Artists sometimes need to be saved from themselves.
And by "sometimes" I mean OFTEN. (My cure for a creative epidemic is a healthy dose of shut the fuck up.)
For much of my adult existence, I’ve repeatedly found myself in situations where fellow music-makers1 play their works in progress for me. I don’t mean to inflate my importance as a set of ears — I recorded bands for a couple of years in the early ‘aughts and then veered into reviewing music. For a time, I became somewhat known for those roles in my local music circle. Beyond that circle, though, it’s been a nonstop stream of people either sending me their own work or the work of artists they’re repping.
I consider myself extremely fortunate in this regard, especially in cases where a personal rapport has developed and people trust me enough to pull the curtain back and give me glimpses of things before they’re finished. I’ve just recently been warming back up to working with people in a quote-unquote producer capacity (or midwife, steward, guide — whatever we wanna call it). I’ve also mixed a handful of songs and arranged the song order on a couple of albums.
Other than the fact that I’m feeling pangs of “I should be doing this more,” I couldn’t be happier. Acting as a sounding board for people’s music (and creations more broadly) comes as naturally to me as breathing — so naturally, in fact, that I’d almost forgotten it was one of the things I feel I was put here to do. Mind you, I’m not saying that being great at this task comes naturally, I’m just saying it’s what I naturally gravitate to the same way a fish gravitates to water.
With that said, I’m remembering a compulsion among musicians to frame their work for you before you’ve even had a chance to internalize the work for yourself. To put it more bluntly, I know a lot of musicians who can’t just shut the fuck up and listen — even to their own stuff! It especially drives me up the wall when musicians hurl a bunch of references to other artists at me, thus severely constricting the way I hear their song.
I think there are a few different factors that contribute to this problem, which I see as a creative disease of epidemic proportions. And part of what’s so problematic about it is that it reveals a profound lack of confidence — of trust that the work can exist on its own terms. If you have the resolve and the backbone to let your work stand on its own two feet, you don’t need to couch it in all this pre-equivocation.
Imagine being in a group of people and having something to say. Imagine staring down at your shoes as you mumble in a low voice that’s barely audible. Or introducing your ideas with “I’m not sure you all see me as having the right to speak, but…” Imagine feeling like you have to apologize before speaking. How do you think your words will be received? How much credibility will your audience invest in what you’re saying?
Okay, now here’s the thing: being confident in your music requires less effort than the scenario I’ve just described. It requires the opposite of bravado. Instead of mustering up nerve, your music requires that you simply move out of the way. That you make yourself invisible in the moment, and that you allow all of your calculations about your music to recede into the background offstage while your creation takes the spotlight. It requires that you resist the urge to intrude — just like you wouldn’t stand up and shout during your kid’s appearance in the class play or make a spectacle of yourself during their little league softball game.
Over and over, I find myself having to insist: “Okay, I need to listen to this without you talking all over it. I’m gonna need you to turn the thinking part of your brain off while I form my own impression.” As far as I’m concerned, this isn’t just a matter of my own irritation. It goes way further than that. I see it as an impediment to artistic wellness that needs to be healed.
As a case in point, a musician I know sent me some live videos of a band he’d played with years ago. I’d requested links to more of their stuff after being summarily knocked out by this one:
Each new video came with either a disclaimer or a spoiler, or both. Such as: “This one is fun, controversial and involves slow motion ...if you get that far.” And: “During this song, my band stages a mutiny halfway through the song.” And: “This is why people never ‘got’ my band.” And, finally: “Last one... not the best performance but it's a cool song.”
My response:
What's with all the explanations before I can even get a chance to listen? I mean, imagine if you were trying to read a book and the author kept popping up with spoilers on what you were reading!
To be clear: this musician is a former editor of mine, and we’re comfortable giving each other shit. But in my view, he’s a supremely talented musician. More importantly, he works very diligently at his craft. If you watch videos of him doodling around on the drumkit for even 30 seconds, you can tell that he puts the work in. I mean, he’s a music teacher, for fuck’s sake — one with his own set of guidelines for how to approach creative ambition. Which means he’s the last person who should be tripping over his feet apologizing for his work before I’ve heard so much as the first peep.
One could argue that all those qualifiers when introducing these performances stems from a genuine desire for his work to be properly understood. I don’t hear it that way. In any case, even if I give him the benefit of the doubt, this is precisely my point: we don’t need to force an understanding of our creations onto people. Artists need to develop the ability to be both confident and indifferent enough to let people form their own understanding of the things they made.
