What I hadn’t considered was that it wasn’t the ideas that were wrong, it was just what they’re about. The Cult of Done is terrible for actually making anything valuable. But it’s great for practice.

As you may know, I have trouble finishing songs. In my long and illustrious career, I’ve finished no more than a dozen. There’s just too much to fit together, too much to get right. I always get hung up on details, and the song I’m working on gets pushed to the back burner.

I thought a Song-a-Week project (a la Jonathan Coulton) was the perfect solution. If I had to write a song every week, I figured, I would eventually just start pumping them out, without worrying as much about how things fit together, and how well each line works.

So I tried it. I spent the first two and a half weeks letting one song grow too big for its britches, and the next few days wallowing in defeat.

Then I remembered how practice works. Too often, we think that practice just means doing something over and over again until you get it right. But that misses the point.

Practice is how you load consciously directed behaviors into your unconscious, so you don’t have to think about them anymore.

This is how we learn everything, from walking to talking to playing instruments to rules to social interaction. By far, the easiest way to do it is one thing at a time. You start out consciously doing something simple – left foot, right foot, ok left foot again – and when you’ve done it often enough, it starts doing itself. Only then can you level up. You can take that action itself for granted, and put something else on top of it. Climb stairs. Run. Dance. After enough time, these things become second nature as well, and you can build more new structures.

The Cult of Done is a great way to do it. It preaches continued unmitigated action. Never edit; just do, and learn from your mistakes. I think that’s the perfect way to practice. Do something without judgment. Look at it and think about how to do the next thing better. Repeat.

Back to me. It turn out the problem with trying to write a song a week was that I don’t know how to write songs! Each song I’ve written has been like starting all over again, a process of discovery that eventually leads to this unique and beautiful, slow-boiled creation. There’s no way to practice all that at once; there’s just too much going on.

So here’s the new plan. I’m stepping back to the nuts and bolts of the thing, and upping the ante. Starting two days ago, I’m writing a verse and a chorus every day. Once that starts getting easy, I’ll add a second verse. Etc, etc. Every day, I’ll be loading these rules – how the lines fit together, how the little bits and pieces and chords interact – into my unconscious and letting it get comfortable with them. Teaching my brain how songwriting works, word by word, line by line, so I can run without having to worry about which foot goes first.

So far, subjects have come pretty easily. But I’m only on Day 3. Tell me; what do you think I should write about?

There’s a certain narrative of success that says you have to compromise in order to reach a big audience. That you have to “sell out” your “art” in order to reach your cookie-cutter goals of fame and fortune. But things have changed a lot in the past few years, to the point where, outside of the major label-360 deal-recoup or die model, it’s almost the opposite. To distinguish yourself from the throngs of people making records in their bedrooms, you have to be unrelentingly yourself.

If you liked that, enjoy the full interview.

For the rest of us, I’d like to take a look at this manifesto point-by-point, to expose some wrongheaded thinking about why we do things in the first place.

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.

This is a little vague, but it kind of makes sense. I’ll leave it be.

2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.

This is reasonably good advice. Except that it’s unclear how you eventually decide that something is done, if it’s still supposed to feel like a draft when you’re done.

More importantly though, it brings up the major problem with this manifesto and many productivity-based systems. Getting things done is a shitty goal!

No it’s not, you say. We all have goals we want to accomplish, and to-do lists, and we want to be able to accomplish them, and check the little boxes, and pat ourselves on the backs.

Well, no. If this were truly the case, the ideal scenario would be to farm out all your goals to other people to accomplish for you, and then check the box when they tell you they’re finished. Anything worth doing is worth doing because you want to do it, not because you want it to be done. If you want something to be done, it’s either in the service of something else that want, or you’re wasting your time.

3. There is no editing stage.

Only true if the goal is getting things done. Yes, it’s much easier to finish things when you don’t edit them. It’s also easier to stop listening to/reading/watching/otherwise consuming them, because they suck.

4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing 
what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.

I appreciate the sentiment, but why fool yourself into thinking you know what you’re doing? How about this: accept that you don’t know what you’re doing, and do it anyway, because it doesn’t matter. Unless you do anything involving impressionable children, people’s safety, or you know, like financial stuff. Because then it really does.

5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an
idea done, abandon it.

