What we think about, what we expose ourselves to impacts our art. It’s kind of like a cauldron, and our daily experiences get thrown into it every day to produce a brew. Am I doing this right? Should I be doing it completely differently? Should I even be doing it at all? Of course, this is an imperfect process, and so confusion arises. We want to bring different things into the world and we have different ways of getting that done. I’ve given a lot of answers to this question over the past couple of years, and so I can confidently say that most of these answers have been hooey and I really don’t worry about having a process that much.Īll due respect to this Mountain Goat, but everyone has a different approach to their art. I am an artist who has been asked a fair number of times about what “my process” looks like. I finally have some actual expertise in this specific arena. But God, I would love to think about literally anything other than comparing myself and my art to other people. I understand in my brain that comparison is the thief of joy, and I’m resolved to keep writing my weird little songs and putting them out into the world. I can’t help comparing myself to my friends who’ve played packed shows, who have “numbers” on their SoundCloud pages, or even just have a handful of listeners who aren’t their personal friends. I just turned 33, and I feel old and stuck, and I can’t help thinking about how futile it feels to make art without an audience. I’m a songwriter, and at this point I don’t think I’ll ever make it big, whatever that means. That sentence has been banging around in my head, with the accompanying question: What should an artist think about? I just read an article in which a musician said they’d never make an attempt at engaging with TikTok virality because they have “old-fashioned ideas about what an artist ought to be thinking about” (it was John Darnielle from the Mountain Goats, in this excellent piece ).
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January 2023
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