We Get There When We Get There
On maturing as an artist and a person.
For an artist, there is nothing more painful than discovering an exciting creative idea, taking it out for a long walk while imagining a beautiful future together, and then coldly being forced to put it down. This situation is something of a rite of passage for creatives; no one gets spared from the misery of letting go of their best ideas. Writers must cut entire chapters and plot lines, composers must resign themselves to excising some of their favorite instrumental passages, and every painter has a gut-wrenching moment when they observe their half-finished canvas and realize that its future lies not in some faraway gallery, but on top of the scrap heap. A great artist either learns to become an absolutely ruthless editor of their own work, or makes peace with outsourcing the dirty work to a less-emotionally-invested third party. The gods of creativity require constant sacrificial offerings — as if contending with a fickle public wasn’t already enough…
This was a very difficult lesson for me to learn as a young musician and producer. When I was first starting out, I gave little thought to the concept of “good taste.” I wanted to show off; I wanted to do everything I was capable of doing, every single time. As a pianist, I was vehemently against the use of silence, preferring instead to play as many notes as I could, as fast and as loud as possible. As an aspiring producer, I wanted to shoehorn every creative idea I had into every recording. I created with a wild, overflowing exuberance, and I couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to create in the same way. Restraint? Pssshh. That was for the aged. I believed that I already knew all that I needed to know, and didn’t have the patience to give my work a second thought. Back then, the only way I would ever consider editing my work was by accident… *cue the flashback music….*
Picture me, with a ‘90s “Boy Meets World” hairstyle, wearing baggy clothing. My first forays into music production began when I was sixteen, having purchased a four-track cassette recorder that allowed me to overdub piano parts onto my favorite Notorious B.I.G. tracks. A year later, I upgraded my humble studio setup to include my parents’ Gateway 2000 computer and — inspired by hip hop acts like The Roots and A Tribe Called Quest — learned how to mix bits of old jazz recordings with ’70s soul breakbeats. On the technical end, this was made possible using a primitive waveform editing program I had downloaded called Cool Edit.
You may skip this paragraph if you aren’t interested in a technical description of a random audio editing software program from the ‘90s, but the feature that put the cool in Cool Edit was its ability to capture an audio sample and twist it in various ways. For example, imagining taking a recording of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons and changing the pitch and speed of the recording until it resembled something one might hear to accompany a Looney Tunes cartoon — if said cartoon was, perhaps, directed by Timothy Leary. Most importantly, Cool Edit gave me the ability to take one of these manipulated audio “samples” and paste them onto another sample, combining them together in the same manner that an orchestrator combines different instrumental timbres. The only caveat? Sometimes, the program would randomly crash, and you would lose all the work you did in an instant, without any warning. Awesome.
I learned a lot from experimenting with Cool Edit, but most importantly, it taught me not to get too attached to any of my creative ideas. For a music producer, a program crashing even once is the stuff of horrors. This program crashed on me all the time — often as a direct result of trying to execute the “Save File” command, which added an ironic layer of insult to the injury. I eventually grew conditioned to brace myself every time I selected “Save” from the drop-down menu, gritting my teeth and wondering if this would be the time that I lost the last hour (or more) of work. It was a most frustrating game of roulette; Cool Edit is undoubtedly the reason I’m not much for gambling as an adult.
Years later, I re-learned the same lesson — albeit in a much more consensual way — when writing my first book. Over the years, I had built quite the stockpile of fun stories about my life as a musician and producer, and the anecdotes seemed to just pour out of me when I set out to write them down for the first time. My talented editor, Amanda, had the thankless task of paring down my rambling first draft into a more pleasing read, and she did so with surgical precision. Any story that didn’t add to the overall narrative — no matter how much I enjoyed them or how well I thought I told them — had to be cut. Each time, I went through a microcosm of the stages of grief, initially attempting to reframe or find a more relevant spot for the anecdote before accepting that its fate was to end up wherever all of the other unused paragraphs in Microsoft Word end up; somewhere in the Great Digital Dustbin in the Cloud, perhaps mingling with my lost Cool Edit recordings from twenty years prior.
Maturing as an artist means learning to see the big picture, and letting go of all the extraneous details that cloud its view. When we are young, we inevitable want to share every idea that pops into our head. A mature artist, however, is deliberate; every brush stroke, paragraph, and string passage serves a greater purpose. Experience — and experience alone — allows one to distinguish between what is meaningful and what is frivolous. A mature artist knows what not to paint.
