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Creative lineage
You and your work are not on an island. You are part of a tradition—the most recent people to join a party that started decades, maybe centuries or millennia ago. Who came before you? What work came before your work? “For me music has always been about lineage,” Philip Glass writes in his memoir, Words…
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Three ways to learn taste
Martin Scorsese approached filmmaking by having one of his archivists record videos of films and live TV with multiple VCRs, and cataloging them into a system. He ended up with thousands of these videos. You will approach your work with the same kind of obsessiveness, though perhaps to a smaller degree. You will research meticulously,…
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Organizing principle
If an album has 12 songs, there are just over 479 million ways to organize them in a sequence (12 songs * 11 songs * 10 songs… all the way until the last 1). Out of all of these possibilities, a recording artist needs to decide which one tracklist represents what they want to say.…
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Three things about options
Options open up possibilities. They are a form of freedom. Time spent discovering and creating new options is an investment. Maintaining an option will always require extra work or fees. If you can afford it, this can be a good idea, even if you don’t have a great reason to maintain it. Don’t let your…
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Sincerest forms
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Jealousy is the sincerest form of desire. Doubt is the sincerest form of humility. Guilt is the sincerest form of conscience. Confusion is the sincerest form of ambition.
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Questions on my mind
Because the first step to finding better answers is to ask better questions: How can I learn to love working on the business model, not just doing deliverables? What is a constructive way to honor the emotional experiences of disappointment, jealousy, and fear? What tradeoffs have other people who I admire made in their lives?…
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One of the most important rules to writing
Work with what you’ve got. Bringing any work to life requires that you make a bargain with your imagination. You plead with each other to make it work. Your reality—schedule, energy, budget—demands compromise. Your imagination demands more. Both are most unhappy when you don’t make a deal and give up on the work. This is…