🎙 TREE 375: Protect it

This week, please welcome back music producer Steven Lee Tracy. He’s writing the posts and choosing the songs. (Make sure to listen to today’s song. It’s one of Steven’s.) I’m drawing weird things. —Jeff

One.

We’ve established that if you can take that stellar job with benefits, paid sick leave, and a fat retirement account and be happy, you should. Maybe. We’ve also established that sometimes that isn’t an option for folks, and that is ok too. Next up, let's talk about protecting the thing that you love.

So now you maybe get paid to do the thing you love. Your creative life is now a little bit of a team sport. It's no longer just you writing music, drawing, or sewing a shirt just for the pleasure of it. You have clients involved, and now they have a say. You are now subject to their good or bad tastes, marketing campaigns, or their own abandoned art careers. Oh... and they don’t think you’re quite as good as you actually are. FUN!

The workaround of this problem for me, is that I HAVE to create on my own time for no other reason than selfish pleasure. For example, I’m currently in the middle of finishing up a collection of my own music intended to serve as modern dinner music. (Sexy I know.)

When I recently told someone this, their first response was “Maybe Starbucks will pick it up and your dinner music album will be in every Starbucks!” My response to this is approximately 400 thumbs down emojis and 2 middle finger emojis.

I spend my days needing to consider the commercial aspects of what I do. For me to stay in love with music, I sometimes need to write considering nothing other than what is exciting to me (which apparently is dinner music, sooo there’s that). There are currencies other than money, and there are successes that don’t require outside affirmation.

Two.

“Obviously it’s the loneliness and the the lack of control, but most of all it’s the fact that Wafty John is sitting on the floor of the basket eating a bean sandwich.”

Three.

For today’s song I chose BOYGIRLBOY’s “Huntress” because it is a song I wrote and recorded with my wife just for plain ol’ fun.

Grow slowly.