That same week, I sent the following to another musician:
One exercise that I'd like to you to start practicing: when you send me music or play me music, to hold back on explaining anything about the song before I've had a chance to process it. To let the music speak for itself FIRST before explaining it into oblivion. This is hugely important not just for the scope of making an album, but for a musician's holistic well-being. We don't need to justify our songs or have somebody understand what our angle is. I’d like you to give it a try — to just sit there in absolute silence and let your music take center stage and speak for itself.
I’m serious when I say that I view this as not just a musical suggestion, but as a prescription for helping creative people build a more solid inner foundation so that they can be more grounded — and I mean: in life.
I chuckle because I’m sure that comes across as controlling — even falsely evangelical, especially considering that the idea of me of all people wagging my finger at other people’s life choices is laughable. But in the creative domain, I hold firm. Because, if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that working with artists requires decisiveness. Much of the time, you’re stepping-in to save them from themselves, from overthinking to the point where they slice and dice their work to death before it’s even had a chance at life.
Hilariously, this played out with my daughter on the morning of her 7th birthday party. Several days prior, she’d decorated the goodie bags she was going to hand out to attendees, each one custom-inscribed in iridescent marker. I loved the bags and thought they looked beautiful. On the morning of the party, she took a pencil to one of the bags and wrote “Happy Birthday” on it. She explained to me that, even though she’s aware that we use that greeting for the birthday person, she was flipping the phrase on purpose — as in: “thank you for sharing in this special occasion with me.”
I actually appreciated the sentiment — it was the pencil that bothered me, because it didn’t match the color scheme she’d already come up with. So I made a big huff and insisted that she cover the pencil markings with a sticker that matched. It’s ridiculous, I know. My therapist and I had a laugh about it afterwards, but I brought it up counseling knowing that I’d gone too far. I should explain that my daughter, I can already tell, is the type of artist who loves to make things, then destroy them, then re-constitute them.
Like most kids, she gives me her drawings and paintings all the time. I’ll often, however, find her days later drawing-over one of her pieces. If her original medium is watercolor, for example, she’s prone to taking maker or pen to it, or even cutting it up or stapling it or folding it into an entirely new piece. I love this, because she’s a mixed-media artist in the truest sense of the term. And I get the sense that, for her, even a finished piece becomes a canvas for a new idea, as if the medium itself is never fixed.
That’s fine — in fact, I consider it part of my job to encourage that aspect of her artistry — but I wasn’t trying to impose my will on her goodie bags so much as stand up for her original creation. I’d recognized that she’d captured something and was about to unravel it, just for the sake of adding more. Was it wrong for me to be an overbearing pain in the ass about it, on the occasion of her birthday no less? Yes. Was it wrong for me to take that decision entirely out of her hands? Yes. Did the bags look nicer and more consistent with her initial vision in the end? Yes. But it should be noted that she was happy with the final result too.
I’ve already talked to her about this and told her that for her next party all the aesthetic decisions are gonna be hers, and that I’ll make suggestions next time instead taking over. My therapist offered that asking about her decision and showing curiosity about her process is the way to go. Like: “Oh, so what have you got going on here now that you added pencil?” I wholeheartedly agree.
I can recall one specific instance with one of the first bands I ever recorded. Our working relationship ended up stretching out over a span of several years, and I developed close friendships with some of them that continue to the present day, including semi-regular check-ins where they’ll play me what they’re working on. Back when we were in close contact, one of them once referred to me — in a not-unfriendly but matter-of-fact kind of way — as a control freak. I’m not gonna pretend he was wrong, but I will say that I’ve come to embrace “controlling” as a double-edged sword. Which is to say: it has its benefits.
Case in point: about five years or so into our working relationship, the members of this band all started jamming spontaneously on an idea together. If memory serves, I felt an immediate sense of urgency that this idea needed to be caught on tape. At my prodding, the RECORD button was hastily pushed. On the raw recording, you can hear how it abruptly cuts-in because the jam was already in progress. But it was nevertheless a sublime, breathtaking piece of music that just appeared out of thin air — that miraculous thing that happens when a bunch of people in a room somehow all click onto same wavelength.
Ask anyone who’s played music with other people enough and they’ll tell you that these instances have a telepathic quality to them. They occur regularly enough to come with the territory, but they’re still rare enough to be precious. The drummer does a fill, for example, hitting the snare four times at the exact same moment as you find yourself strumming your instrument four times in the exact same pattern. The longer you play with someone, the more likely this is to occur, and yet it never ceases to be amazing.
When this telepathy occurs between an entire band, however, it’s even more impressive. I cannot adequately put into words the thrill of being present — either as a participant or spectator — when a work of art is born almost fully-formed in this way, gifting us with a glimpse into whatever dimension such things come from. I still feel lucky to have been there at that exact moment. Not only did we all get to peer into that other realm as the portal opened, but we were lucky enough to capture it in a form that, at least for a time, will linger on this earthly plane for as long as it stays stored in a medium that can be played.
