Music Diary – 18/06/23

What the hell are you doing here? What the hell am I doing here? If you had an answer, you wouldn’t be here. WOW. Isn’t your mind BLOWN? Can I get a Grammy now? Seriously though, we might as well enjoy the ride… Grab a drink: there may be a light at the end of this tunnel.

So, what now?

After months of radio silence, this blog & news page just suddenly comes back to life and expects YOU, clueless reader to actually give a single F*CK? Yes. Yes, it really does. Sure, some would say it being dead was a good thing: blogs are so 2002 and a played out Boomer thing anyway, right? Well, no. First of all, none of that ageist BS here. Second, I work in a time vacuum. Third, you ever heard of SEO? Search engine optimization? Whatever. Forget about marketing, promotion, SEO, the whole Shebang. Or is it Shabang? Shibang?… STOP! Basically this is just a record of the process. A whimsical story telling tool for Doran if you will…

“Is anyone there?”

Doran looks at the ‘crowd’, a few bots and his mother, eagerly encouraging him. Sweet. As he considers this scene, the bot on the right, clearly more busy than the others, suddenly displays an odd sigh of relief and leaves the room immediately after without even a wave. Rude. For a minute, Doran questions his life, and more importantly the fact that already a third of his 3 person audience got so bored with his art that they decided that developing sentience was surely easier than having to sit through any more of this sh*t…

As an artist, or really, as anyone who is trying to achieve anything, the first of many hurdles you seem to be faced with is the death sentence that is the complete disinterest most people will have about your projects. Whilst loved ones and close friends may encourage you if you’re lucky, the truth is that most people around you will either not give a f*ck, ignore it or even actively try and discourage you from even trying in the first place. Yeah! You know the kind of person I’m on about. That one person that’s like ‘oh that’s nice but it I would have imagined it differently’ or ‘your work is cool, but really you know you won’t ever make it big right?’. Yeah, those obnoxious people with seemingly no joy nor imagination in their lives.

At first it’s easy to be completely heartbroken by this situation. It can make you question the whole thing. ‘Am I delusional? Am I making a fool out of myself? Am I just terribly sh*t?’ After all, your social circle are the people you thought would enjoy your stuff the most, and their opinions matter to you. It’s the people you actually make the projects for sometimes. So surely they would care, right? Wrong. I learnt that lesson the hard way.

I had no clue how sh*t was my art at first

I don’t know, maybe YOU ARE a genius from the start but I look back and don’t blame my friends for finding my old projects mediocre. They were. After years of hard work people are slowly engaging a tiny bit more. Especially with music, listeners are just used to a clean end product, which sadly means they may not even see the potential in your craft until it actually starts being close to professional in terms of quality. This is a catch 22 and also hard to accept, I know, but think about it and you know it to be the true truth.

People have lives

Yeah, I know, crazy. But yeah, they just don’t have time to listen to your demo or support your latest project whatever it may be sometimes, and that’s completely OK. It may bruise our egos a bit, but I think really we might as well accept this and buckle in because being in any similar endeavor requires some tough skin on a daily basis. Which brings me to my next point…

Bad friends actually want to put you down

Some people, especially people who seem to have some sort of void in their lives, would much rather criticize anything anyone else is trying to achieve rather than work on themselves. Those are the ones I mentioned before, who just make you feel more sh*t with every passive agressive, or outright insulting comment they make about your projects. I think it may even come from a place of jealousy sometimes. The fact you’re even trying to achieve something just boils their blood, because you’re just ‘unexceptional’, and they’re not achieving anything exceptional either so surely it’s not OK that you’re even trying this.

This seems to be particularly the case with people who are in the same hobby as yourself. Tell me you haven’t ever met or seen an artist that is so full of themselves that they don’t ever recognize the quality of anyone else’s work, and outright refuse to give or get any help from fellow artists because they think somehow that would be giving too much away and take away from their aura of being a pure blessing to humanity. Thankfully though, loads of friends and fellow artists are not like that and are great. I talk to those ones. We make a good team. I try to find the good influences in my life and keep them close… Well, this was therapeutic.

But it’s not all bad

We have ways of dealing with this. Not giving a f*ck helps. A stubborn will to prove the whole world wrong is a bonus. Having a personal version of success is the cherry on the cake. I find, the less I care and keep working hard to promote and improve my art, the more people from my social circle actually come back and engage eventually. The thing is, random people seem much more likely to love your projects, because they don’t see you as the silly little normal kid they used to know. They don’t know you at all. Once a few people like that start recognizing your work, some people who knew you from before just turn around and go: “oh well, other people like this now, so I will too!”. Sheepish nature, right? That is good, but those aren’t your best fans though. You know that person that just likes everything you do, gives you useful feedback and keeps supporting you despite no one else caring about your last project? Hold them tight, and never let them go.