Singing is cringe
I’ve never sung on a record before. The only recordings I have of my voice are from joke songs I wrote as a 14 year old and a karaoke recording of myself singing The Smashing Pumpkins’ 1979 over a karaoke backing track at Six Flags. I let my mother hear it once on the car ride home and it’s since been lost to time.
There is never a perfect time
I’m a musician, not a singer. But I have things I want to say. They may not be things worth saying but that’s up to the listener to decide. To me, they’re an expression of what I feel at any given moment in time. That said, I’ve never found someone who could be consistent and show up to practice with lyrics and sing in front of a crowd. After 2 decades of this nonsense, now that I’m in my 30s, I’ve decided it’s time to just sing.
You don’t have to be good, just emote
I know I’m not a great singer but I’ve also learned from some of the greatest artists of all time that being a great vocalist isn’t about having range and hitting every single note. It’s about singing with feeling in a way the communicates with the audience in such a way that they are able to see past the lack of technical proficiency and feel what you’re trying to set across.
Like many artists before me I’ve gotten to the point where I no longer have the time or patience to wait for someone to come along and help me express what I want to express. With Moss I will be playing all the instruments and singing the vocals myself. Of course I’ll be doing my best to stay in key and make it sit nice in the mix and my goal is for the end product to be heard as something unique even if it isn’t technically compelling like a Celine Dion performance.
Everyone has a voice so use it
Everyone has a voice and we should use it regardless of what others may think of it. I’m not delusional. I have my day job to lay the bills so I have the freedom to experiment and try these things. If I fail and people hate my voice then so be it but I don’t want to go back to making purely instrumental tracks simply because I don’t have the courage to sing.
Perfect is the enemy of done
The EP I’m working on has 3 songs on it that I’ve done vocals for. There’s one more that I’m working on finishing both music and vocals for, and the rest are instrumentals that I don’t plan to release yet because I don’t feel like they’re ready.
That’s another thing I want to address. In the past I used to release songs that were bad or incomplete just because I had finished them. That’s easy to do when all your songs are instrumentals. This time I have to take great care to arrange them properly and find a place for the music and vocals to live side by side. One more song is left to record and then I can move on to mixing, mastering, and releasing. My goal has been to release music during the 2023-2024 winter season and if I finish this last song then I can certainly deliver on that promise.
Oh, and one more thing: it’s important to ship. That’s something I learned in another life where I was a programmer. You either release software or someone else will before you. Music is a lot like that. Perfectionism is the enemy of great art. I’ll write about that soon so be on the lookout.