Later, though, as we were doing post-production on the piece, they insisted on super-imposing a monologue onto this utterly gorgeous music that had rained down on us from the ether like a golden rain made of sunbeams. To this day, I find the contrast between the monologue and the music is so unnecessarily jarring that it infuriates and offends me. I consider it a kind of assault — a callous and unprovoked desecration of the gift this band had been given by the gods of inspiration.
They might as well have walked into the Louvre and taken a blowtorch to the Mona Lisa. That’s how horrified I was. But a more precise analogy would be this: imagine painting the Mona Lisa, screenprinting the image onto obnoxiously loud neon green t-shirts with a laugh emoji over her face, and then locking the original in a storage closet so that no one could ever find it. In other words: this band didn’t destroy the gift outright, but they refused to share it with the audience.
I understand that juxtaposition was their whole point, but I knew those guys well enough to intuit right away that their decision was coming from a place of creative immaturity. They couldn’t just allow the music to be beautiful. That would be too… soul-baring. Instead, they had to impose an element of irony or difficulty. I fucking hated it. But I also knew them well enough to get in the ring and really fight them on it. Again, I wasn’t pushing to get my way — as I saw it, I was standing my ground on behalf of their work, their inspiration. It was a noble cause, but in the end they refused to budge.
So this butchered monstrosity went out into the world instead:
If ever there was a time I was going to have a Phil Spector moment, it was that one. And, if I’m being totally honest, I would have used any leverage at my disposal to force my will in this situation. If I could have held them at gunpoint — as Spector infamously did with The Ramones — or, say, morph into a record label exec with the veto power to be like “no, you’re not doing this,” I wouldn’t have hesitated for a second. I would have ensured that this decision be taken from their hands.
Though, if I’m also being honest, I wouldn’t have gone as far as Brian Eno once did with U2 and erased the tape. Even pushing them to release an instrumental version of the tune as a side dish to the main album would’ve been fine with me. I did make sure to keep an instrumental version in my own personal archive, by the way, and included it on a mix CD I made some time later for one of the bandmembers. Ha.
To be fair, the same musical theme reprises later on the same album — in what I consider to be a much more graceful form:
Basically, they split the original group improvisation up into two parts, each with a different speaking track layered over top of it. It’s up to the individual listener to decide whether the two tracks make a more impactful statement when taken in the flow of the album as a whole. But, if you ask me, by the time the motif comes around the second time, it’s already much closer to its conclusion. You don’t get to just bask in the glory of the way the theme develops in the first place.
No doubt, certain listeners will say “The band was right — and it wasn’t Saby’s call anyway.” Well… yes and no. I mean, it’s certainly not a producer’s job to act as an autocratic tyrant. My favorite way of describing production is to say that you (the artist) drives up to me and then hands me the keys to your car so that I can take the wheel for a while to help you get to where you wanna go. It’s still your vehicle — but, in the process, we’re going to go down roads neither of us would’ve thought to go down on our own.
Implicit in your decision to tap someone like me to serve this function for you is the understanding that sometimes I’m going to fight you for what I think is the best path — but that fight is going to be on your behalf. I might be right, I might be wrong. Or both parties might be right and both might be wrong — because sometimes compromise is the best choice. But anyone who works with a producer (or editor, etc) is, in effect, asking for someone to be the outside guiding hand that at least pushes back when they go too far. Otherwise, the artist wouldn’t need anyone else there to begin with.
At the end of the day, I have no issue making an executive call to save an artist from themselves — or, more precisely, to save the art from them. From their own destructive impulses that seek to deface or even outright mutilate their own creations.
How can I be so sure? The answer is simple: it takes one to know one!
<3 SRK
I hesitate to refer to myself as a “musician” because I’ve gone through several lengthy gaps where I don’t stay consistent with making music, following-through on my initial ideas, or even banging around on instruments. That said, I’m constantly recording random sounds with my phone, I can still come up with music on the spot whenever I pick up an instrument (or even non-instruments), and I have an actual album in the works. Still, I view “musician” as the proper term for someone who plays with other people on a regular basis. It’s also a title I feel need to live-up to. Until I feel that way, I’m okay with “sound artist” because harvesting sounds is a legit part of the creative process that I feel like I’m really good about staying on top of. I’m also fine saying “I make ambient music out of found sounds.” But if I were to get involved in some active projects on an extended basis — making things with other people that require actual playing of an instrument — I’d gladly re-embrace calling myself a musician. In other words, I just don’t like claiming something unless I’m actually doing it.