For the past few years, my friend Chris Greacen has been organizing an annual Song-A-Day project, where musicians write and record a new song each day for a month (thankfully he chose February, as it’s the shortest month).

The main constraint (and this is tricky for a lot of recording artists) is to focus on song creation and less on the production of the recording – there just isn’t time to obsess over getting exactly the right EQ setting on the reverb on the hi-hat when you’ve got to get the damn thing mixed and posted before bedtime. If you have any tendency toward perfectionism (ahem), this can be abject torture.

This may be a large part of why I’ve resisted participating until now, but I think I also just wasn’t sure what would be gained by the exercise. Why put yourself through that kind of pressure? What’s to be gained?

This year, I began to see how this might be a really good thing for me to do, so I’m taking a deep breath and giving it a whirl. And when it’s late at night, and I’m staring at the keyboard trying to the think of something to write, I’m going to remind myself that these are things that I hope will come out of all this:

• Give my creative life a kick in the pants. I feel like I’ve been much less disciplined about making time for music; being forced to create something new each day will be like creative boot camp. Hopefully, I can strike some sort of sustainable balance come March
• Refine my studio workflow. I’ve acquired some new gear over the past few months, and being in the studio each day will help me learn my way around.
• Generate some material for a new album. I’ve had an idea for an album-length project rolling around in my head, and I’m hoping that by the end of the month I’ll have a stockpile of raw material that I can shape into some kind of cohesive whole
• Keep perfectionism at bay for awhile. As I wrote in a previous post, there’s a time and place for perfectionism. The Song-A-Day project definitely ain’t it. I’m looking forward to spending an extended amount of time in a “create first, ask questions later” mode, and seeing what kind of effect that has on my creative process. For the rest of this month, I’ll be able to forgive myself for not obsessing, because it just won’t be an option.

If you’d like to follow my progress, you can see all of my daily work at the main Song-A-day page, and I expect I’ll be tweeting about it as well. And please let me know if anything in particular strikes your fancy – I might be too exhausted to notice it myself.

We kick off with a special holiday edition.

The Client: a major retail clothing chain

The Spot: 30-second TV ad featuring winter clothes for babies & toddlers (heavy on teh cute)

The Job: Client had edited the spot using Ella Fitzgerald’s recording of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” as a reference track. They loved it, until they found out how much it was going to cost to license it. So they hired me, hoping I could create something they would like as much as Ella Fitzgerald. How hard could that be? (gulp)

The initial conversation went pretty much like this:

CLIENT: So what we need is a jazz arrangement of a Christmas song.

ME: That should be no problem – there are lots of Christmas songs in the public domain.

CLIENT: Oh no, we don’t want you to use a traditional Christmas song. Those are all overdone. We need a new Christmas song.

ME: OK…do you have any lyrics you want to use? I know some folks we could call for help with that.

CLIENT: No no, we don’t need lyrics. If we can’t use the Ella Fitzgerald, we don’t want any vocals at all. This should be an instrumental only.

ME: No lyrics?

CLIENT: Right.

ME: So…how will anyone know it’s a Christmas song?

CLIENT: Well, it just needs to sound like a Christmas song.

ME: (beads of sweat forming on brow) OK…well…I know: we can put sleigh bells in the arrangement. That makes anything sound like Christmas.

CLIENT: No way, no sleigh bells. That always sounds so cheesy.

ME: I see. So let me see if I understand: you need an original track that has no lyrics and no sleigh bells, but which sounds like a Christmas song without actually being a Christmas song.

CLIENT: Exactly. Can you do that?

ME: (recalling current bank balance) Sure!

The End Result: Hoping to somehow get that Christmas feeling, I wrote a new melody to the chord changes of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”. After the first few bars, I diverged slightly – enough, I thought, to fend off potential copyright infringement.

The final recording is below. Unfortunately, I don’t have the video – in the end, the pairing of this track with the images of cute kids in snow clothes actually kind of worked. On its own, I’m not sure it exactly says “Christmas”.

We may procrastinate, we may drag our heels. And once we actually do get down to work, we may find it tiring, even frustrating. But even then, we can at least walk away with a feeling of satisfaction for having taken the time and energy to let our creative spirit loose for a bit, and that’s always a good feeling.

Except when it isn’t.

There are times when you conclude a session feeling a little moody, even depressed. You may have have been wonderfully productive, and created some work you’re actually proud of, but there’s still a certain heaviness you can’t quite shake. I’ve been confused by this many times, and have come to believe that it’s a natural and predictable (if annoying) by-product of the creative process.

