Making My First Solo Record pt. 1: Three Lessons I Learned from Creating a Solo Record

What's This?

This is my behind-the-scenes blog series while I make my first solo record. I’m doing updates every Friday until the music is out.

Creativity is introspective and weird. I find myself obsessed with the idea of making art, yet I'm often confused by what art is. What's the purpose of creating a song? There are so many ways to look at it.

I think/hope my writing a weekly blog on this topic will be valuable for other people. In sharing these ideas with you, my goal is to stoke up some good conversations about the what, how, and why of creativity.

OK, here’s part one:

THREE LESSONS I LEARNED FROM CREATING A SOLO RECORD

(1) making a record is 10,000x harder than making a single song

here’s the process of creation for a single song: load up a new audio file, carve out a few exciting sounds, and groove it out. 120 seconds of melodies, riffs, beats, and some production to tie it all together. fly by seat of pants. in the end, something fun always happens.

but, to create a full album: it’s so much bigger, you need structure. it’s easy to make one song and keep it all in your head - but when there’s 5 or 10 or 20 tracks in different stages of completion, you can’t remember everything. excitement turns to overwhelm - too many ideas, too many concepts.

(2) music is about personal growth

the biggest reward of the album isn’t any financial, social, or intellectual success. it’s about conquering a personal challenge. I’ve never made a solo record before. at first I felt cocky, like: “how hard can it be?” now, merely finishing the thing will feel like a huge achievement.

the extra bonus is the idea that other people will like it - but there would be way easier ways to do that. if I wanna just make music and entertain people, there’s thousands of bands to join to do that with. the specific reason for making my own album is personal.

(3) music is compounding joy.

you create a song once and enjoy it for a lifetime.

listening to my own music is mostly why I do it - I’m writing stuff I want to hear. the more music I make, the more awesome life is cuz I have an even bigger discography of rad shit to enjoy and be proud of.

..

end of part 1

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