If you never release your album do you exist as an artist?

Here is the studio. Five hundred square feet of space split between the live room and control room. Over a thousand if you count the lower floor (a garage) as a usable space (which it can be for cool room reverb). There are the amps. Everything is mic’d up. All you need to do is turn on the computer, the preamp, the interface. Select a track, record. That’s it.

But here I am. Sitting on the sofa. Feet up on the ottoman. Just not feeling like it. For a month at a time. It’s been six months since I started recording the Growing Moss EP. I’m over it. I have one song left to record. I don’t feel like it.

I’m at a point where I not only not want to expand the EP into an LP but abandon the EP completely and start a new project... eventually.

Sometimes the art just flows. At other times it feels like glaciers moving over a landscape. Like you’re carving landscapes.

Right now things aren’t flowing for me. The initial idea was exciting but halfway into execution I hit a wall. And I think that’s okay. It just hurts sometimes. The trouble is getting over this idea that you must put something out or you are not valid. I am a musician. I write music. Much of it is good. Just as much isn’t. But in the end there are no fans waiting for the next release. If there were they’d be happy with a good release after a (reasonable) wait. There’s no label pressuring you for a release.

In the end it’s just me in my oasis that has turned into a torture chamber of my own design because the less I use it the more it feels like I should, the guiltier I feel for not using it.

This is a problem of artistic block. It’s not uncommon. This happens to me roughly every two to three years. Little ones happen all the time. The more pressure I put on myself the worse it gets.

Maybe, whether I mean it or not, I’ll say I’ve decided not to finish this record and just chill, listen to my vinyls, watch YouTube videos, and play video games in this space and let the instruments collect dust a while.