After posting yesterday's entry it occurred to me that my predicament might've raised an obvious question: Why don't I simply spend part of the day working on songs and another part of the day writing? There are two reasons:
1. When I focus intensely on creative work, I get exhausted pretty quickly and I find it extremely difficult to switch gears and still do anything worthwhile.
2. It usually takes more time than I planned on.
For instance, after returning from my errands yesterday at around 12:30, I replaced a missing string on my guitar, tuned up, and proceeded to finish a song that had been sitting around unfinished for 4-5 weeks. That was going to be it for songwriting, but then I started noodling around on the guitar in hopes of finding a tune for a title I've been lugging around for months. Said tune materialized and writing, arranging, editing, rewriting and finishing it up kept me busy until about 6:30, at which point I had to head out to pick up Pixie from work. Throughout the course of the evening I kept rewriting lines for both songs and sneaking off to the office to jot them down, but for the most part I stayed away from work after I'd knocked off for the day.
For about the first 7-8 years of my freedom from the world of employment, I worked incessantly. I worked all day, part of the night and on weekends. These were the days before everyone had e-mail so I spent an ungodly amount of time on the phone at all hours. I was at various times working on songs for records, setting up tours, writing and publishing a fanzine, arguing with record labels over advances, running my own record label, etc. etc. etc. I finally and not surprisingly burned out. I decided that I'd no longer work in the evening or on weekends. The immediate effect of this was that I wasn't able to be as prolific as I had been, but this didn't necessarily seem like a bad thing to me; most of my work up to that point had been produced on laughable budgets under outrageous time constraints, and I helped matters along by going about my business as if my hair were on fire. I lived in a perpetual state of bewildered apprehension, convinced that any day the royalty checks would stop coming and I'd be back on the loading dock or manning the leafblower at 5 a.m. in the movie theater, or sitting behind the cash register at the Mini Mart. The prospect of a real job struck such terror into my heart that I worked twice as hard as I would've ever had to at a real job, and while most of my work was still pretty good, I was pretty miserable doing it. Finally calming down and getting onto a reasonable schedule may have caused a slowdown in production, but it started paying a few more dividends in the quality department and, at the very least, I was able to start really enjoying it again.
These days, I try to limit myself to a 7 hour day just so my work never feels too much like a real job. And though I didn't do so yesterday, I usually count domestic chores as part of that time. And every once in a while I take a half day off to read a book or watch a ballgame or something.
I'm glad I worked on the songs yesterday as they both came out very well and I'm creeping a little bit closer to that 14 song mark. I'm telling you, coming up with 14 killer songs is not an easy task. I never knowingly wrote filler before, but I have always suffered from a tendency to convince myself that songs that I really like that aren't working will somehow end up working in the context of an album. Which never happens, by the way. After 19 years of doing this, I'm finally forcing myself to dump dozens of ideas and completed songs that I really love and that I really do think are great songs, just because they're not great enough and/or they don't work in the context of this particular band. The result is a very strong group of songs that gets stronger with each new one. I couldn't be happier, but working this way takes a different kind of toll on you. It's a healthy kind of exhaustion, joyful even, but it's still exhaustion, and since it involves stuff that is ultimately all about just playing, it can be hard to give yourself a break. But I will. Once I reach 14 songs, I plan on taking a few days off just to pat myself on the back and tell myself how wonderful I am.