An Artist's Curse II

Then and when I take a guitar into my hands. Sometimes I play the drums. At times, I sing. Never good, really, neither all too bad. I’ve written some songs in the past (starting with a hip hop love song when I was ten) but music is not my craft in a way that I see it being a craft in people spending their lifetime studying an instrument to make it their souls creative vessel. Becoming professionals, masters in that matter. Who am I to talk about something I am not a master in, who am I to share about anything I haven’t spent any time studying? This as full disclosure, I am not a musician, not a professional, but I like calling myself a creative, and a fairly active receptor of music.

I couldn’t help myself this morning when I was listening to a piece that has not gotten a lot of credit and I felt the beauty of this harmony, the joy arising and the emotions surfacing thinking „holy shit“ as I knew that this particular song has been created with a shitload of soul. You literally feel the spark and passion listening. More than you feel when listening to music that has been over-conceptualized and overly processed, that has been systematically worked through to please the masses blunted tastebuds.  

I don’t know out of own experience what it means to create music from scratch and to go through this long and wrecking process of creating a song, yet alone an album. The example of the musician creating music, though, can serve as analogy for all art that is created with some selling numbers in mind. 
I know some extremely talented musicians that got lost in their head. They are incredibly talented artists, but they’re also talented businessman. Unfortunately, they couldn’t figure out a way to connect both their talents equally. 
Is the thing you are creating moving you, even after working through it for the 1000th time? If it does, it’s staying authentic through the project. If it doesn’t, reconsider. You might be over-conceptualizing your piece of art. There’s a common misconception of many artists entering the business world thinking „okay I gotta please the masses“. Not only do they get overproduced and overcorrected, but further, they start overproducing and overcorrecting their work already in early stages of creation. Creating, to meet the masses.  Yet that is not how you meet the masses, as that is not how you meet the individual.
How can you expect to move an other soul if you are not creating with yours first and foremost?
To create something with soul you have to remember to keep the soul in the art. 
You have to remember to NOT sit down and dissect your art while “taking a bit of imperfection out there, and some more imperfection out here”. Or all you have left is an empty body missing it’s soul. 

Don’t lose your work within your head.
Don’t lose the soul, the spark within all these concepts.
Because frankly, this spark is all you have. It is this very spark that makes you an artist in the first place.