Could The End Be Near? Decade Milestones A Telltale Sign? History Says No.

Here it is 2015 and I just realized I started this blog a decade ago.  Happy New Year, by the way, whoever you are (voices in my head?).  Haven't posted much, but have ramped it up in recent years a bit.  Still have no idea if anyone is reading it, but don't care, since it feels good to write about my hobby here at blog.scottcooley.com.

A couple years after I started this blog, I started my website.  Neither was hard to figure out.  I have intentionally not taken it too seriously, choosing only to post content to either when I felt like it.  Slowly but surely I've steadily made improvements and upgrades over the years.  Just like my songwriting hobby, I've eased into the blogging and web site stuff slowly.

Last year marked a decade of releasing an album every other year, and in four more years it will be a decade of selling my music officially in online music stores.  Slow and steady improvement in all of this stuff, in my own opinion anyway.  Maybe 10 years is a nice number for a life chapter, although to be honest, I started this whole hobby in 1989, so it's going on a quarter of a century strong so far, and despite a few droughts of a few months here and there, has shown no signs of letting up.

Only when the urge strikes do I even attempt updating the blog, the website, writing a new song, or recording a new song.  Seems like since I didn't follow this pattern for releasing albums, opting instead to stick to a steady schedule, it would make sense if I tried to write one blog post per month.  I pulled it off last year for the first time.  Unlike my album release schedule, I didn't have a stockpile of posts first ready to record and release well into the future.

It just so happens that I'm now really almost out of songs, and am in the process of finishing recording all the songs I ever set out to record.  More formally record in multitrack digital, anyway.  The first take cassette tapes don't count, in my mind, since they were mostly practice exercises instead of actual songs.  I've gotten a little better here and there over the years, in small noticeable ways, and more than anything involved with the craft, I'm better at rewriting now. 

Re-writing and then either re-recording or recording new the songs is what I should be able to finish up by the end of this year, considering available free time.  There are about 40 or so remaining to do.  These are the bottom of the barrell songs that I've deemed just barely borderline-worthy enough to rewrite, or for good reason have procrastinated recording over the years.  Many of the re-records are ones that didn't make the cut on past albums.

So, my next release should be the best of the last batch of not very good songs, but I feel compelled to exhaust the current lyric/chord stockpile.  About another 10-15 beyond those 40 are lyric-only documents I need to write music for.  Then there are about 50 more documents of starts to songs and very incomplete lyrics I might revisit.

Of course there will be weed-outs, and not enough to result in two album's worth of material.  The drawback here is I'm possibly wasting time on songs that are not good enough to begin with, instead of writing new ones.  I can't help but finish these up though, and just maybe the next dozen you hear won't be half bad.  It could possibly be that clearing my plate of this song candidates wrap-up project will be liberating a spur on another creative period.  Time will tell.

I'm stating all this because I haven't felt like writing new songs at all lately for several months now.  Part of the reason is I want to get all these remaining unfinished songwriting/recording related tasks done first before I switch back to the create new from scratch mode.  It will truly feel fresh when that happens, because I won't have the dark cloud hanging over my head making me think I have unfinished songs I need to be working on.

It could be the hobby has run its course.  There are many famous artists I've read about who have a creative spurt - usually for about a decade - and then the desire fades and they don't write/record anymore.  Usually a lot of contributing factors and reasons for this, many unique to the individual's circumstances, but also it's the kind of thing that seems to have a tendency to slow down and conclude naturally on its own.

The 2016 album will therefore have a feel of a b-sides or rarities or previously-unreleased type of compilation, and it may well signal a final album like you might expect.  Maybe not, but I'll be fine with it either way.  Maybe I'll find a new hobby and move on to something else.  You never know, but it will be fun to have a feeling of closure on these never-quite-finished tasks on my hobby to-do list.

When you’re dead, your songs won’t matter, so why hold back?

If you’re like me – a songwriter and independent recording artist who sells a few recordings online once in a while – from time to time your thoughts inevitably turn to questioning why you bother to write songs in the first place.  This usually happens when you’re starting to write songs again for your next album release like I am now.  Thinking about writing songs makes you think about what to write about, and that can make your mind wander to the point where you wonder what the point of this craft is.

Then if you think well into the future, you realize it’s probably not in the cards for you to write a song that becomes a standard that will live on well past your death.  The more you think along those lines, it can lead you to think about why you don’t release certain songs.  Hardly anyone buys them anyway.  I have a list of my self-ranked songs, some of which I’ve recorded, and some which haven’t even made the cut to record beyond a first take at all.  On these lists, next to the song title I write the reason it didn’t make the cut of my own, strange weeding-out methods.  They’re abbreviated.