As with art, so it is with life. When we first enter adulthood, we approach our lives with the goal of acquiring things: friends, money, possessions, professional accomplishments, and so forth. Once acquired, these things may no longer bring us the same joy we anticipated they would bring, but they become part of us nonetheless. As newly independent adults, we define ourselves by our social circles, our unique set of interests and skills, and our professional reputations. We are ill prepared for a life and identity beyond any of these things; the very thought that these things could disappear one day seems unfathomable to us. If such a thought should enter our heads, we swiftly “YOLO” it away and carry on — as should be the case for young people. We should all have our day in the sun; our time for wild, overflowing exuberance.
As we age, we begin to acquire wounds. Some are relatively minor, like getting passed up for a promotion at work or being let down by a friend. Others are major, like experiencing the death of a loved one. These wounds and the scars they leave behind can’t help but affect us in profound ways, but that is not to say that the effects are always entirely negative. When we are young, we tend to hide our scars; as we grow older, we learn to wear them with pride, knowing that each one granted us wisdom that we will one day impart on younger generations— but only when they, too, are ready to receive such knowledge. The condition of youth is marked by a need to experience the ups and downs of life firsthand, and in this condition, no substitute will do. It is thereby impossible to actually grow old before one’s time — not by reading about it, not by dreaming about it, not even by spending time with the elderly. We get there when we get there. Trying to internalize wisdom without the relevant life experience is a bit like reading about a rollercoaster without ever getting to take the ride.
Like a mature artist crafting a masterpiece, dealing with life’s disappointments and hardships naturally teaches us to filter out the noise and distractions and zone in on what is truly meaningful. The extraneous details of our lives — the stuff we always thought we wanted, the petty drama and gossip, the ever-shifting trends of the intelligentsia and tastemakers — gradually recede into the background with every revolution around the Sun, leaving only what is most essential: our values, our beliefs, and the people we care for most. Similarly, our youthful overconfidence has a habit of reversing itself as we age, as we mature from overly certain young people into older folks content with the knowledge that we never really knew as much about life as we once thought we did. Aging may be associated with decay in the physical sense, but spiritually, it is a beautiful blossoming that gives our lives richness.
These days, I don’t think much about the early recordings I lost, or about the clever passages I cut from my book. I don’t think much about the career goals I once set for myself as a young adult, either, and I’m probably less certain about my future goals than ever before. Although I would not be considered “old” by most people (16 year old me would beg to differ, of course), I’m not young, either — and I’m perfectly content with that. Each day, I get a little bit better at editing both my work and my life, and a little bit better at seeing the big picture behind it all.
-SB
2/27/22 - I received a lot of great mail in response to last week’s piece, Buck The Algorithm! Although not exactly my chief intent, it seemed to conjure up quite a bit of ‘90s nostalgia — which I am of course more than ok with. One reader suggested I check out Chuck Klosterman’s new book, The Nineties — after all, those of us that grew up in The Nineties are the last generation to grow up in the Land Before Algorithms. I have a long plane ride later this week, so I’ll be reading it then.
Another reader — herself a writer — agreed with the Weird Old 1893 etiquette guide that “thank you” and “thanks” both suggest differing amounts of gratitude, and that responding to an act of kindness with a perfunctory “thanks” has never really been appropriate — even some 120 years later. Weird Old Book Finder: 1, Modern Texting Culture: 0.
Other readers also shared some of their own tips for Bucking The Algorithm and resisting the pull of digital determinism: collecting handwritten recipes, consciously choosing books to read across a wide range of interests, and going in-person to see museums full of physical memorabilia, instead of merely scrolling through their digital representations.
Finally, as a P.S. to today’s piece, I’d like to add that lots of songs have attempted to capture the experience of growing older, but I believe Joni Mitchell did it best, in “Both Sides, Now”:
Tears and fears and feeling proud
To say, "I love you" right out loud
Dreams and schemes and circus crowds
I've looked at life that way
Oh, but now old friends they're acting strange
And they shake their heads and they tell me that I've changed
Well something's lost, but something's gained
In living every day
I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all
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Enjoy your week,
Scott