Done Is Better Than Perfect

Introducing "Listen For The Lonely" from my new LP "Split Seconds On Earth"

In recent years I’ve decided that making a new album is like climbing a mountain.

It starts when I sit with my guitar at the bottom of the hill and look up to contemplate the ascent.

Do I really want to make this climb? I ask myself this each time. Usually I don’t, but something compels me to start strumming. I don’t know what it is and I don’t know why this keeps happening.

I begin with a few chords on my guitar. They’re aimless, really. I stare into the void and something takes over. Something subconscious. This is when the ascent starts. First, some melodies appear, so I capture them. Then I scribble down some silly words that sound nice with those melodies. The words are usually boring, cliché and pedestrian. But they hold the melody in place until I can mold them into something worthwhile. I record all of this into my phone so I don’t forget.

(Incidentally one of my fears is someone listening to some of the hundreds of 20-second song ideas I have documented on my phone. “What the hell is he mumbling?” they would say with furrowed brows. How embarrassing.)

Over time I review the bits and pieces of phone ephemera and continue to work on the ideas that have promise. These are the ones that do something to me inside. They have potential to be something more and convince me to keep going.

You know, to keep climbing.

As I refine the ideas that might become songs, I pour over their melodies, dissect their lyrics and wrestle with potential song titles. I play with these puzzle pieces for many months.

Eventually I start to recognize favourites. The favourites have melodies, words and titles that seem to synch well together. Then I imagine how these unfinished songs might intersect in an album format: one to ten, one to twelve, whatever the total ends up being. More puzzle pieces. I start to wonder how the songs might sound recorded and think about which ones I should tackle in the studio.

Recording them is another integral part of the journey that never goes to plan. As the songs come to life in recorded form, they throw my original agenda out the window. The ones I thought would be the best songs often end up being the worst, and the strange tunes I wasn’t sure I should even record, end up surprising me. This happens 100% of the time. So over the years, I’ve learned not get too attached until they are down on tape. That’s when the contenders truly appear.

With the new batch of songs recorded, I start the painful process of mixing. I say painful, because mixing is a very delicate dance of listening, tweaking, re-listening and tweaking again. At this stage your ears love to play tricks on you. Not enough guitar in that mix? Well, turn it up a bit. But when I do, I realize something else is too low.

Are my ears fooling me?

Now the guitar sounds worse. But we only turned it up a tiny bit. Okay, turn it back down. Now my vocals sound buried. Do they sound buried to you?

My ears are fooling me.

This part of the journey is a tricky balancing act. I don’t make the frequency rules, that’s just science.

And by the way, when listening to rough mixes, you can’t trust the speakers you’re using and you certainly can’t trust headphones. You need to listen on multiple sets of speakers to hear the differences so you can compare mixes and find the happy medium. So you go out to your car. Sure, it may be cold out there, but warm it up and listen to your mixes on that dashboard stereo. This usually gives you a good indicator if you’re in the ballpark. As you listen, you may envision a car full of teenagers partying to your song with the volume cranked, or backseat lovers playing the tunes at a volume perfect for their make-out soundtrack. These are good signs. You’re closing in on high-five time.

But wait a minute. What does that awesome HAIM song sound like against these mixes? What about that Bonnie Prince Billy tune I love so much?

Let’s compare.

Comparing rough mixes to songs you care about is dangerous territory as it can lead to what I call Mix Depression.

My songs aren’t as good as HAIM or Bonnie Prince Billy’s, so how can I possibly compare these mixes? This is what goes through my head as the mix nit-picking goes on and on.

Is any of this good at all? My brain rhetorically whirs. Why did I even bother starting this climb? Ugh, this mountain. Get me off!

Finally I give up and give in. The mixes are good enough, I tell myself. And while I suspect they’re not perfect, I prepare to carry on with the climb.

“You know what’s better than perfect?” a friend said to me once. “Done. Done is better than perfect.” I remember these words of advice and it gives me some peace and license to move on.

But the climb is far from over.

Follow me on Bandcamp here to get more details on my latest conquered hill, a new album called “Split Seconds on Earth”. Details will be posted soon. Pre-order limited vinyl here.

Now it’s time for the next stage: I have to “master” these songs. The mastering is the icing on the cake. If the mixes are what came out of the oven, then the mastering is the chocolate ganache.

When I was young, I usually skipped this process because mastering was too expensive. I had already spent all my limited funds on recording my songs in a studio and then paying the mixing engineer for that painful exercise that went on and on for weeks. These were long and expensive parts of the journey and affording a mastering engineer wasn’t in the budget. Plus, I still had to pay for manufacturing the vinyl records, CDs and perhaps even cassettes.

But eventually I learned that a cake usually sucks without icing.

When the mastering engineer has performed some unspeakable magic, the songs are packaged up with perfect artwork and sent off to the plant so physical copies of the album can be made.

I also upload my carefully crafted songs to the various digital platforms where people consume music like children gorging on free candy at a birthday party for a rich kid. The songs you’ve worked so hard on all these years, spending your time and money to create, now get tossed to the ether in the hopes they resonate with someone, among the endless volumes of music out there.

Whether or not they find a home in someone’s beloved record collection or fleeting playlist doesn’t really matter in the end. I know each of my songs represents a unique creative journey and I’m fond of the trips they’ve taken me on. I remind myself that I am driven to write songs and though some never make it to the summit, the path to bring them to life is by far the best part.

So after months and years of tinkering with this group of new songs, I find myself standing up here on another mountaintop.

I call this new batch “Split Seconds On Earth”. There are 10 songs this time, and this is the first one on the list: Listen For The Lonely.

Split Seconds On Earth releases late April. Follow me on Bandcamp here for more details coming soon. You can also subscribe to me on YouTube to catch all the DIY videos I make for my songs as well. Thanks for supporting indie music and all of us who are driven to make it.