Forty Five Years to Learn One Simple Thing

There's a particular kind of truth that sounds almost embarrassingly obvious the moment someone says it out loud, and yet takes most people the better part of a lifetime to actually believe.

Make the Music you want to hear.

That's the strange thing about this kind of knowledge. It's not information you're missing. Someone could have told you the sentence on day one, and you'd have nodded and agreed and gone straight back to doing the opposite. Understanding it in your head and actually living by it turn out to be two entirely different processes, separated by however many years of getting it wrong first.

From 2000 to 2015 I made my living as a Media composer, and I worked a lot with a Director called Julian Kronfli. We made TV ads in the main, but the cool thing about Julian was that he cared about every part of his craft, including the music. When writing to picture, you'd think that because you're working to briefs, you can only write what works for the ad, however, I found out fairly quickly that whatever style of music was needed, it was always best received if I had written it as if it were a proper personal composition, I could stand behind.

Make the Music you want to hear.

Back in the day, I was writing songs and trying very hard to become a pop star. The big mistake I would make would be to try to please the people I thought could make a difference instead of just forging ahead on my own path.

I think that's because the useful truths in any craft aren't really facts. They're more like weights you have to carry for a while before you feel how heavy they actually are.

Someone can hand you the words for free. They can't hand you the years that make the words mean something.

Make the Music you want to hear.

Which is a slightly frustrating thing to admit, if you're the sort of person who'd like to pass on what you've learned to someone earlier in the process than you were. You can say the sentence. You probably should say the sentence, because occasionally it does land early for someone and saves them the years. But you also have to make peace with the fact that, mostly, it won't land at all until they've earned it the same slow way you did.