Knowing When To Let Go July 26, 2009
The last few months I’ve been working on a lot of new music, with the purpose of having enough of a repertoire so that I can start doing solo gigs…and perhaps even record a new cd. While it was a slow start at first, ideas have been coming fast. I would go as far as to say that this has become one of the most creative and productive times in my life.
But…with the unexpected slew of ideas comes the hard part: knowing when to accept that an idea just isn’t all that great. Sometimes, you know right away. Other times, and this is what’s been happening to me a lot lately, you come to realize it when you’ve already been working on a song for weeks, if not months.
I used to be quite ruthless about this, letting go of ideas no matter how hard I’d worked on them, confident that new and better ones would come along. But wanting to have a certain number of songs by a certain time made me lose focus. I kept fighting with ideas to make them work, even though I knew in my gut it was a hopeless battle…or worse, I tried to finish songs before they were ready, just so I would have “more songs.”
But enough of that. I’ve been playing and composing music long enough that I know when an idea isn’t working. When it’s good enough, I know because I have no doubt that it is. I know because I can practice and play it for hours without getting bored and still feel an emotional connection.
So from the new songs I’m working on, I have one or two that are definitely going into the trash bin, and a few others that need a closer look. And to tell you the truth, it’s actually quite a relief to let those songs go. Sure, there’s a small part of me that goes “but that chord change in that one song was soooo cool!”, but I’ve come to the conclusion that if those parts are really that cool, then they’ll surface again in the future. At least I hope so…