When you’re working at your best, your whole self is involved, and your creative side is drawing on all parts of who you are. And that’s a good thing. The trouble is, you sometimes stir up some dust in the infrequently visited parts of your psyche and that can leave you with, for lack of a better term, a kind of amorphous feeling of ooginess.

Oddly enough, this is actually good news, if a little hard to take. It means that you’re not just scratching the surface. You’re doing some good, deep work that’s actually involving your whole soul. The more vulnerable you feel, the more true your work probably is.

More good news: if this is happening to you, you have license to be extra kind to yourself. Go for the comfort foods, the cheesy movies, some quality time with your favorite people, or whatever works for you. You did some good work and got to some interesting places, so indulge yourself a little and just ride the feelings out. They’ll pass.

At least until next time.

It shows up when you’re trying to work. Sometimes it’s blaring loudly in your conscious mind, and other times it’s murmuring softly in the background, like an annoying sound that makes your jaw clench up without your realizing it. Even the most productive work session can grind to a painful halt when this question arrives.

“Is this any good?”

It seems like a reasonable thing to ask; after all, we want to make good work, so why not check in from time to time and see if that’s actually what we’re doing? But the truth is that this question is a productivity killer, and is useful only if our intent is to drive ourselves insane.

The first problem is that there is no meaningful answer to this question because we don’t really know what “good” is.

Despite what anyone may say, we don’t have a practical, universally-accepted definition of “good” art. Lots of people have lots of opinions about what the criteria ought to be, but there’s nothing definitive that the working artist can hold on to with any degree of certainty.

This helps explain why many of the works we now consider masterpieces were once completely ignored or even reviled (and vice versa). The works didn’t change, but the standards by which they were judged did, and continue to do so.

Professional sports teams don’t have this problem. Ask ten different sports writers who the best team in the NBA is and you will get the same answer. Ask ten different literary critics who the greatest living poet is and you will probably get ten different answers. Ask again in a couple of months, and you might get another set of answers.

Basketball teams are governed by the ranking system set by the NBA. “Good” in this context means something very specific — the ratio of games won to games lost — and that meaning is well-understood.

Art doesn’t work like this. There are as many standards for what makes great art as there are individuals to come up with them, so a clear and meaningful answer to “is this any good?” is, practically speaking, almost impossible.

“Ah yes, but”, you say to me, “I have my own criteria for what makes great work. I know what I’m trying to achieve and I can tell if I’ve achieved it or not. Can’t I just use my own standards to evaluate my work?”

Perhaps, but has this ever happened to you?

You’re working on something new and you’re feeling great. You’re in “the zone”, the work is flowing like never before, and you’re sure that this piece is going to be “the one”: your breakthrough masterpiece, the work that gets you fame, fortune, and the adulation of your peers. This is it — you have arrived. You walk away from your workspace and start rehearsing what you’ll say on all the talk shows.

The next day you return, review what you’ve done, and wonder how you could have deluded yourself so egregiously. The work is terrible, the worst thing ever made (not just by you, but by anyone). You’re a complete failure, and you should probably just give it up once and for all.

Does this sound familiar? The work didn’t change at all, but your opinion of it just turned 180 degrees.

Maybe own our criteria is not as iron-clad as we think it is.

This brings us to the second problem: we are the least-qualified individuals to judge our own work. We’re just too close to it to look at it objectively. Over time, as we gain some distance, we can evaluate it more meaningfully, but while we’re in the middle of it, our judgment is suspect at best.

This leaves us in a bit of a predicament: we desperately want to make good art, and live in mortal fear of making bad art, but we have no reliable way of determining if we’ve achieved either. If there’s any truth to the old saw about all artists being crazy, this may very well be the reason.

So what do we do?

I think we need to try to change the question. “Is this any good?” fails the usefulness test, but there may be other, more effective, questions we can ask that will actually help us get our work done. Try these on for size:

1. “Is this clear?” Nietzche once said that great writers would rather be understood than admired. Is the piece understandable? Is it very clearly saying what you want to it say, or is the message being muddled by elements that don’t belong? In the TV show “Studio 60”, a junior writer, after watching her sketch bomb horribly at a dress rehearsal, sits down at her computer, restates the premise of the sketch and says “OK: let’s throw out everything that isn’t THAT”. I think that’s a good way to approach it.

   Of course it’s possible that you may not know exactly what the piece is saying. That’s actually pretty normal, especially in the early stages (and you may never know for sure), but you should at least have the feeling that it holds together, that everything that’s in there belongs. Any part doesn’t feel right or seems out of place needs your attention. You want to feel like all of the pieces are working together to make some sort of coherent whole, even if you can’t clearly articulate what that whole is.

