This is Day 8 of my goal of posting a minimum of 500 daily words on here. I appreciate any and everyone reading this, and if you’ve been reading these posts from day one then I super appreciate you! Today’s post picks up on yesterday’s topic, exploring the mind of someone who might just be too creative their own good, someone who can’t stick to one thing and follow through with it in the long term, but who is moved, so to speak, by the ever-changing tides of his or her artistic, philosophical, and/or creative interests.
- If you want to start reading from the beginning of this writing endeavor, check out DAY 1.
- If you want to start by reading yesterday’s post, you can check out DAY 7.
As far as finding one specific thing that I feel like I’m meant to do, I think I personally might never know for sure. Maybe there is no one right thing to throw oneself into. Just because it might be the surest way to success doesn’t mean it’s the right way to live life. I’m not denying that it could be the correct way to live, but when a person feels so many inspiring dimensions within themselves, is it really right to cut off so many of them and to focus only on one, for the sake of being acknowledged as a ‘professional’ by society? I always find myself following whatever fascinates me at the time, ignoring expectations of what society expects me to be doing at any moment of my life, and sometimes I struggle with feeling like I’m selfish or there’s something inherently wrong with me because I choose to be this way. I’m not trying to brag about how I’m not a conformist or anything like that; in fact, it really worries me that I live so separate from what is considered a proper and somewhat normal life in this day and age, since it seems like things are likely to work out better in the end for those who do choose to follow the safe path set out by society.
Towards the end of 2023, for example, I was super into making my rap thing happen again, and I joined an online community of rappers and producers from a certain subreddit, with the idea of putting together a mixtape to showcase the talent within the worldwide hip-hop community. Everyone shared their talents with the group and things were flowing very naturally, lots of music was being made between different members. I worked on songs like crazy, for days almost non-stop, which is why I’m on most of the tracks which ended up being selected for the final version of the mixtape (which should be released very soon). It was a privilege to be working on music with other dope artists. During those days I spit some of the best verses I have in a while. The spark had been reignited, but little did I know it was doomed to be short-lived. I slowly started becoming uninterested in rapping again, and navigated more towards the technical side of things, learning how to mix and master my music. I’ve been learning how to mix and master for a few years now, mostly from YouTube tutorials and experimentation, but shortly into the start of 2024 I felt a huge motivation to get more into it, and I just couldn’t keep up with my plans to continue making new music anymore. I still have collabs from the start of the year that are on hold even now, since I simply couldn’t continue working on all the music that I had planned on making. I knew I had to keep working on new raps, but for the life of me I couldn’t make myself write a damn thing. I would watch tutorials for hours, on everything from mixing and mastering to sound design and how different VSTs work. I started playing around with making multiple final mixes for my tracks, playing around with different textures for the final touch on the track, and getting really interesting results from that.
Learning all these sound design ideas, along with the new gear I’ve acquired over the last two years, then led me down a path of creating more sonically pleasing music, and lately I’ve mostly been focused on making some of the trippiest music I’ve ever made, some psychedelic ambient music, which relies heavily on sound design and effects. I’ve been into ambient music for some time now; there was a time a few years ago, for example, when I meditated exclusively to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports album. It was somehow more peaceful than silence itself, more specifically the first track on that record, “1/1.” Coincidentally I’m listening to that same track right now. Wow. Anyway, I’m getting sidetracked. I don’t mention all this so that you, the reader, will say “Wow, this dude is on fire working on music non-stop, and so many different kinds of it! Amazing!” What I’m trying to do is paint a picture of just how much I’m juggling in my mind, and how quickly it switches from being fully immersed in one thing to being fascinated by another. It’s easy to tell someone to let go of all their other interests and to focus on one specific thing, but it’s different when you are the one living it. When something completely pulls you in and you become fascinated by it, it’s almost impossible, at least for me, to hold back from diving straight into it, and to be honest I don’t feel like I even should hold back at all. I like being a curious person, I like learning new things and falling into new rabbit holes. There’s simply too much interesting shit out there. Will this be detrimental for me in my life? On a financial level it most likely will be. I could get lucky and avoid this fate, but I know that I have to be prepared for that unfortunate yet very likely outcome. In the end though, only I can decide whether artistic and philosophical freedom is worth the losses I’ll probably have to come to terms with sooner or later, so on I go for now.
If you have a few minutes please listen to my song ‘I Can Feel It.’ I wrote it, produced it, mixed it, and mastered it. Did the cover and distribution also. It would mean the world to me if you would hear it! Much love y’all!
rebel eye 