Manifesto: I Write For Myself
But Do I Write for the Writer in Me or the Listener in Me?
I began writing songs at about age 12, after many years of playing classical piano (it felt like against my will.) I enjoyed writing songs on the guitar because I didn’t have to have regard for some objective quality – I just expressed myself. I wrote and played from the perspective of the writer and performer. At the same time I did not care for the listener. It was the purest form of self expression.
However, when I listened back to my music, I didn’t always like what I heard. When standing in the perspective of a listener, I felt my music was overdone, spilling with ideas but lacking restraint.
But that’s the price of genuine, unfiltered expression – is a messy, possibly unpalatable piece of art.
As I grew I began to play in adjustment to get to a place where I wanted to listen to my own songs. In exchange, I had to value the end result as opposed to the process. And that wasn’t as much fun. In fact, it for a while destroyed my love for music and in part threw me into an unfathomable depression.
But now as I stumble back into my initial songwriting perspective of “combinatory play,” as Einstein calls it, of throwing things together for fun, I am also aided by the experience of knowing what it takes to achieve objective quality. And the result is I can hopefully calibrate between the raw energy that the process of self expression brings and the discipline of my focus on the end product.
It’s only after experience that I have spent enough time in the perspective as the writer of my music, and as the listener of my music, that I can begin to get to a place where I can be wholly content with my music. And it “only” took me 12 years.
Manifesto: I Write For Myself
But Do I Write for the Writer in Me or the Listener in Me?
