February Crunch
Unpacking a month-long creative whirlwind
I ended up scheduling a bunch of stuff throughout February, it got crazy, and I didn’t post at all. But I did write a 7000-word essay about modeling creative behavior that should be coming out soon. I figured I’d go through everything I did last month just as a brief catch up. Some of it is out there already, and some of it will be coming out in the upcoming couple months.
Interviewed the band Northern Liberties for my Perfect Recognition project. My old bands played with NL a lot, and I played a solo show with them in December, which was awesome.
Edited and released this interview with Adam Gnade for Talking Writing. I was excited about this one coming out.
Wrote music for an Adam Gnade reading for Talking Writing, available here on Substack and here on Bandcamp. This turned out so nicely that we’re planning to record more pieces together.
Wrote the aforementioned 7000-word essay. This wasn’t on my original to-do list, but once I started writing it I felt like I couldn’t stop because I’d lose the thread. I ended up spending an entire week of my work/free/creative time writing. It kind of screwed me over for the other things that I was trying to do, but I’m glad I got it out of my head in one piece. This should be coming out in the next week or so, maybe as several parts.
Played a show with the bands Curse Reverser and Bruise Bath, which was super fun. I put together the video for the first half of Weird Music and performed that for the first time.
Made and submitted this video for the Tiny Desk Contest.
Put together the album No Concept for the RPM Challenge. The RPM Challenge is basically the same idea as NaNoWriMo but applied to music. So you’re challenged to write a song, an EP, or a full length album during the month of February. I spent December and January freely writing loops at night without even listening back to them after I made them. I listened to all of them on January 31st, and then chose 10 to turn into songs for No Concept. During February I arranged all the tracks I chose, mixed, and overdubbed extra parts. I released it on March 1st.
And I was supposed to have this parenting roundtable podcast out on 2/28, but I didn’t quite make it, so it just came out yesterday. Oh well.
After heavy creative pushes I always feel a mixture of accomplishment, futility, exhaustion, and a need to bounce back financially. Accomplishment because I’m always proud of the things I create, and while my general numbers remain very low, the quality of people’s reaction to my work is often incredibly moving for me. Futility because despite everything I feel that I’ve accomplished, nothing significant has changed. Exhaustion because these kind of pushes often require a ton of physical and mental energy. And a need to bounce back financially for obvious reasons—a real look at how much money I’ve made over that time of pushing steady paid work to the side to make time for the art.
I would like to clarify that my feelings of futility are never tinged with regret. I’m always super happy that I made what I made, it’s just that—even though I know better and I try not to do it—a little bit of hope starts to creep into my mind and heart while I’m working on stuff that maybe this will be the thing that breaks it all wide open. I’ve been around the block too many times to believe that this will ever happen, but it’s tough to stop that seed from poking out of the ground sometimes.
These reflections are bringing to mind a few different moments in my creative life.
For the first two Weird Music interviews in 2009, I took a train down to Baltimore in the morning to meet with Matmos, and then I took a bus from Baltimore to New York to interview Ches Smith. That night I slept on a friend’s couch and then took the Chinatown bus to Philly the next morning. I didn’t even get a chance to go home before work and instead went straight from the bus to my part time job at the linguistics center. I sat down at my computer with a similar mix of emotions. On the one hand, I had just returned from an intense experience and successfully collected the first two pieces of a very large project. But on the other hand, I was sitting down to several hours of mind-numbingly boring work. It’s like bouncing into the house bounding with energy and then being forced to sit on the floor and stare at the wall for four hours straight.
I mentioned in the parenting roundtable that I left a hostile work environment as we were planning for Henry’s birth. Before he was born, we went on a tour and I got a call from that same place to see if I could fill in for a week right after we got back. I said yes because it would be a good paycheck after not making very much money for several weeks, but also because I wanted to see if any of the discussions I’d had with them before I left had changed anything. It hadn’t. But it was a much needed paycheck.
As luck would have it, as this push was winding down I got an email from the linguistics center asking if I wanted to pick a project back up that I haven’t touched in over a year. So it looks like I’ll be switching back into a little hourly work for a bit of recovery. But there’s more coming down the pipeline, so stay tuned.