Well I promised some paid content last week and I still haven't gotten around to it. Truth is it feels a little presumptuous but I have some things I'd like to profit from. Does it diminish the art of creation when you start limiting its release because of a hoped for financial compensation. I don't really make music for money, I've never made any money from it to date. Actually it's the other way around, every song is costing me money to make, even recording them for 'free' in my 'home studio'. I could use any kind of funding I can get right now, I have dreams too.
I have been recording some new tracks the last few days and I will but them behind the pay wall eventually, maybe when it's not just me visiting my website. When I switch hats again, I'm in music producer mode right now. I decided to try a different method of song writing for the last track I recorded. Mostly I find a chord pattern and then fit words to it, tweaking each part as needed so it all gels. Sometimes I write the words with a melody in my head and then find the music later, those are often country songs in the end. The one I finished yesterday though I began as one chord little riff that I had been trying to fit into the picking of another song. It quickly became two different chord arrangements and I played around with it for a day listening for the words or the structure to come out. I got nothing so I figured I'd record it and see what happened. It just came together after that, by the time I had keys on it I was writing words and changing the arrangement. It's inspired by the song it sounded a bit like "What Is Love" by Haddaway but I had the words to that song wrong in my head so that confuses things a little. Plus it's not a dance song so chances of anyone putting those two together are slim. Inspiration comes from wherever it needs to come from. I used the pop hit standard and recycled the first verse to sing it twice, I didn't feel like it needed to say anything else. Either I would just be repeating what I'd already said in different words to make the chorus make sense or I would have had to write a different chorus to go with the second verse. See too much effort and the risk of losing the message too great. It's kinda a sad song in the verse but the chorus is a little happier. The dichotomy was what made me think it would work best to repeat the verse, or I'm just justifying my laziness.
It's funny that we have to justify things to ourselves, give ourselves excuses, cop outs, even when it's something we want to do. Which part of you demands accountability for stepping outside of the social norm and which part for walking with? We all have a secret self. According to a supposed former secret agent Andrew Bustamante, the CIA teach them we all have three personas; public, personal and secret. Now you know, you're getting my public persona here, obviously. The me you see is the me I want you to want to be. No, I'd rather you be you, I just like the way that sentence sounds. If it was left up to me, we'd all get what we need. Maybe not equality, not everyone wants the same thing, but the freedom to choose. So much depends on geography sadly. Where was I, playing with words, saying nothing. The self justification, I don't mean what you tell other people to justify your actions, I mean the things you tell yourself, as if you need to somehow make peace with the part of you that is resisting. There's more then three personalities at play inside most peoples heads. This is why it's important to stalk yourself, as Don Juan would say, to find your routines and step out of them, don't do the universe the favour of letting it know what your gonna do until you do it. You might learn a few things about yourself in the process. You can start by taking stalk of the little differences, the inconsistencies in character in yourself when you are interacting with those around you. The big three splits are pretty easy to divide, think of it as you that goes grocery shopping versus the you that hangs out with friends, versus your partner or closest confident. Now divide it down even further from there, you get the picture. The possible number of different yous is staggering. So what's the authentic self, what lies beneath all the external baggage. We're all dragging a world of dead weight with us everywhere we go.
I feel like an outsider speaking to this now. I'm not saying I've shed the human form or anything but I don't have any friends that I see in the flesh. I live with my girlfriend, who is basically my only point of reference with the out side world. I don't speak Spanish well enough to fluently hablo con cualquiera, thus my chance encounters with english speakers are my only times of communication, it shapes a narrow frame of reference. I feel I'm pretty consistent with who I am but I'm also lacking any challenges to that. I'm not as confident alone in public without being able to communicate but it's ridiculous, it's been a year and it hasn't been a real barrier. I never spoke to people back home. Unless I was forced out of the house to go to work I was living quite the same there as here, I'd stay in my little zone, avoid people. It's been a pattern for a long time, I have lived with girlfriends since I was 19, often in remote areas with little choice for social interactions. Either you liked the neighbours or you had no friends nearby. I eventually came to town but I never succumbed to the temptation of friends. I had a family, that kind of takes care of any free time one might have for making friends, especially considering how much we moved around. By the time I'd find someone to hang with we were packing our belongings and moving again. Do that enough times and you find it harder and harder to find the time to start again. Probably why most people's friends date back to high school days. I got a few of those friends but I found as I got older my friends became people I had to pay money to spend time with, a tattoo artist, drug dealer, dog trainer. People I have a common ground with established by the fact that I paid for their time. Often my first new friend in a town would be my weed dealer, he's the person I see most. Here I see the guy once a week but our conversations have been limited to como estas. That's cool, I'm not a fan of idle chit chat or small talk. Words have power, and it's wise not to waste it.
Save it for the unstructured ramble of a blogg. I reread it, it flows well. I'm just here to draw you into my world get you hooked and reel you in. I want the world to be a better place, if I can unburden you for a few minutes then I've done my job. If I can make you stop and look and then think and take stock, hell now you're doing yours. It's not impossible to create the reality you want to live in, the hardest part is denying the reality that's been etched into your very marrow sense you heard your first words telling you the world is this way. Science has proven that nothing exists without direct observation.