2. “Is this authentic?” Does the voice behind the work belong to you, or are you borrowing someone else’s? Are you using cleverness as a substitute for true feeling? Are you trying to make your work seem “smart” to take the piss out of your critics? Are you trying to be someone else?

   This is a much tougher question, and a solid “yes” is hard to come by – Miles Davis once said “Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself”. If you can answer this question with “no…but I think I’m getting there”, that’s always going to be good enough. You’re on the right track.

If I’m making this sound easy, I apologize. It’s not. You may be staring at your work in frustration knowing that it’s neither clear nor authentic but without knowing what to do to fix it. That’s where craft comes in, and that takes practice, a lifetime of practice, in fact. But these questions can actually help move you forward, whereas “is this any good?” is likely to leave you spinning around in circles.

At least until someone comes up with the art equivalent of the NBA.

Compare your answers with some of the most famous artists, philosophers and scientists at Daily Routines, a very well-organized blog that provides a fascinating, nuts-and-bolts look into how very successful individuals structured their days get their work done.

The patterns vary widely, but a theme of consistency runs throughout. Having found a particular routine, most of these folks stuck to it for many years. I think there’s an important lesson there.

Plus, if you’re a 9-to-5′er and you think that your day job gets in the way of getting your work done, take heart: Anthony Trollope produced 49 novels in 35 years while holding down a day job at the postal service. Kinda kills that excuse, doesn’t it?

(via The Very Short List)

Really, I think one’s art goes only as far and as deep as your love goes.

— Andrew Wyeth

I always thought that inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you’re not going to make an awful lot of work.

— Chuck Close, in the film/book/website Wisdom

Salvation came from an unlikely source: a musicians’ web forum.

The thread began with one person describing how he was having trouble completing a new piece of music because he was “obsessing over the tiny details”. A torrent of responses soon followed, and opinions varied widely. Some argued that when you’re stuck, it’s best to let go and move on; others said that details were the most important part so they must be obsessed over.

One poor soul even confessed an inability to complete anything because he gets too hung up on all the fine points.

For anyone who’s ever embarked on any kind of creative endeavor, this probably sounds pretty familiar. It points to a fundamental problem that all artists have to grapple with at some point:

How do you know when you’re done?

The fine-tuning process is potentially endless — there’s always something you can tweak — at what point do you allow yourself to stop?

If you’re working with a deadline, this question gets answered for you. Deadlines can be a real pain in the ass, but in this one respect they’re a godsend because they give you an out. When the deadline hits, come hell or high water you must step back, call it day, and let the piece walk away on its own two feet. And if you’re unhappy with the way the piece turned out, you have the perfect excuse — you can just blame the “unreasonable” deadline you were forced to work with. (And they’re always unreasonable, aren’t they?)

Without a deadline, it’s up to you to answer the question for yourself. This is when Perfectionism sneaks in the back door and starts rearranging the furniture.

Perfectionism is both beauty and beast. The beauty is that it can help drive you to make your work the very best it can be. The beast is that you can get lost in a sea of details, and either continue working on the same piece for the rest of your life, or give up in frustration and move on to something else, which, if you do this often enough, will leave you with a huge pile of work that’s all about 90% complete. Neither is a pretty story.

I think we’d also have to admit that our flirtations with Perfectionism give us a little bit of an ego boost as well. When Perfectionism is in the room, we get to play the role of the obsessed artiste, steadfastly refusing to release our work to the world until it is Absolutely And Completely Perfect. Now, please: leave me to suffer with my work.

It’s a good story, but I don’t think it leads to a healthy creative process. In truth, I think it’s just our old friend Fear, in yet another one of his disguises. And it’s a good one too: as long as we can find things wrong with our work, we have an excuse not to finish anything (crafty old bastard).

So the question remains: how do you know when you’re done?

I don’t think there’s a single answer that will apply to everyone, but I think the solution lies in finding a healthy relationship with Perfectionism. Definitely invite it in, but don’t let it overstay its welcome. To help find the right balance, you might ask yourself a few questions:

1. Is this the right time for Perfectionism? As a general rule, Perfectionism becomes more useful as you get into the later stages of a new work; in the early stages, it usually just gets in the way. If you’re starting to explore some new material and you find yourself sweating the details, you might do well to send Perfectionism home and tell it to come back later.
    
