When you are singer, songwriter, producer, sound engineer and play all the parts there’s an awful lot of hats to wear. There’s a lot of tasks where you will be lacking. Jack of all trades, master at none. That’s ok. Yet, the real problem I think is when you need to be your A&R, label boss, manager and maybe even booking agent too.

You really are bound to fail, aren’t you. So, in some ways there is no reason to beat myself up for not being able to bring all my projects to completion. Very few in the history of recorded music would have been able to wear all those hats and get something done (while keeping a dayjob and being a present parent).

Most had a team to help them out, many had outside pressure that forced them to commit to deadlines etc.

In my case, I think the external pressure is what I’m lacking the most. When there’s a deadline, there’s no choice, you have to ship your work, finished or not. The other day I heard of some independent artist that booked mastering services to be done on specific dates and payed for it in advance. That way there was a deadline that meant losing money if he didn’t send his mixes over.

I’m not familiar with the play by George Bernhard Shaw, but I often think about the quote “‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” Not the least, when it comes to all the different podcasts I keep listening too. Frankly, a lot of them are made by musicians that haven taken up some kind of teaching to free themselves from writer’s block by staying busy with something else.

And in a way, writing a blog entry here isn’t that different. Pondering some creative inability instead of writing a lyric.

Just as I wrote a beat/jam a day I think I need to give myself some lyric writing challenge. It’s really a bottleneck for me. A later challenge might be some every other day activity. Creating 15 jams a month with some recorded vocal.

Happy Midsummer, dear reader.

This morning I put my Critter & Guitari Organelle up for sale. It’s a really cool piece of kit brimful with possibilities. Especially the kind of happy accidents you can’t plan. In my head I have lots of ideas how I should put it to use, but I don’t get around to it often enough.

Having access to a variety of reasonably affordable boxes (we’re not talking Moog One here) – I’ve found it’s easy to become a jack of all trades. When you don’t use them often enough, everything becomes “mental work”, there are no reflexes allowing me to work fast and intuitively. My conclusion is that it makes more sense to focus attention to a few pieces, master them and get things done.

So, I’m letting go of all those ideas for experimentation. Just like in life there simply are too many paths to take. You can’t walk them all. And holding on to a piece of gear for some FOMO down the road doesn’t make sense. I actually wished I had more time to put it to use and really learn the rack-possibilities in Orac. For now, I don’t.

The essence of strategy is sacrifice. Goodbye Organelle – I hope you come to a good home.

Good habits are easy to start, harder to uphold. And once you settle with doing 95% of what planned, it’s likely to see those percentages plummeting. I’m just speaking for myself. But it’s interesting to see what happened when I decided to stop posting my jams.

I didn’t stop making them. But I stopped finishing them. And when I think about it, it’s really the finishing part I need to practise. Coming up with ideas is easy, finishing is hard. A half-finished song/jam is a daydream – forever open to possibilities. Finishing is committing, realizing something didn’t turn out great. Wrapping the box up for storage.

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Sweden had its national day. The weather was good. I went for a long run and made a house beat on the Op-1. 128 bpm, I probably was going for techno, but then it just happened. This could become a track, but it needs a bit more work which I don’t have time for tonight.

Tired day, bored jam. Messed up. Keeping up the practise.

This blog has been floating belly up for quite some time. Maybe the whole year has. Not in every aspect. But, I trodded into my usual traps. And once I lost my forward motion and momentum it seems everything spiralled out of control.

First of all, I made my Ep-project too precious and ambitious. And when the music that came out of my monitors failed to live up to my vision I lost heart. Instead of making some modest nice, clean productions with a few tracks. I piled takes upon takes desperately to make something grand. Til…it feels I could just as well start the whole song over and finish it in one night.

My singing didn’t work either. I self-consciously realized that it sounded like someone trying to sound good, rather than a good singer.

At the same time, in the last few weeks I’ve had fun producing some silly theme-music for some commercials (to be used internally within a company). It was all tongue-in-cheek and I did “infringement-safe” remakes of Kraftwerk’s We are the robots (using a Monotron!) and that Rocky-song Eye of the tiger. As well as a ping-pong song from sampling ping-pong balls.

The lesson for me is that I had a lot of fun, I was fast and could deliver a good product – since nothing was that precious to me. There was no prestige. There was no grand vision to match, everything was good enough – or rather great in its own way.

