, and dedicating myself to working in productive, measured, and sustainable ways on the former.

“Measured” is a key part of that for me. If I try to fix everything at once, I can just get myself a different flavor of overwhelmed, and I end up essentially back where I started — spinning out of control and unable to focus on my work.

When I think about my friend, I imagine his brain hijacking his music time. I imagine him sitting down, excited to work. And then I imagine, as he starts working, that perhaps feelings start coming up — perhaps subconsciously! — and his brain starts undermining him. What if what his subconscious wants is for him to remain stuck? What if that’s a known and comfortable place? Sometimes it’s easier to stay stuck in unhealthy patterns than to address them. It’s complicated.

If I could advise my stuck friend, it would start with breaking things down into simpler chunks. This friend is talented, and has experienced some success with music in the past. I imagine that comparing his current self to that past self might be stressful. I also imagine it might create a situation in which he feels that anything he makes has to be judged in context of what came before. And the cognitive dissonance of sitting with a song in that uncomfortable in-between space when it’s not yet sounding good or working well might be extra hard to deal with.

So I would suggest setting intentional, incremental goals.

I would think that a very positive first goal could simply be to do the work necessary to reconnect with the simple fact that songs rarely emerge finished and ready to go. To acknowledge that songwriting and recording are work — sometimes uncomfortable work. It’s messy! There are half-starts and dead ends and wrong turns. And our self-worth can be tied up in all of it. It’s easy to feel good about ourselves when things are flowing; feeling good about ourselves in the moments when things aren’t working well is much harder, and also much more important.

If we acknowledge that we’re most likely not going to finish a perfect song in an evening, then we can get serious about the incremental work of writing and recording a song from scratch.

Maybe, as with my friend, we’re starting with a rhythm guitar part. What if we could give ourselves permission for the first guitar take to just be a scratch track? Instead of fretting over the sound and the performance, we could focus on the chords and the feel and the structure of the song. We could think about the emotion we want to transmit. Maybe we could wireframe up a structure and arrangement, just using whatever sounds are immediately at hand. The real sounds can come later — maybe first we can work quickly, to do our best to capture the emotion that made us want to go into our studio in the first place.

And then, later, maybe even on a different day, we could go back and work on the sounds, replacing them one at a time with better versions and better performances.

Alternatively: another approach that I like to take sometimes is to separate out types of tasks, and tackle them when my energy seems right for it. In the moments I feel more inspired and/or energetic: mixing and production and drum programming. In the moments I feel less inspired and/or more tired: vocal tuning and waveform editing and more passive listening and carving out EQs. It all has to get done; we can move between tasks in a way that’s better aligned with where our energy is in the moment. We don’t have to try to force ourselves to write if it’s not a good time for writing. Maybe it’s a better time for sound design.

There’s a reason we’re drawn to make music, and I believe that for most of us it’s because we have something in us that wants to get out. But because we’re creative people, who are frequently prone to overthinking and self-doubt, our brains will sometimes try to undermine us. It’s a trap! But if we’re aware of it, we can evolve intentional, incremental work strategies that will keep us in forward motion.

Braaiinnssss — jamie