I’ve never really written about the music making process, but I think it could be fun.
Earlier this week I woke up early to give my brother a ride to SLC. I-15 (the freeway) is now my jam session trigger. I always make sure I have some go-to jams ready on my playlist as well as something new that makes me feel like I’m branching out and expanding my musical tastes.
So I was driving back from SLC jamming out to some pop-candy music and really felt like that was a good day to write a song. I let go of my inhibitions and just played the kind of stuff I usually do on the piano. I actually ended up writing a song I liked even though it was as “poppy” as ever and kinda cringey. 1 or even 4 years ago I couldn’t have gotten myself to do this, but this week I let myself go and finally fell into a state of “creative flow” that I crave and made a bad song that I was actually okay with.
Rewind with me for a second to understand something.
“Too Cliche”
I have a love/hate relationship with the song-writing process and I’m often too prideful to let myself go and just mess around on the piano without a plan.
I think this pride stems from learning just how complex and beautiful music theory is and how incredibly good some people are who master it (I marveled at the creations of jazz musicians like Bill Evans and Herbie Hancock in high school). I grew up being hyper-aware of “cliche chord progressions” and I halted my progress as a musician by refusing to make anything “too normal”.
In my mind it was cool to like the obscure stuff, the jazzy stuff, the music-theory-wowing stuff.
So I ended up having this distaste for writing anything “too normal” like a song with a “I–V–vi–IV” progression. I still LOVED (still do) the normal stuff, even the really poppy stuff that was on the radio, but I just couldn’t get my prideful self to be okay with writing that kind of music. Unfortunately this resulted in my reluctance to even start the creative process of songwriting. This fear of failure — in this case the fear of my songs landing in a remotely familiar chord progression — led me to put music-making aside for years.
Learning About Failure
Somewhere along the way after reading too many self-help books and TED talks, a new Bryce came on the scene. It finally clicked for me when I read something Sal Kahn (creator of Khan Academy) said about failure. Then I re-remembered all those quotes about “daring to fail” or “failing forward fast” and got attached to this “transparency mindset” that I’ve written about. I started going through my favorite artists discographies sorted by date and realized some of their earliest published music wasn’t that great. I came to the realization that it wasn’t a matter of whether the song was good, it was a matter of whether the song even existed. The mere fact that the songwriter took a step to make something (and publish it) that they or anyone else could call a failure put them ahead of the rest.
I’m often saddened that I didn’t make this realization earlier, but I still believe the saying “better late than never” and I’m going to keep making bad songs until I learn enough to make ones I’m proud of. And if the artists I cherish hadn’t released their earlier work because they didn’t like it, I wouldn’t have gotten to this point. So I think it’s a good thing to release your bad songs as long as you really put an effort into it and you made a small step forward in your learning of music theory, music production, instrumentation, or whatever it may be.