Again, a nice sentiment, but ultimately harmful. We “procrastinate” because of the feelings that come up when we think about the things we’re putting off. To avoid those very projects is to do only what comes easy, to run away from the things that help us grow. Yes, you will absolutely get more things done this way, but will they be the things you want to do?

6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.

No! If being done is to be a goal, it has to be so that you can do other things. Getting things done is a distraction.

7. Once you're done you can throw it away.

OK, I’m on board with this one. I’d have trouble throwing away my own work once I’ve done with it, but I can see how that attitude would help with both doing and getting done.

8. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.

I guess this depends on how you define “perfection.” I’ve often been called a perfectionist, not because I want something to be perfect, but because I want it to be right. I’m still convinced there’s a difference, although I’m the first to admit I can’t figure out what it is.

9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.

Yes to the first half, no to the second. While it’s impossible to know what you’re doing if you don’t do anything, it’s possible to do a lot of work and still not have a clue.

10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.

Hmm. I guess if you’re not allowed to edit, then yes, outright failure, or even making a mistake means that you’re done. I get the sense this is supposed to be telling me something else. But what?

11. Destruction is a variant of done.

And done is a variant of sneaking your dinner to the dog so you can have dessert.

12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as
a ghost of done.

Will somebody please explain to me what this means?

13. Done is the engine of more.

Yes! Exactly! This summarizes the problems with the cult of done. Since when is “more” the answer to anything?!

There is too much crap out there. I do not want more articles, more ideas, more music, more movies, more more more. I want better! Imagine if every 20-song megastar album that came out in the past year had been 7 songs instead, but all the extra time had been put into making the work more compelling.

Forget the “cult of done.” I’m starting my own: The Cult of Doing It Well and Having Fun Doing It. Manifesto to follow.

Weclome, new visitors! Here’s the lowdown. I’m an indie singer/songwriter of the soul persuasion. I write, record, and mix all my own stuff. There’s a vaguely Prince-like vibe to some of my harmonies, but I also claim D’Angelo, Rufus Wainwright, Steely Dan, The Beatles, Jeff Buckley, and dozens of others as influences.

I put out an EP called If We Were on September 30, 2008. It’s available on iTunes and on CD. Sweet Reprise, the song from the video, is on it. You can hear other bits of it below.

The first song you’ll hear, Far Side of Town, is under a Creative Commons nc-by 3.0 license (with the rest of the album soon to follow). This means I’m giving it away! You can take it, share it, remix it, and share what you’ve made, as long it’s noncommercial use, and you link back to my site. To download it, and get the full details, go to http://arthurthefourth.com/far-side-of-town/.

I’ve had this blog since June 2003. It’s taken a lot of shapes since then, but it’s starting to settle into one that I like. An exploration of the creative process and the struggle to become something more than I am. I’m sure many of you can relate.

Have a look around! If you like what you see (and hear), leave a comment. If you want to keep seeing it, subscribe to my RSS feed. If you want to hear more, join my mailing list. I’ll keep you posted about live shows, and send out occasional goodies that don’t appear on the site!

歓迎!

[Update: If there's no iTunes Music Store where you are, you can also get If We Were on Lala, Napster, or eMusic.]

You can get Sweet Reprise on iTunes. If you like what you hear, buy the whole EP!

• Stevie Wonder is not a sideman for the Jonas Brothers. No. I’m going to spend the rest of my life pretending I didn’t see that.
• Adele has the best accent ever.
• Radiohead is consistently disappointing live.
• “Music” is neither a place nor a closed system. Calling someone “one of music’s all-time greats” (as Josh Groban did Neil Diamond) forces the creative pursuit of music-making into a NARAS-shaped box. It’s not just Groban; the Grammys have been doing this for years. (”music’s biggest night, anyone?”)
• Whoever mixed that Jay-Z, Kanye, T.I., Lil’ Wayne business was clearly a Lil’ Wayne fan.
• Robin Thicke looks uncomfortable in his own skin. He needs to drop the George Michael act, which is wholly unconvincing, and start writing great songs again.
• Phrasing and dynamics apparently aren’t handed out until you turn 50. Adele and John Mayer may have snuck some early.
• Ne-Yo’s voice is purty.
• Lupe Fiasco looks like a young Herbie Hancock.
• I wish Samuel L. Jackson were my friend.

