I had a night of excruciating stomach pain; awaking with it from a very visual dream of a garden of exploding cakes. Foam and sweet cream filled the garden and kitchen, but the sight was somewhat alarming. My pains might be due to a recent decision to try taking probiotics to help with my long term digestive problems. Perhaps this is a positive sign of change. Only time will tell. Either way, the lack of sleep did not affect my enthuisiasm for the day. The trick with work is to use emotionless, rationalised targets and similar logical analyses.
Yet, it's been a frustrating week. I now have four songs complete: Joey Deacon, I Care, Light Blue Evening and The Invisible Man. Apart from I Care ('Care' from yesterday), all are at least ten years old and I'm unsure if I like any of them. Each alone has merits and flaws but each is starkly different and the emotions don't match my current feelings and their style doesn't match my attitudes to my art or music. Even I Care is different from my usual music. The very punk-rawness of that track sets it starkly apart from Joey Deacon, which is the very electronic and minimalistic - its sounds were inspired by a Casio VL-1 keyboard.
Yet, I might feel differently one day, and I'm sure that some people will like some of these. Can I define why I dislike them? It must principally be the age of the music - its lack of connection with my emotions and attitudes of today; and the old production and sound, which I've tried to update. There is a strong element of being tired of them, I've heard them hundreds of times and remade them over and over many times.
It's still been a very useful week, however. I'm torn between releasing these on some sort of E.P. or small collection of old songs, or just forgetting them and treating these relics as tutorials. These songs feel like my early paintings, knowing the flaws, but knowing that I'll improve. Willing to 'get them out there' and not caring about judgement.
Yet, I also want everything I make to be good enough, to ideally sound better each time, to be starkly artistic and creative, not just any old thing.
Sibelius weeps; he burned his 8th symphony due to perfectionism - his lesson would be to get things out there and not care. I also think of Kate Bush and some of her wonderful Phoenix recordings, and some glimpses of songs like Scares Me Silly and Something Like a Song that I love the sound of and really need to be out there.
Well, of older songs, of course I've written hundreds, but only produced and recorded a tiny amount. Of those, these few tracks, and the few on The Dusty Mirror, probably represent the best (although Written on Rice is worth an outing one day). Art should be new, newly made, about current times, about the artist's current life... so many of my painting ideas and paintings feel ancient and out of touch with my current self, and music does too. Perhaps the solution is to only create new work and never rework old work - yet does this doom these older works to being unseen and unheard forever? Also, what is new? I have years old painting ideas and newer ones but only today's very ideas are the newest. Even my Richard Dadd painting was an idea from a few years before I painted it.
I'm reminded that the Teenage Opera was not published for 25-30 years after it was written, by which time it's themes were very out of date, its music was, it was like a relic of a prediction which came true; the the old Grocer Jack character himself.
What to do? Irrespective of any of this, I've made huge strides this month in creating music and new ways of creating music. I must not dwell too much on this analysis. I can easily create new songs in a flash.
Oh! One invention idea. For decades music artists have been listening through one ear of headphones while having one ear open, while singing perhaps. I do this when playing guitar. It's amazing to me that nobody has yet made 'one ear' headphones that can be comfortably worn but having just a hole on one side - so my idea for a company like Sony is to make some MDR-7506 headphones with only one ear. I could easily make up a set with a bit of sawing - and £100 for a new pair of 'phones - it seems tragic to damage a new pair of great headphones in this way however. My temporary solution is to buy some really cheap 80s-style Walkman headphones, the ones with orange sponge ear-pads. These let in sound so easily that you can wear headphones AND hear everything in the room. I think there is a commercial need for 'very open' headphones that allow really a clear sound from the room as well as the sound being played. I can't find any like this but would love to have some.
