One of my tentative song titles for this year’s RPM album poses a question, in humorous song title parenthetical form:
(Does the World Really Need) More Music (?)
I wondered that again as I awoke this morning with Death Cab for Cutie’s “Codes and Keys” in my head. It’s the title track from an album they released last year. It’s a pretty good album. Every time I listen to it I think, “This is pretty good. I should listen to it more often.” But then I rarely do, because there’s just so much really good music being produced these days.
Do I really need to toss my little CD onto the already massive mountain of music (not the most poetic alliteration ever) being produced every year?
Well, that’s not really why we make music, is it?
I want my music to be heard. I want it to be enjoyed by others. But mostly I want it for myself. I have an urge to create that comes from a place I don’t completely understand. But yet I do it. I must do it. Because that’s what I do.
My music isn’t the expression of a troubled soul. I’m not bearing my heart with the music I create. I just have sounds in my head and I need to get them out.
But the creative drive goes deeper. It’s not the most satisfying realization, but I’ve come to learn that on some level, I just need there to be things in the world that I’ve made. In the words of Steve Jobs, I want to make a “dent in the universe.” Existence is so incomprehensibly vast, and we are such an infinitesimal part of it. But, for a few dozen of the Earth’s trips around the sun, we’re a part of it. And, what’s more, we know it.
I guess that drive to simply leave a mark before I’m a pile of dust is the driving force behind a lot of the creative impulse, at least for me.
I used to think that this creative impulse was at least partly tied to an instinct for procreation, that bringing new life into the world was what I really felt compelled to do, for simple biological reasons. But I have kids now, and while they’re great in many ways, it hasn’t lessened that urge to create art.
So, I continue to make music. I explore. I refine. I grow. And I keep trying to get it all out of my head and into the world.
This is not at all where I had intended to go with this post. I was going to just talk about the song I worked on last night, which ended up sounding a little bit like a Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross soundtrack… if all of their soundtrack tunes were 12 minutes long and ended with an extended, unaccompanied theremin solo. But that’s probably not as interesting as probing metaphysical reflection.
The short version of the daily progress report is, last night was another productive session, and I extensively employed two new apps I just discovered last night through the App Store’s often questionable “Genius” tool: Alchemy and SoundPrism. The latter gets an endorsement from Jordan Rudess, which is good enough for me.