Most importantly, congratulations to my fellow Freestyle Love Supreme members Lin and Bill, and my Rock Band buddy Alex, for the “Best Musical Show Album” award for In The Heights. Yeah boys!!

I’m listening to Joni Mitchell’s Little Green, and reading the lyrics online, and for the first time, I’m seeing the song for what it is. A story about three lives, intertwined briefly, and where they go from there. About having to choose what seems like the lesser of two evils, and what that feels like from the inside.

It’s about something real. Capturing a certain moment in her life, and opening it up. The art of what to say, and what not to – when to hone in, and when to abstract. The sweet and shifting balance of airing her self out, and letting us in.

I woke up this morning with Stephen King’s On Writing neatly placed on the pillow next to me. I’ve been re-reading it for the past few days; I’d remembered it was great, but I couldn’t tell you why.

A few chapters in, and I remember why. There’s nothing particularly clever about his writing, nothing particularly florid in his language, nothing so ground-breaking in his style. But when Steve King writes, you want to keep reading.

I woke up, this morning, a little antsy. With an urge to drive, and nowhere to go. I’ve got some projects on my mind, things that I’m really excited about, but I keep getting hung up on the details. Those snotty little details that always get in the way of the big ideas. The ones who sit just at the edge of your vision, waiting to ask you how, when, and why. Those goddamn know-it-alls that you always wanted to punch in the nose, but hey, you wouldn’t hit a kid with glasses, would you? You don’t want to get in trouble, do you? Oh, I know just what your mom will say…

The details always seem to know just what could go wrong. They’ve got 52 volumes at home of Why This Is A Bad Idea. But do they ever have any fun?

I’m at a crossroads in my career right now. I had one goal in mind for a long time. To create my calling card, the credentials that would define me as a musician, and pass from hand to hand, accelerating, pushing me forward.

I made my card. And the few months since then have focused on those hands. How to get them to cup my name and deliver it faithfully to another set just as willing. How to fine-tune and maneuver the process into a state of perfect mathematical induction, where each pair implies the next, and I’m sitting back and relaxing, pencil in hand.

But honestly? I just want to write. I just want to keep doing and making and writing and being. But I’ve never quite known how. When I listen to Joni, it feels so clear. That I need to start with something powerful and personal. That there need to be cafes and deep sadnesses, longing, and hope, and the glimmer of redemption. But when I read King, it’s about constructing the narrative. About looking up at the sky, and choosing. That one, that one, and this one. These are my Big Dipper. These are my Belt of Orion. These are The Story.

What do I want to do? What are my tools? How do I write?

I wish I knew. When you need to tear something down, the little details can always be counted on. But when it’s time to build, I’m not sure where they go.

It’s time for me to start learning how this works. Do something. Test. Try again. Do something. Test. Try again.

Do something. Test.

The secret to making it as a musician: Do something. If it works, do more of it. If it doesn’t, do something else.

An oversimplification, of course. I have been doing a number of things (many of them involving watching episodes of The West Wing in rapid succession), and I certainly wouldn’t call myself a successful musician. But the point is a good one. The only thing standing between me and a more lucrative musical career is doing the right stuff. And you can’t recognize the right stuff until you’re doing it.

I’m working on it. I spent a lot of yesterday putting together new charts for the new band; we’ve got our first rehearsal today, and I’m very excited! I’m producing an EP by Rabble Rouser, which is broadening my horizons and honing my recording skills. I’ve got a solo gig on February 24th at Rockwood Music Hall, and a Freestyle Love Supreme gig tonight. Some more FLS gigs are coming up, and I’m working on scheduling something solo in San Francisco in late May. (If anyone has any connections….)

I’m working on new material for a new project – not a new album, but new music nonetheless. I’m almost there, but I’ve still got some blocks to work out before I’m ready to really get started with it. Once I’ve got that one going, I’ve got another project or two waiting in the wings.

While all of this is happening, I’d like to revisit the basics. I want to spend time studying orchestration, but my piano and sight-reading skills are not up to snuff. I plan to spend some time over the next year building up my traditional piano skills (i.e. practicing the kinds of pieces most pianists played when they were 10 years old). I’m considering a secondary blog about the process.

I like process. I like doing things. I’m on the way.