The Arts & Fetters project was really very cute, and fun, but ultimately I have to ask myself “to what end?”–I mean, I honestly have about ten ideas of this calibre daily, and my immediate instinct is to just throw myself headfirst into realizing them, and I usually make it as far as the second hurdle, and then throw myself into the next idea. I’ve apparently gained quite the reputation. Well, this is foolishness, because my first priority is music, right? So, anything that I’m doing that is not music or survival must be eliminated from my life. I’ve found the best way to take care of all these stray ideas is to write them down and throw away the pieces of paper.

Even music, though, requires a lot of thinking, and very little music. Sure, there’s songwriting. But there’s also practicing. And learning how to engineer, and mix, and market, and raise capital, and network, and acquire fans, and distribute the product, and monetize, and each of those has a dozen other little branches that I need to figure out. Which of these should I be outsourcing? Which have deadlines?

Well, practicing daily is a must. Is it? Yes, because I notice regression in the strength of my fingers and evenness of my playing if I don’t practice. Is it necessary to have either of those things, you know, given that I know how to use midi and quantization? Well…kinda…no. So why am I doing it? I’m going to have to give this some more thought, honestly, because when I write it down like this, I can’t really come up with a reason to practice anything but vocals.

What’s most important, I’m afraid, is raising capital. I’ve recently emerged from an experience proving that if you have enough money and some partial ideas you can hire a great producer and killer band, self-release a gorgeous album and go on tour. No problem. And I spent Sunday night unable to progress any further because I couldn’t figure out how to mic the drums. I don’t even know where to begin concerning ANYTHING. And that’s why it’s easier to just jump to a new project, because it’s like working on an assembly line, just screwing on the bottlecaps but not having any clue how to paste on the label, so we just continue screwing on the bottlecaps. Eventually you’re either going to have to outsource the labeling, figure out how to do it yourself, give up, or amass an enormous quantity of unfinished bottles. The last option, for the record, is the path chosen by aging hippies and cover bands. These are people who just really enjoy screwing on bottlecaps and dreaming. Eventually whatever’s inside the bottles will sour, and their peers will sit around discussing how good the stuff inside once tasted. I have no intention doing this, or giving up. I can’t afford to outsource anything right now. So there’s figuring it out myself…and there’s also one option I didn’t mention: failure. I wouldn’t mind trying.

The point is that I have one year remaining to me as a musician, after which I’ll need to give it up if I’m not showing any signs of moving forward. So, this is where I’ll be trying to hold myself accountable, and writing about what works, and what doesn’t. I’m not removing entries from A&F unless asked to do so by its authors–but I think the blog’s title still holds true, the fetters being my limited time remaining. And also, I must say, I still really like this layout.