Taxi.com, focus, and “The honeymoon is over”

I just got back last week from the 2013 Taxi.com Road Rally in LA.  It was well worth the time, expense, the hassle of getting things ready at home before abandoning my wife and 3 young children for 5 days.  I’ll cut to the chase, my epiphany was 3-fold:

1- play/record to my strengths (ie, the stringed instruments I play)

2 – keep it simple (I have a mountain of simple songs that come through me)

3 – knock out a whole bunch of them

I knew this before, but hey, that’s why they call it an epiphany, right?  It finally hits.  When the student is ready, the piano will fall on his head, or something like that.  I play quite a few stringed instruments, from good enough to very good, they hang on my studio wall, I need to use them.  I’m a simple guy, simple songs and arrangements come through me easily.  Duh.  I have mastered all of the necessary elements of recording and playing to perform and record these songs relatively quickly, and with high quality.  So, what’s my problem?  Nothing, I just have to push that big boulder a little bit.  I believe the creativity comes through all of us without exception, but you have to do it to make it exist in this world.  You can’t move a boulder with a plan, you have to actually move it a little with your arms and legs and brain, and whatever else  you have hanging off of you.  There has to be a progression of movements over time.  Not that I’m telling you anything you didn’t already know.  Maybe this is your epiphany.

Focus

1- strengths

2- simple

3- a bunch

I’ve been working with a client on a group of his own tunes, and I’ve seen that the honeymoon is over.  Everything is cool, everything is in progress, but it’s that inevitable moment in any project where there is just plain hard work to be done.  And no one else is going to do your project.  In many ways it’s a good sign, it shows that you’ve actually finished about one third of the project.  Enough to keep you in, but enough left to do to make you think, oh crap, there sure is a lot left to do.  It’s the hard part of a project that will pay off in the end if the focus maintains, the commitment revives, the goals get reviewed.  We had a choice after several tunes had been roughed out, a choice to re-do quite a few  because of the key they were in, that they should have been done in a different key.  My opinion, if it serves the song, if it serves to better convey the soul of the song and your message, then change it, re-do it, just do it.  Of course, you may be saying to yourself, Steve, you dumbass, why didn’t you make sure of the keys in pre-production?  Well, fictitious reader, sometimes all of the planning in the world isn’t going to avoid an unseen change.  If it serves to better convey the song, it needs to be done.