Two months until the end of this year, and what have I done? Back in May, I completed and released a really good pop-rock album, which I confess to having listened to a lot since then. I wanted to let that spell wear off me before I'd start on another set of songs, but the lateness of the year has overridden it, slapped me back to my senses. Inspired or not, I got motivated.
This past weekend, I did the music for three songs, and sketched a fourth. For the most part, they're songs that had been rolling around in my head, like marbles in a bucket, for months. The songs are simple in structure, but the arrangements have complex sounds on simple parts. Most of my songs are like that. I sometimes fear that what I am doing isn't different-enough from what I've done before. To whatever degree that it might or might not be, I can hear in it some sort of progress, and among it all a progression. It's the sound of personal growth, I suppose.It must be terrible to fear that doing something too different from what one has done previously, or for which one is best known, will lose one's audience. This might go hand-in-hand with having made a name for oneself and having to present oneself according to the expectations that that engenders. I meet such musicians now and then, and they make me feel as though I'm supposed to feel intimidated by their reputations, but, especially when I'm not aware of their reputations, I feel that they're just talking down to me. Having to maintain one's parameters of sound, personality, and perhaps personal appearance, in order to maintain one's iconicity, must make one feel desperate, in an ironically different way in which aspirants feel desperation. The latter is afraid of never getting it; the former is afraid of losing it.
I recently listened to _______'s latest album and was disappointed that it wasn't different enough from his previous works. Same characteristics, more refined and defined, with little new added to the equation. It sounded like "a _______ album." I wondered how much past success had contributed to the tendency to replicate what had brought that success, or whether it were a matter of not knowing how to do anything outside of the same lane; that there be other rows to hoe. While I can't deprecate the fact of its genuine expression, the adherence to formula leads me to question it. It's the sound of a musical career on auto-pilot.
One thing that I miss, lately, is hearing someone doing something truly new – someone contemporary who is expanding music, rather than referring to the past. Sometimes I'd like to go out and hear some blues-rock bands, but it's not new-to-me enough for me to feel it worth my time. I recall the first time I'd stumbled into a bona fide juke joint, a dive bar in which I were one of two whites among black folks (one of whom was the harmonica player in the band playing). That experience is still so dear to me that I don't want to suffer the Stevie Ray Vaughnnabes. But here I am, thinking like a consumer, rather than a producer, of music. Could the butt up which I have my head be my own?