My evaluation key, which I also sometimes write next to each song, is like this:  Definite Keeper (DK), Keeper (K), Borderline Keeper (BK), Almost Borderline Keeper (ABK).  Sometimes I can’t quite decide and will even do a DK/K, or a BK/ABK for the in-betweeners, sometimes later on deciding to bump them up or down for some reason.  This is my own method I came up with which sort of evolved after a songwriting friend and I used to rate each others songs with a 1/4K, ½ K, and full K when we were both new to the hobby.  I did color coding on a batch of songs once, using white as “waiting for upgrade/downgrade decision,” and have even done a bold/italics/strikethrough method, but DK/K/BK/ABK is what I’ve settled on.

I’ve never released an ABK, but through rewriting, I have actually boosted a few ABKs to BKs, but it’s rare.  Also rare are DKs, and I can honestly say I’ve only had a handful of those in twenty-plus years of writing songs.  Don’t get me wrong, you probably haven’t heard of any, but if you’re one of my few true fans who’ve bought every album, you might be able to pick some out we’d both agree were DKs.  I would hope this would be the case anyway, but one never quite knows for sure which ones others will consider your best.

There are many I don’t even bother typing in the list – the definite non-keepers.  Some of the borderliners end up getting released, some never do, some get moved on to the next album candidate list with specific notes about what to improve when worthy of revisiting for a potential re-write/re-record.  There’s always a reason for these designations, and I usually put them in parentheses after the song title, typically only for those that didn’t make it through the final weed-out process.  It’s the reasons though that I have to look back on and wonder what state of mind I was in when I wrote them.  Some of the reasons might even be funny to some of you out there.

Here are a few of those parenthetical “reasons to not release or record” from my notes:
• music too simple
• wife didn’t like it
• potential stereotyping interpretation
• too personal
• music a possible rip-off
• unconventional
• monotonous
• forced rhymes
• whimsical
• potential inferred drug reference
• lyrics too hokey
• too much of a chick song
• too much like some other song I wrote
• too long
• too slow
• too conceited
• controversial subject matter
• lyrics too simple
• lyrics great, music terrible
• music doesn’t fit lyrics
• too negative
• too sappy
• unclear meaning
• sexual connotations
• contains swear word

I’ve got many, many more reasons I’ve weeded out the hundreds of songs I’ve written you’ve never heard. One of the things you do when you’re all out of new songs to record and having writer’s block is you re-read some of these lists and notes.  You start thinking you might’ve had some that were borderline that you could tweak here and there to launch them to keeper status.  This rarely works, as I pretty much subscribe to the garbage in/garbage out principle, but it is possible.  Sometimes you can have great lyrics that just didn’t work at all with the music, and after a long period of forgetting about the song, you can fit them to a totally different chord progression and melody (assuming you forgot the original melody).  Other times you can revist a song title note that says great tune, terrible lyrics, and write brand new lyrics and make it work. You don’t want to waste great musical or lyrical ideas, and you never know when you might have something new that will fit.

As I’m in the midst of such a scenario here lately, thinking those “what is the point of all this” thoughts, I’ve come to a new realization:  Why not release some of those, since hardly anyone will buy them, and since it’s not going to matter after I’m dead and gone from this world anyway?  Some might turn out to be other people’s favorites.  Maybe the more controversial, more edgy, more personal, etc., songs would actually be better and more well-received than the universally-appealing, safe stuff I’ve been putting out!  Since I have no reputation to begin with, there’s absolutely no danger of it becoming worse.  The few true fans out there might be pleasantly surprised.  I’ve somewhat already proven to myself that it can work well.

Some that I agonized over, yet released anyway:

I need to do more of this.  I’ve received favorable feedback on all of the above.  I debated about releasing a song with a swear word in it for an embarrassingly long time, eventually decided to go for it, and lo and behold, it became a fan favorite (Mackinac Island).  After that I thought what many an artist has, which is that I didn’t want to give people more of the same so as not to repeat myself and not bore them or bore myself or become known as the artist who writes a particular type of song.  Now I’m leaning toward trying hard to not worry so much about what people think and just release away, self-weeding methods be damned.  Throw caution to the wind, since in the grand scheme, it will be a drop in the ocean.  Maybe this new approach I’m forming will be closer to what true art should be about in the first place.  Stay tuned for my 2016 release, as it just may surprise you.

The conclusion is don’t think twice.  Rate your own songs once, then trust your first gut feeling about whether to release them or not.  Don’t waste too much time on lists and notes and rating systems.  Go ahead and put the music out there.  Don’t let good songs go unheard because you’re too worried about what people will think of you.  People understand the art isn’t necessarily representative of the artist’s personal views and they know you write from other character’s perspectives.  When you’re not around anymore, it’s not going to matter to anyone, so as a t-shirt I saw once read “don’t die with the music in you.”