Let’s kick off this article with an old joke:
What’s the difference between a composer and a large pizza? A pizza can feed a family.
Ah! To finish a work, the short-lived utopia of the artist!
We’ve all been there, or are there now. A hard drive choc-full of unfinished tunes. Perhaps a few days old or even years old.
But at least ideas are evergreen right?
Shelf life
So you’ve only got one track finished from your blockbuster album or blockbusting tune. No big deal, except for the fact you started the album last year.
So you’re ready to shop your album, well at least in theory because actually your shopping cart has no finished songs in it!
It’s unlikely your album will pay the bills (sorry) but concepts almost certainly won’t!
So what to do…
Samplenerd.com isn’t just engaging articles on fusty old samplers and synths! In Frames of Reference I provide a plan on how to build a library of go to sounds. Hopefully debunking the myth that we never use our own sounds!
Delay tactics
If someone told you that you had to wait three years to finish a song you’d started would you bother even starting?
I probably wouldn’t. More likely I would forget that and try and come up with something else.
After all, we live in the age of the “now.” The age of “why wait?” The age of “I’m not waiting!”
Go with the flow…
Perhaps all we can do is wait. Perhaps that chorus will never come; perhaps you’ll never get that lyric to fit your melody. But isn’t that quite beautiful?
In the age aforementioned – our age; given the lack of guarantees that accompany the creative spirit. Isn’t this lack of clarification, this lack of confirmation, this lack of guarantee quite nice?
It invites us to go with the flow. It invites us to patience. Invites us to embrace the unfinished. The imperfect, and so on.
We pass our creative impulses like ships in the night. For no sooner have we finished one work the seeds of the other have been planted. Meanwhile, the creative impulse will not give you any guarantees. Guarantees that it’ll be any good or that it’ll even be finished. It introduces elusiveness into our lives, and for my money that’s a good thing. Because I know as I get older the temptation to want almost everything secure and less open to change becomes increasingly apparent. That willingness to just go with it, to take risk, to just think sod it and do something else diminishes.
We mature to: I’m too old; I can’t; what will x/y/z think of me?
But art. It encourages an almost Zen like approach because frankly it has no such qualms. It’ll quite happily say, “yes I know you’ve spent the last 4 months working on this piece, but you’re not getting the end of it / the start of it [insert as applicable] !!
The instances of the unfinished are legendary, Shubert’s Unfinished Symphony anyone?
So, worry not if that next big hitter stays on your HDD that little bit longer, you’re not alone 👍