The last one to see it
It looks different when you’re standing right in front of it than it does when you’re viewing from several feet away. (Snow at Argentueuil, Claude Monet, 1875)
When I was in my early twenties (all my most pathetic stories begin with those words), I was desperate to create an album of music that made a Statement.
It wasn’t enough to just put a few of my best songs together and share it. Oh, no! Every song had to have a concept, and they had to weave together to say something bigger.
Never mind that Pete Townshend and Brian Wilson had each nearly lost their minds trying and failing to do something similar. Somehow, I was going to transcend my limited circumstances and experience to make my murky vision a reality.
This is where Ron Howard as the Arrested Development narrator would say, “She did not.” I had raised the bar far too high to clear, and my nascent music career never recovered.
The sad part is that any song I wrote did have a concept; what’s more, the songs already had threads that connected them. The threads were invisible to me because they were me. I took for granted my own voice as a songwriter.
I could have just written and shared the songs and let other people reflect their broader theme back to me. I would have been the last one to see it, and that’s okay.
As artists and creators, we can’t always create the necessary distance to stand back and see my own work as other see it. By definition, we don’t have outside perspective. We can let it be the job of other people to categorize and label us while we just keep on doing what we do.
An artist’s body of work only seems linear in retrospect, when we can classify their output into different eras or schools. In fact, their oeuvre is more like a neural network in which each piece can connect to each other piece in multiple ways and connects to multiple other pieces. Each piece you add extends this network of connections, strengthening existing ones and adding fresh new possibilities.
In this way, over time, the artist’s distinctive traits emerge, like a new species of bird that becomes identifiable after studying the characteristics of hundreds of individual specimens.
Thus, it was pointless for me to labor over one song or even one album to try to see how it would define me. It wouldn’t. It couldn’t. I just needed to move on to the next one.
In my more recent adventures in creative work, I’ve let go of the need to label and classify. I’ve just been making what I feel called to make. Once I have a hundred pieces or so, I can usually start to see the patterns. If I can’t, the reflections of other people can help. This happens naturally if I’m out there sharing because I can see what’s resonating with my audience.
It’s been fascinating to, in retrospect, see that my work fit into categories that I wasn’t consciously aware of at the time of creation. Now, having discovered those categories, I can use them to guide my work moving forward if I want to.
It may feel as though this thing you are thinking of making is too much like the last thing, or too different. But chances are, it’s not. If you were to stand back and survey the whole, you would see that the parts fit perfectly. Or maybe you wouldn’t — it’s hard to catch a glimpse. Just keep making stuff and let the rest of us figure it out. We’ll let you know what we see.