2. Is the piece still moving forward, or has the law of diminishing returns kicked in? Are you fixing details in one place, only to find flaws elsewhere, and fixing those causes you to create new problems in the area you fixed earlier? Some of this can be productive, but it can quickly degenerate into a Perfectionism feedback loop. If you feel like you’re stuck in a repeating pattern, it might be time to wrap it up and move on, or, at the very least, walk away from the piece for a while and come at it with a fresh perspective.
    
3. Is it time for a second opinion? It’s often useful to have a fellow artist that you trust take a look at what you’re doing and see what he or she thinks. Ideally you want someone who won’t candy-coat their reactions to spare your ego, nor offer mindless criticism to help inflate their own. I’ve sometimes found that I don’t actually need the person to say anything. Just having someone else in the room helps open up my perspective on what I’m doing.

It’s a delicate dance: how much is too much?

Based on my own experience, I would argue that it’s better to err on the side of too little obsessing rather than too much. I’m sure many would disagree with that, but I’ve found that there is a lot of value in bringing work to completion and releasing it to the world, even if it’s not “perfect”.

When you declare a piece finished, you start to create a little distance. As time goes on, and as your work goes on, those details that you had been obsessing over start to become a little fuzzier, and don’t seem to draw quite as much attention as they used to. This is not to say that you no longer see flaws in your work (just about everyone can find something wrong with something they’ve done) but the incessant buzzing of those flaws fades into overall music of the work as a whole, and they’re no longer the distraction that they once were.

When you look back on the piece, months or years later, you get a nice feeling of “I did that,” and you’ve picked up a little more wisdom and a little more confidence that will serve you for as long as you continue making new work.

I think that’s a pretty good payoff for simply letting a few details go.

(Note: this post has gone through numerous drafts and rewrites, and I still feel like it’s not quite right. Oh well…)

UPDATE: David H. Thomas posted a note to Twitter that pretty much says in one sentence everything I was trying to say in this long post: “Let yourself be a perfectionist and simultaneously completely forgiving.” Indeed.

UPDATE 2: There have been some great responses to this post from David H. Thomas and Karl Henning. The discussion continues somewhat randomly in comment fields of all of our blogs – lots of fun!

Art is both love and friendship and understanding: the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of things. It is more than kindness, which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is a recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the interrelations of these.

– Ansel Adams, in a letter to Cedric Wright

Hat tip to Amy Lesko at the Beauty Dialogues

• Find a sanctuary where you can comfortably work.
• Dedicate at least two hours a day to your art.
• Have more than enough equipment and supplies.
• Set short- and long-term goals and keep track of progress.
• Think of your work as exercise, not championship play.
• Explore series development and exhaust personal themes.
• Work alone with the benefit of books and perhaps tapes.
• Replace passive consumption with creative production.
• Use your own intuition and master your technology.
• Feel the joy of personal, self-generated sweat.
• Fall in love with your own working processes.
• Be forever on the lookout for the advent of style.
• Try to be your own person and claim your rights.
• Don’t bother setting yourself up for rejection.
• Don’t swing too wildly and damage the well-being of others.
• Don’t jump into the ring until you’re feeling fit.

Of course, workout routines are not one-size-fits-all, but this strikes me as a pretty good way to start.

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it hurts, repeat it.

But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold, we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.

- Ursula Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” The Wind’s Twelve Quarters

During the years of Buchenwald and Auschwitz, Matisse painted the most charming flowers and fruit that were ever made. That’s why today they still speak more eloquently than the most macabre description of the period. Their creator was faithful not to the tragedy but to the reaction that tragedy kindled in his conscience.

- Odysseus Elytis, translated by Theophanis Stavrou: Books Abroad, Volume 49, no 4, Autumn 1975 [emphasis mine]

I firmly believe that joy is more fertile than pain.

- Maurice Ravel

Thanks to Rob Brezsny for the first two quotes (he’s been on quite a tear lately!).

I dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes — all the better.

Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.

-Michel Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” interview in Le Monde, 1980

Hat tip to Rob Brezsny.

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it hurts, repeat it.

But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold, we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.

— Ursula Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” The Wind’s Twelve Quarters

During the years of Buchenwald and Auschwitz, Matisse painted the most charming flowers and fruit that were ever made. That’s why today they still speak more eloquently than the most macabre description of the period. Their creator was faithful not to the tragedy but to the reaction that tragedy kindled in his conscience.

— Odysseus Elytis, translated by Theophanis Stavrou: Books Abroad, Volume 49, no 4, Autumn 1975 [emphasis mine]

I firmly believe that joy is more fertile than pain.

— Maurice Ravel

Thanks to Rob Brezsny for the first two quotes (he’s been on quite a tear lately!).