Postcard Helicopters

Oops!

With all the fuss around posting the music video on Friday, I forgot to write the weekly update on my 50/90 Challenge progress.

I don’t have any more songs ready to upload, today, but I have two strong contenders for being complete before the end of the month. At this point, they are instrumental tracks, and I can’t tell if they will morph into songs with lyrics before I’ve finished having my way with them. Heh.

I have lots of lyric fragments lying around, but I haven’t worked them up, at all. I had the image in my head that I would write the music first, and then sort through these fragments and pick something that seemed to gybe with the vibe and work up a full lyric that way.

That decision may have been in error.

I also have several started-but-abandoned music tracks going back to the beginning of this challenge. Stuff that I worked on for a few hours or a few days and either lost interest in or couldn’t develop very far. I don’t know the number off the top of my head, but I suspect it’s less than a dozen pieces.

As the challenge comes to a close, I am tempted to push out all these unfinished pieces; not masquerading as songs, but to call them unfinished projects, incompletes, or some such nomenclature to say, “this is what I was working on, but I never finished them.”

The thought of doing that also has me re-evaluating my decision to try and post as much work-in-progress as I can as part of the journey for this website. One of the guiding ideas was to show the route from where I stepped on the path all the way through the various waystations I pass along the way as I pursue my musical goals. The idea was that it would be a chronicle of how I did it as it happens instead of re-visiting that journey at a later date and in that way being able to tell only the parts that make me look good (hint: I don’t think my inability to complete this year’s 50/90 Challenge would constitute “looking good” in that retrospective view).

Part of the problem with this approach is that I sometimes feel self-conscious about posting work that may not sound very good. I’ve been able to do it in the past by using F.A.W.M. and, now, 50/90 as containers for that work. But I feel slightly more squirrely about that during the “off-season” time. What this often leads to is not writing any music at all, since there is a conflict between the issues of will it be “good enough” to go online versus upholding some kind of completeness mandate. A part of my brain expects that all of the work will come out perfectly formed on the first try, and is very critical when that doesn’t happen: as if I were suffering from a momentary outbreak of bad manners. But I think most people are familiar with this internal editor or critic, so that’s not really news.

Perhaps it just calls for a slight adjustment of the trajectory. Perhaps I simply need to make it clear that those tracks are Works In Progress, sticky-notes, or sketches to go toward future projects. I think I just want a way to acknowledge that I’m approaching this process as much as a curator as a musician, and I worry that it gives the impression that when I post a song it’s from a place that sez, “Lookie what I just made! Innit Greeeaaat?” I think the frustrated Librarian in me wants to see it all go up, properly catagorized of course, and once it becomes a polished and refined thing, then I can crow about it.

I suppose one way to work that out is to keep the sketches or work-in-progress stuff in this blog but then to add another page that includes those Look! See! tracks; perhaps in some sort of jukebox format.

This is all just thinking out loud. I’m not sure how I plan to resolve this, but I wanted to at least speak toward the issue of why I post what I do and what I think about it.

And look at that – the clock has turned into Sunday and I’m late with this post. Another “in the moment” that would probably vanish to a more polished retrospective.