Words

How Long Did It Take?
An Examination of the Creative Process

As I finish my first CD, people keep asking me, “How long did it take you to do this?”  There really isn’t a piece of time to describe it.  I don’t think it’s possible to count the number of hours I worked on it, there’s just not a number big enough.  Also, it’s not like I had a block of time where I started it on day X and worked on it straight through to day Y.  It was a project that started and stopped itself hundreds of times.  So the best unit of measure I can come up with is “a lifetime”.  My lifetime. 

But I’ll be the first to admit that a lifetime seems a bit long to produce an album that’s only an hour long.  So where did the time go?

A Breakdown of the Steps

The first part of any creative project is education.  I had to learn how to play music.  That process started when I was eight and continues everyday of my life.  I started with guitar, added trombone, then piano.  When I was 18 I started learning bass and slowly picked up drums.  Learning many instruments takes a lot of time.  If I only played one instrument, I probably would have progressed faster.  On the other hand, different instruments compliment each other, and skills I learned on one became useful on another.

Then of course there’s song writing, which for me is a combination of composing music and writing poetry.  Both skills take a long time to develop.  All the songs for “No Less Days” were written and rewritten from 1991 to 1999.  But during that time I wrote a hundred other poems, started hundreds more that I didn’t finish and had just as many ideas that were lost before I could write them down.  And musically I had many ideas that never grew to fruition.  Another inconvenience is that the creative spirit doesn’t like to focus on just one thing, so I’ve already started working on material for my next album.  It felt weird moving ahead when the first project wasn’t finished, but I’m not going to argue with my muse.

One of the biggest reasons this project took so long was technology.  About 20 years ago, music technology started becoming more affordable and people started putting music studios in their homes.  When I was 15, I knew I wanted to have a home recording studio.  I wanted to use it to record an album in which I played all or at least most of the parts.  After graduating college in 1992 I taught myself synthesis, MIDI recording, digital audio recording and digital audio editing but the hardest part of learning technology is that it gets better, faster and cheaper every year.  As soon as I started understanding what I was using, it was time to upgrade and I had a whole bunch of new tools to learn.  The learning curve never seemed to level off.

As I got more comfortable with my studio, I soon discovered one of the disadvantages to recording everything myself.  A four-minute song might have 20 different parts in it.  I had to record each part, so what sounds like a four minute song to you, is 80 minutes to me.  Add to this the fact that I had to get the right tone for each instrument, set the levels and record multiple takes, you see how this can take a long time.  The worst was when I recorded a bunch of tracks and realized that I wasn’t getting the song I wanted, and either had to rerecord a few parts or start the whole song over.

So gradually the album started taking shape and I became comfortable with the many skills required to record it, but one thing really intimidated me - singing.  I’ll be the first to admit that singing has been the hardest part.  Thank God I found Maryann Price who taught me that proper breath support, listening and other physical skills are only a small portion of what it takes to sing.  Singing is all about confidence.  If you think you can sing, you can.  Not only that, if you think you can sing, you sing more often.  And the more often you sing, the better you get at it, and the more confident you get.  You see where this goes and why singers always seem to have such big heads.  Maryann taught me to believe in myself.  The album wouldn’t have been possible without her.

There were also a few other skills where I felt somewhat limited.  These were things I could do myself, but I knew I would get better and faster results if I got help.  I needed some friends to lay down extra guitar parts, string players to record my string quartet and an engineer to help mix the album.  I’m used to collaborating with other people, but this time, I was the producer.  Instead of doing, I had to instruct others how to do.  This led to another first for me - time became money.  Before, I had all the time in the world, now I had to decide when something was good enough and not worth the money it would take to redo it.  That was a hard thing to learn.

Obstacles

Now that I’ve outlined the steps I had to take to make the album, let’s look at the things that tried to keep me from doing it.

An obstacle many artists face is their day job.  Having to go to work each day really gets in the way of the creative process.  Some nights I would get an inspiration, a giant boost of energy and I’d stay up very late.  But the next day at work, I’d be tired as shit.  It became negative reinforcement: if I stayed up late working on something creative, I was punished the next day by being tired.  I started thinking twice about being inspired after 10pm.

Another things that can get in the way is other creative projects.  Besides writing and recording music, I love performing, and the experience of playing in front of people makes me a better studio musician.  But playing around town in bands does take a lot of time and energy.  Also, as I developed my recording skills, I wanted to put those to use as well.  I started picking up other recording projects, which brought both money and experience, but again slowed my album down.

Then there are the wonderful obstacles that get in the way.  I find I spend a lot of great time with my wife.  Having our first baby was a really great diversion too.  And there’s always TV, movies, video games, the internet, and ebay.  Not to mention the fact that we have to “Mow, rake, paint and clean the big house.”  The irony is the “obstacles” that make it so hard to get things done are called “life”.  Without them, what are we writing about?  Who are we performing to?

Which finally leads me to the real reason this album took so long.  Let’s be honest, the biggest obstacle, the thing I had to overcome most was self-doubt.  And since I wore many hats, there was lots of room for doubt:  “I suck as a songwriter.  I suck as a poet.  I suck as a keyboard player. I suck as a bass player.  I suck as a singer.  I suck as an engineer.  I suck as a producer.”  This is enough to paralyze anybody.  Something that should only take a few hours to do, takes several days to fret over first.  When I wallowed in doubt, I didn’t listen to the muse or her inspirations.  I was lucky. I beat back my doubts and finished my dream, but it was never easy.

So with all that doubt, why do it?

JFK said, “But why, some say, the moon? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain?  Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic?  Why does Rice play Texas?  We choose to go to the moon.  We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Maryann Price told me, “As an artist, you have to be obsessed.  Why else would anyone go through this?  Why else would you spend so much time and money on it?”

Perhaps it’s a stab at immortality.  A work of art is something that we can leave behind that proves we were here, that shares who we were with others.  In the song “No Less Days” I sing, “The only things that I take with me are the only things that I leave behind.”  Perhaps putting down a piece of myself in art is my way of leaving a piece of myself behind.

But that’s the selfish reason, not the true reason.  We do it because we have to.  If we are given talent and inspiration, we must use them.  Otherwise, we are like an instrument that never gets played.  It sits in the corner, goes out of tune and eventually deteriorates till it is no longer playable.  Instead, we must let the Great Creator continue the act of creation through us.  We must let our instruments sound.

So where is my doubt?

My doubt is still alive and healthy.  Now that my album is out there, my doubt says, “no one will like this, you wasted your time!”  And while many people may not care for my writing, playing or singing, I know one person who loves it: me.  I heard this album in my head years ago, and the only way I could truly listen to it was to make it.  And now that I’ve made it, I really do enjoy listening to it.  So when my doubt says that there’s a bunch of people out there who don’t like my music, I say, “Fine.  Let them go listen to something they do like.  Let them be inspired by the music and art they love.  May they be so blessed as to be inspired, follow their obsession and create their own art.”