To sum up...

Here's a summary of a really long blog post that I read but deleted for being too long:

- I am made to make stuff. 

- I create because I am a creation in the image of a Creator, and my DNA compels me to imitate that creative process.

- Though they are not all that different, I have always treated visual art and music very differently in terms of the creative process. 

- Visual art was about exploration and play and was process-driven; music was about performance and coolness and was product-driven.

- This has been an obvious (but completely earth-shattering) revelation to me.

- I have never considered with visual art that it's wrong when I don't know what I'm doing ahead of time. It's really just about making stuff. And while much of it hasn't been anything special; a few things (like my one-man seesaw; or, as I call it, the "Mee-Saw") were pretty decent. But the end result was not something I had a grip on at the outset.

- Music making has been the opposite. I am paralyzed when I sit down to write or record. There are decisions to make, and they must be the right ones. I must adhere to some rules that may or may not really exist, at least to me. Rules about how things should sound or what-instrument-goes-where-in-a-song. 

- I used to play guitar in my room for hours, recording into the tiny mic input of a boombox while trying to figure out how to record the sound of my guitar amp being played through a box fan without recording all the fan noise, too. I failed at that, by the way. Now I tend to want to write some chords and verses and map the whole thing out before I even play a note.

- That last sentence shows me how off I've been. Music is inherently mathematical, so yeah, there are some things any good musician needs to know. Things like what-chords-are-in-the-key-of-A. But...

I'm just saying that the concept of exploration and play is in there, too. And that my DNA is telling me not to ignore it anymore.

Posted via email from JasonHarwell.com