Much of my favourite stuff happens in the zone between talent and ambition.That glorious, imperfect region of someone pushing to be better than they are. Give me an ambitious failure over a tame success every time. When it works, it’s brilliant. When it doesn’t, it’s usually at least interesting. So with anything creative, I try to remember:
If I don’t fail occasionally, I’m not being adventurous enough.
This is one of those failures. In fact, I feel somewhat uncomfortable putting it on the internet at all, but it’s a few years old, so at least I’ve got a bit of distance from it, and I ought to illustrate my point.
I’ve tried talking songs fairly frequently over the years, with varying levels of success. To be honest, it wasn’t really until Driving Blindfolded that I’ve been particularly happy with it [written last year].
There are bits about this track I really like, some of the layering and guitar parts are pretty cool, but as a whole? It just doesn’t work. It reeealy doesn’t work. And because everything was recorded around everything else I can’t really keep the good without keeping the bad.
But I still kept it.
It’s got it’s own fucked up worth, but beyond that I had fun doing it and I learned from it. And if I never let myself make something that doesn’t work? I doubt I’d manage to make anything I cared about at all.
