During March, April and a bit of May, I kind of lost interest in making music. I couldn’t think of any good ideas to record and it became something of a chore even to pick up a guitar once in a while. I found I wasn’t listening to music very often, because it all seemed too familiar and predictable. There was one day when I seriously wondered whether I should sell most of my gear, cutting it down to the level of “just a hobby”.
I’m still not entirely sure what caused all that, although for a few years I’ve been aware of a self-inflicted pressure to really “do something” with music. This pressure has always been accompanied by a vague, impending sense of disappointment, an assumption of failure. Maybe it’s part of some ancient evolutionary code… a need to cock my hind leg and mark the world with my musk spray.
It’s daft, really; I’m in the enviable position of earning a living through music and I get lots of free time to mess about with my own ideas, using gear that many people (including myself, ten years ago) could not afford. I’m not loaded, and I do lots of things on the cheap, but I can’t deny that I live a comfortably middle class life and have no fear of impending poverty. Maybe that’s what it is… a little bit of working class racial memory coming back and reminding me to stop being so complacent about life.
Then again, I don’t think complacency is the problem, because I’m actually quite hard on myself. I’m *very* easily disappointed with what I do, whether for work or pleasure, and I sometimes feel like a fraud if I manage to create a half-decent piece of music quickly and easily. I know that’s stupid, that perfectly good music can originate from five minutes of shambolic serendipity, but I guess I have more perfectionist genes than even I was aware of.
In the end, the solution seemed to be to force myself to be less focused, to take more of a scattergun approach and dip into a wider range of interesting projects (more details in the next entry). Another valuable lesson manifested itself among all the talk of the current G3 tour, featuring Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and (controversially for many people) Robert Fripp. I didn’t go to any of the shows, as I’ve gradually lost interest in both Vai and Satch, but the G3 buzz did remind me of how long it had been since I’d read any of Fripp’s writing. During one particular linkage frenzy, I ended up at a website containing a transcription of Eric Tamm’s biography of Fripp. One passage, in chapter 11 is just perfect…
“What do we do when we can’t do anything, have no interest in music, never want to see a guitar again, have no energy for anything at all? Well, we do nothing, but while we are not doing anything we practice for eight hours a day.”