The Confidence to Create (The Confidence to Complete) for Songwriters & Other Creatives
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The Confidence to Create (The Confidence to Complete) for Songwriters & Other Creatives
Let's harness the stallion!
This is short - mostly due to some time constraints.
I came across a YouTube channel: struthless
Two videos - linked below that I found insightful… and frustrating as F&#%!!!
Truth: The videos are not frustrating. I got frustrated watching them. More specifically, I got frustrated at me.
I explain it in my latest video:
As I indicate in the video, it was supposed to be, The Confidence to Complete.
It all comes out of my abject failure at completing SO MANY projects!!
We’re going to focus on the music for now.
I completed, The Tide, a few weeks ago. I’d made a commitment to record acoustic versions of my songs - while we, prepare and build additional time, for more fully-produced songs.
I was recording the next song, The Coward and The Fool.
As I indicated in the video above, I laid down some really nice acoustic guitar tracks (2 tracks, panned left and right) and a scratch vocal. And then…
I spent 3 mornings recording bass
I spent a morning or two recording shaker
I spent some time recording tambourine
… keyboards
… electric guitar
… programming some drums
It all sounds really cool. It’s all incomplete but solid ideas…
That’s Awesome, right?
Wrong!!!
I said I was recording acoustic versions of my songs. Me and my guitar.
Adding all those tracks is just a way for me to avoid completing the song and putting it out. So, the scratch vocal sits incomplete with several really cool ideas for those other parts.
Given my time commitments, it is a surefire way to ensure the song never comes out. It also ensures I don’t get to the next song... or the next song... or the next song.
This could be pathological!!
This morning I muted all that really cool extra stuff leaving just the guitars and my scratch vocal.
Ya know what? It sounds really good!! The guitars are done!!! Ready to go.
And so, I will record the vocals by Saturday and mix the song on Sunday.
Complete Projects by Applying Constraints
One of the videos on the channel I mentioned above is titled, The Stallion Theory: How aimless creativity ruins your life.
He is alluding to something that Jerry Seinfeld talks about when it comes to creative output. Basically, creativity is a stallion in your head. If you do not harness it, it just makes a mess of things - nothing gets done.
From that idea, he (struthless) created a form called, The Stallion Harness. I’ve created my own version as a Google Slide file that you can copy to your own Gmail account or as a PDF you can download.
Below is an image of mine from yesterday. Besides demonstrating why I learned to type in elementary school, it was my marching orders for creating and publishing a YouTube video yesterday. It’s a sub-par video… but it is published. The idea is fine and I may make another one day… but, I have other projects to work on and less time today than I had yesterday.
We’re all on a deadline…
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again.
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR JOINING ME ON THIS JOURNEY!!!
Matthew Moran
August 4, 2023
The Confidence to Create (The Confidence to Complete) for Songwriters & Other Creatives
I don't want to sound like an ornery son of a bitch, but I see things very differently.
I think we need what Nietzsche called a reappraise of that which we value. He wanted to downgrade sympathy and altruism, and he aspired toward a harsher, more competitive and even violent vision.
That's not the reappraisal I would want.
My reappraisal:
I think we have to take Creativity off its high horse, stop worshipping Creativity as the North Star or most magnificent value, and I think we should increase our valuation of things such as loyalty, trustworhiness, reliabiliy and constancy
Our society does not suffer from a paucity of artists. We have a superfluity of egomaniacal artists preening and screaming for applause and laudatory comments ad nauseum.
Our society suffers from a lack of constancy, trustworthiness and reliability.
Also, I don't mean to sound like a supercilious son of a bitch, but the great mass of people don't read anything, don't know anything and are only a couple of steps removed from roses are red, violets are blue on the literary spectrum.
AND WHAT ARE MOST ARTISTS DOING IN THEIR WORK: I recenty read an article which said that from the late 19th century until the present, the prime goal of artists throughtout the Occident has been "Epater le bourgeoisie."
Or Shock the bourgeoise.
For well over one hundred years, artists have assumed the stance of smart alecky teenagers who aspire to wow and stun their elders with smut and savagery marketed as a primeval rebellion against a stuffy environment of lace doillies and the prim propriety of old lady aesthetics.
After a while it gets a bit monotonous.
Very useful - I like the stallion analogy