If I could work on my own music this way, there would just be wins. I would have more fun, be in a better mood to the benefit of my family, I would finish more music and more songs would be written – while I would be getting better at it.

So, no more precious. I fear I’ll end up as Gollum if I keep fooling myself this way.

There’s always a good reason for not finishing. If you want to find a reason, you will find one. At least I do. The most common one is probably making the argument that the end product will be better if I do X first.

Well, X seems to be like Godot. He isn’t coming, so the thing never gets finished. No matter if it’s about DIY home renovating or making music, there’s always an X to keep me waiting, post-poning, losing speed and momentum. The iron cools down and I’m on a strike.

I realize the opposite to this is the Silicon Valley idea of a Minimum Viable Product. Instead of waiting for X to make it perfect, they make something good enough for now, so they can improve it if X comes around.

I know this. I’ve known this for a long time, and still I need to remind myself. A few years ago there were stories about Kanye replacing mixes of songs on Spotify after his album had been released. While a deadline and a finish line can be a good motivator for getting things done. It can also be liberating to see the finished work as …not definitely finished. It can always run another lap.

The important thing is to finish the first lap, and not to move the finish line. It just might be better to call it a “lap line”.

Just look around. This place is kind of grey. My Instagram feed isn’t much better. Dormant has a better ring to it than dead, but… On the other hand it fairly well represents my interest in the medium. It just never enters my mind to go onto Instagram to look at people’s pictures. I mean what for? In the supermarket they sell pet food. But I don’t have any.

I’m half-kidding, or I’m not. I recognize the impact of visual communication and Instagram, but I seem to lack the interest to be good at it. Or I simply lack a reason. I don’t get around my contempt for the impulse (and sure, I have it every now and then) to perform and acquire status in accordance to whatever subgroup-norms would be relevant for me. Then there are all the visual clichés. Meals, vacation feet, musical equipment in the company of cute objects. In a way, I’d love to be a part of it all. Instead I’m standing on the outside looking at the other kids playing and can’t get around my overthinking it all.

I might give myself an Instagram challenge of some kind. Just to see if I can get over the threshold. A tiny habit.

It’s a strange word, and a strange thing to do. Not for nostalgic reasons, but to see if I could refresh some memories, I went up to the attic the other night to see if I could retrieve old letters from the time in Mannheim. I did. Not all the letters though. And it struck me what a different time it was, being young in the 90s. Before mobile phones and social media. That’s been talked about before, but looking at myself and my behaviour I could see what a interesting kind of contact-collecting mode I was in. I collected addresses and I wrote letters to anyone – to quite an extent for the chance of receiving letters. Funnily enough I seem to have been exchanging letters with people for no apparent reason, there was nothing about them I found interesting, other than them being girls perhaps. Or maybe it was some kind of loyalty to the kinship of having shared something, if but a few weeks on a location? Or simply a way to hold on, refusing to say goodbye? There’s something beautiful about the last idea. I’ll think more about it.

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A good thing with experiments is that they aren’t precious. You are not taking care of something, you have no responsibility to fulfil something’s potential – but to learn from going through a process.

When I experiment I allow myself to be fast, to be reckless and daring – it’s all just a joyride. Steal an idea and drive it as far as you can.

I can see a recurring pattern in my behaviour, such as my Disquiet Junto-entries or my half-hearted Microbrute-Jamuary. I start out enthusiastically, it gets dull, I’m bored with my work and I drop out. Time passes and I listen back to my sketches and suddenly they seem full of life and potential, like the best work I did that year. Not fully finished, not perfect – but interesting, at least to me. And too often I regret that I didn’t keep pushing my experiments, that I didn’t keep exploring to really master those techniques that the experiments had led me to find.

“Nothing is precious” is a mantra sometimes heard, I think I read about a Radiohead guitarist saying it. It’s an interesting attitude. The confidence and belief that there will always be more ideas.

Well, as a songwriter I seem to carry a lot of eggs. I have crates of eggs from way back. And as long as I view them as precious, actually finishing them is an uphill struggle. It’s like I can only lose, as long as they stay unfinished I can still enjoy their ideal state in my fantasy. Now, what if I decided to see them all as bouncing balls?

To make an omelet … etc.