How My Relationship with Making Music Has Changed

First of all, to get it out of the way, I have a new release with Spesh out on Beatport. The release includes two new melodic house/progressive house tracks, “Starfall” and “Sixes and Fours”. I’m really proud of both of them, and also of how Spesh and I collaborated to make both tracks the absolute best they could be. We had an unusual number of opportunities to test early versions with big sound systems in front of actual people dancing on a dance floor.

But that’s not what this post is about.

When I first started making electronic music, I was fascinated by the process. This was well before YouTube, and I didn’t yet have a community of fellow music makers. It was just me in my shared dorm room with a first gen Mac and a Roland D-70 keyboard. Eventually I added a drum machine, an EMAX II sampler, a DAT recorder, and a few other pieces of gear. The first track I ever signed to a label, “1-900”, was made with that bare bones setup.

Eventually I started collaborating with Spesh, and later Mark Musselman (as Jondi & Spesh and Momu, respectively). I’ve recounted my musical history elsewhere, so I won’t get into it here. Suffice to say we wrote, signed, and released hundreds of tracks on dozens of labels, including our own label Loöq Records. We toured the world, had some minor hits, and gained a fair bit of notoriety.

The main feeling I had during the early part of my music career was a strong desire for respect and recognition from my peers. Above all else, I wanted to feel artistically relevant.

But at some point I realized that chasing relevance (or trying to hold onto it) was an unwinnable game. I wrote about the topic in 2013, but my thoughts have evolved since then. The desire for artistic respect, though it might seem more noble than the desire for money, power, or fame, is essentially the same. It’s a thirst that can never be fully quenched, no matter the degree or number of your accolades. There will always be somebody who dismisses you, disses you, or simply doesn’t know who you are.

A recent interview with Roger Waters illustrates my point. Waters (of Pink Floyd fame) is concerned about the fact that no reporters from any Toronto newspaper were assigned to review his concert. Waters asks the question in a slightly conspiratorial context, but it’s not hard to see that he’s salty about it. He’s concerned with his own artistic relevance, and puts down The Weeknd in the process.

If Roger Waters doesn’t have full confidence in his own relevance, who can?

The answer is nobody, of course. All artists, no matter how much we boast, strut, and preen (or humble-brag, in the case of most writers), are plagued by doubt. Maybe not all the time, but definitely some of those times when we’re out of the spotlight, between promotion cycles, between gigs, creatively blocked, etc.

What’s the emotional solution? Focus on the work, focus on the mission/purpose, try to enjoy your own creative process, try to keep learning and getting better, help others improve. Like anything that involves tremendous amounts of uncertainty, focus on the things you can control.

With music especially, I’m getting better at this. I’m back where I started, fascinated with the process of making sounds with synthesizers and computers. But now with the added benefits of collaborators, a community of fellow producers, a record label, a distributor, and all the skilled producers on YouTube teaching me new things.

I’m not saying that I no longer care about artistic success and respect. Of course I do. I’m not some enlightened being who has conquered desire. But I’ve learned to put those insatiable desires in context, and not give them so much emotional weight. Those feelings are farther away, and no longer drive my artistic process as much as they used to.