In January of 2015, I was desperately ready for some creative space.
My mind was firing off new ideas all over the place, I had that familiar excited feeling brewing deep in my belly, and I was itching to get started. So, along with my girlfriend I moved from the UK to the beautiful city of Krakow in Poland, where I spent four months writing an album of new music.
It had been a few years since my last large music project, and it felt incredible to get back to work. The experience of developing a large creative project is one of my favourite things in life; the feeling of slowly uncovering something, discovering its shape as you go, finding surprising connections and themes where you hadn’t expected, and seeing all the pieces gradually come together into one final whole, is exhilarating and magical for me. There’s nothing else like it in the world.
It’s also incredibly challenging, mind-consuming, and soul-shattering at times. There isn’t a spare moment where you’re not thinking about the project in some way, collecting inspiration or pondering lyrics or rearranging parts in your head. This creative work seems to prod and play with every single one of my deepest insecurities, poking me where it hurts most, bringing feelings of intense self-doubt and criticism almost every other day.
Still, it was beautiful and rewarding to get back to that place of creating. I followed the guidance of Anne Lamott, to simply take it ‘bird by bird’, one tiny step at a time; I found courage in Elizabeth Gilbert’s writing about working with your fear; I followed along with John Steinbeck’s journal that he kept during his work on ‘The Grapes Of Wrath’, and I found hope in the fact that even the greatest artists struggle with doubt and depression and insecurity.
So, I got on with the work. I sat my ass down at the keyboard at the same time every morning, and refused to move until my creative hours were up; I spent afternoons in cafés finishing lyrics; I wandered the city with a microphone, recording ambience and interesting sounds; I spent hundreds of hours editing the tiniest details and playing with variations of notes and chords to get the tone just right.
And, one day, I finished my work.
It took me around 18 months to go from nothing, to a fully completed album. It was the hardest I have ever worked on anything, and I felt proud of what I had created. It felt authentic, personal, and like a meaningful marker of my life during the past few years.
The job was done! I had returned to the reasons that I loved creating art in the first place, and had simply made something honest that mattered to me. Success!
Except, the job wasn’t quite done. Now came another stage in the creative process, and one which has stalled me far longer than expected: the challenging stage of actually having finished the work.
Lots of people talk about the difficulties of creating good art; less people talk about the challenges that come when the art is complete.
There is the constant accompaniment of doubt and self-criticism about the work you’ve done; the feeling of tiredness and lack of energy; and the worry about what you will possibly work on next.
But perhaps the biggest challenge of having finished work is figuring out what to do with it.
Seth Godin is famous for his advice to ‘ship it’; to consistently release work quickly and lightly. According to this line of thinking, most people tend to hold on to their work for far too long, worrying over the exact right time to let it go, when they should really just send it into the world and move on to creating the next thing.
I remember thinking this was great advice when I began writing the album in Krakow. Somehow, it didn’t seem as obvious by the time I was finished.
While I was writing those first few songs, it was easy to feel like I was only creating for myself; if it made me happy, it was worth it! If only three or four other people ever listened to this album, and only one of them took anything meaningful from it, it would be worth all the work and effort I had put in. I was creating for the sheer joy of it.
It wasn’t as easy to remember those ideas after the work was completed. Suddenly, I had a project that I had poured thousands of hours of thought, attention, emotion, sweat, blood and tears into; and it wasn’t so easy anymore to just take Seth’s advice to ‘ship it’.
Instead, I felt like I had to release it ‘properly’. And these days, doing it ‘properly’ means having a constant social media presence on ten different platforms, working with promoters and agents and managers and bloggers and playlist collators and influencers, creating excellent additional content like music videos and teaser trailers and photoshoots and Instagram graphics, preparing some kind of fantastic stand-out event to celebrate the actual release day, and just constantly having to remind everyone on the Internet that you exist and that you matter.
I feel exhausted just writing that paragraph.
This all feels a million miles away from ‘just ship it’. And, to be fair, I can see why all of this is important: the world is saturated with great art, great music, great writing, great filmmaking, great work of all kinds; and everyone seems to be shouting for attention at the exact same time. If you want to be heard, you have to work for it.
ARGH!
Something about this feels stressful and opposed to the heart of creativity, and I’m sure it’s not just me who has felt this way. Where is that simple, honest, beautiful drive that caused me to create art in the first place? Where is that authentic need to simply make something and put it out into the world? Often it’s been crushed and buried by the cultural drive to be seen, to impress, to prove myself, and to make waves.
Some of this is understandable: after all, I do want people to experience and enjoy my art. Now that it’s done, I want other people to connect to it. I don’t want my hard work to go to waste. This isn’t a negative or selfish motive; it’s normal, and it’s good.
But this simple intention to give your art to others can very easily be twisted and bent out of shape, until it becomes solely about getting a strong response or following or social media presence. This isn’t healthy or helpful, and yet it’s something that many creative people seem to struggle with.
Writing this article is a bit of a therapeutic exercise for me, as I am literally right in the middle of this process. Eight months have passed since I actually finished the album, and I’ve finally begun the process of releasing it; as I publish this article, there are only six weeks left until the big day.
