These are some of the things I tell myself to motivate the music making impulse.
Keep up both of the following activities: spontaneous one-take recordings; painstaking layered tracks. On the layered tracks, try to add sponaneous elements.
Believe that there is no limit to what can be done. So what if it’s the same old chords on the same old guitar. No-one played them just like that before, and with those words, with that expression.
Play naturally, don’t bow to convention. I don’t have to have drums on my music. I don’t have to fill up every conceivable space in the listening spectrum. I don’t have to make the lines scan, rhyme, mean something, there need not be a chorus.
It’s healthy to experiment, even if it seems self-indulgent. It might be vital for you the experimenter, even if you’re not intending to inflict it on an audience later on!
If nothing particularly exceptional is happening in the music, something worthwhile may be going on in the lyrics, and so it doesn’t matter – or vice versa.
It doesn’t often pay to force oneself to engage with an old idea no longer of much interest. Pay attention to those ideas which are most engaging, inspire one at the time, seem to fit in with one’s present mood and direction.
Do make time to come to the tape-recorder occasionally empty-handed and open-minded, even blank-minded. So it may result in nothing, but you may serendipitously spark off a brilliant new direction.