I woke up at 6 o’clock this morning, feeling stressed and exhausted, having just dreamt of all the things I still have to do for the upcoming release; and honestly, as I shuffled sleepily to the bathroom, I felt completely drained and depressed about the whole thing. It all felt pointless, like nobody cared about my work, like I was just shouting into the noise, like the release process was an overwhelming weight on my shoulders. I crawled back into bed and tried to drift back to sleep for a few more short hours of peace.
I realised afterwards that all of the feelings of stress and pressure are taking me nowhere; in fact, they are taking me away from the reason that I love creating art in the first place.
Yesterday, I decided to take some time out. There’s a church near me that holds a quiet meditation service once a week, and it sounded like just the thing I needed.
The service was calm, refreshing, and peaceful. I focused on my breath and just took time out to be still. As I sat in the huge, spacious building, surrounded by emptiness, hearing the distant sounds of the busy city outside, I felt like everything was alright. I felt like I was alright; and like all the details of how I released my creative work were unimportant compared to the work itself.
Afterwards, I spoke to the minister. I could tell that he put hours of work into these short services, bringing pieces of poetry and music and ancient stories and thoughts from all kinds of cultures and philosophies around the world. He told me that most weeks, perhaps only 9 or 10 people will attend.
But then he said that he still does the services because he loves doing them. He gets ideas for them all the time, finding inspiration in all kinds of places; and if he has to ask somebody else to take the service one week, he deeply misses it. It’s his creative work, his project, something that he deeply cares about and just does. It doesn’t matter how many people are there, or how appreciated he feels; he simply creates, puts ideas together, and releases that work every Wednesday for whoever is present.
As an ex-Christian myself, I found that attitude deeply refreshing. I came from a church culture that was often driven by productivity, numbers and doing everything as BIG and FLASHY and ATTENTION-GRABBING as possible. To see a minister who simply cared about creating a place of calm and peace and free thinking every week, for whoever needed it, really spoke to me; and reminded me of what mattered when it came to my own work.
I was treating the release of my work like a manned mission to Mars; something heavy, complicated, and with the highest of stakes. There would be a perfect window of time to launch, once every three years or so, and I would have to put everything into making that launch go off flawlessly. If I messed it up, the whole thing would be a waste of time.
Actually, the minister made me think that my work was more like a paper aeroplane; something that was light, made for fun, and designed to be thrown out into the world. Who knows who might see that aeroplane, who may pick it up and throw it further, who might get a smile from it, or who would pick up a piece of paper and build their own aeroplane in response.
Releasing art is a game, not an exact science; meant to be done lightly, consistently, and without too much seriousness. It’s hard to not take our art too seriously, especially when we’ve poured so much time and work into it. But the value of what we have created doesn’t come from how popular it becomes, or how much of a response we get from others; its value lies in itself, in the fact that we made it. Without realising that, you may never launch anything at all.
I’m trying to return to a place of calm about this whole thing. I want to enjoy releasing this work into the world. I want to do the things that excite me, that sound interesting and unique and different, not simply the things that are the most marketable or that will attract the most likes or hearts or claps or whatever. I would rather deeply connect with ten people, than be another noise in the background for ten thousand people.
Ultimately, I want to do my thing; and I want to have fun doing it.
The problem is, I know that soon I’ll probably shift back to stress and popularity and worrying about how to release it perfectly.
This attitude seeps in so quietly and subtly, that I often don’t notice until I’m back in the middle of it. One moment I’m feeling secure and open about the whole process, just interested in making my honest best work and then making it available; the next, I realise I’ve gotten bogged down in the need to impress and prove myself to the world. It’s a constant rhythm, a pesky habit that I’m trying to become more aware of and quicker to address.
The truth is that releasing finished work is almost as hard as creating that work in the first place; but it doesn’t need to be. I didn’t become a musician and a songwriter so that I can spend months worrying about how to release my music; I started creating albums because I was passionate about the power of art, excited about making something exist in the world that didn’t exist before, and about creating something that mattered to me.
I create because it gives me so much in return. Of course, I genuinely hope that it gives something to others; but I do it for myself first.
Time after time after time after time, I need to remind myself of that simple fact. Because this won’t be my last work; I don’t have to hang all my hopes for my entire career on one single project, and even if I never ‘succeed’ in terms of popularity or numbers, nobody in the world can stop me from creating art that brings happiness and purpose and enrichment to me for the rest of my life.
Whatever your own passion may be, whatever you have spent years working on, preparing for, crafting delicately and carefully: don’t get too caught up in the perfect release. It can lead to stress, disappointment, and deep self-doubt; and worst of all, it can take time away from creating the next thing. I think I have to agree with Seth: the important thing is to ‘ship it’.
So, my album is called ‘krakow, 29’. It’s going to be out in the world on the 22nd of March, 2019. You will probably never hear about it again; but it exists, I made it, I’m proud of it, and that is enough.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to work.
***EDIT: the album is now out in the world, and if you’d like, you can listen to it here!***
