photo by Flood

Some days I wish I were a wise old sage, able to conjure the profoundest of philosophies to complement any moment or opportunity that might present itself. Or I wish I were like Wilson from “Home Improvement,” a human library filled with quotes that spanned centuries of the greatest thinkers throughout history. I see websites devoted to reflective quotes and their everyday application to our lives, I read stories of people who were seemingly inspired to do their life’s work by a brief passage in a book.

It’s inspiring to live with your mindset in these contemplative places, but I sometimes forget that nobody really lives in them 100% of the time. Try as I might, my roster of memorized quotes and their sources is slim, maybe a handful at best. So when I am trying to remember the right bit of condensed wisdom for the moment, I’ll silently chastise myself for not being a walking encyclopedia of thought. Or maybe I’ll reprimand myself for not applying one of my own recently formulated philosophies to one of life’s scenarios.

This might be because when I come across an idea that I really connect with on a deep level, I want to be able to hold onto that feeling forever. Those times that I say an enthusiastic “YES!” are times I want to keep at my disposal for the next time it directly pertains to my life. It’s as though I want to be in a constant state of epiphany. But an epiphany is by definition fleeting. It’s a moment, and moments—as with all things in life—don’t last forever.

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Some of you might remember when I wrote about recording two EPs of solo music about a year ago that I was pretty happy with. At the time I said I’d have them out in a couple months, which was obviously wrong; a lot has happened between that post and today, and the fact is that those EPs actually will be finished in the not-too distant future. But for many reasons, another project of mine piggy-backed the solo records in priority over the last six months or so.

So today I’m happy to announce a new musical venture I’m calling E8 (the website is at e8music.com). I just finished the first 4-song EP called “Vignette,” which you can listen to below. I’m letting you name your own price to download high-quality mp3s, but I put no minimum so by all means feel free to grab ‘em for free—any way to spread the music is a good thing in my book. (Alternatively, you can probably just listen endlessly on Bandcamp for free, but that’s far less convenient in the long run.)

I’m excited about the future of this project in addition to my ongoing solo work. And if you like what you hear, please share it with others you think might enjoy it. More to come soon. Thanks for listening.

Sometimes there are days when I wake up and say, “I’m going to do something productive! I’m going to work on the music I’ve been trying to finish since last summer! I’m going to get so much good stuff done today!”

Well, today I’m going to share something with you that did not come from a day like that. This particular day started something more like this: “I feel like doing something completely ridiculous that has nothing to do with anything.” So I created “Psycho Wars.”

What ends in randomness starts in randomness. I was inspired to listen to the score from the classic Hitchcock film Psycho for no particular reason one day. As it played, two things struck me: 1) the eerie, legato string theme didn’t last nearly long enough, and 2) it would also make for an awesome electronic remix. This little thought stayed in the back of my mind for a couple weeks until the fateful day came that I described above. It was time to fulfill the prophecy.

Halfway through the project, I started getting a theme from Star Wars stuck in my head (it’s the music that plays while they dogfight in X-wings, for your nerd reference). I thought, hey, that would also be a good remix candidate. Maybe I should do that next.

Or…

Why make all that work for myself when I could just combine it with the project I had already started? So I did. And voila, “Psycho Wars” was born. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed making it.

photo by Eric Vanderpool

Perfection is what you get when you stop expecting it of yourself. I didn’t always think this, though. Until recently, I spent most of my life fancying myself a perfectionist. I took pride in my opinion that over the course of one short life, the only way to truly reach your full potential was to strive for nothing less than perfection in everything you can possibly control. There was just no point in living any other way.

(Quick side story: my high school physics teacher once asked me if there was anything I didn’t have an opinion on. I told him that there was no point in living life if you don’t have an opinion on every single thing. I’ve since softened my stance on that quite a bit, but you can see what many of my teachers had to deal with.)

As usual, I was wrong, and things are much simpler than I even imagined. Being a perfectionist is actually not a desirable quality for two primary reasons:

1) It’s impossible to achieve perfection, especially all the time.
2) Basing your sense of self-worth on achieving the impossible means that you’ll never really be satisfied with yourself.

Oh, but you’re an artist and you don’t want to be satisfied or else you’ll lose your drive and ability to keep making better art than you have already! This is where I cough into my hand and say “bullshit” in an obvious and condescending manner. I can do this, because I’m an artist too. (I can also do it because this is my blog and I can do whatever the hell I want.) And after years and years of living creatively in the perfectionist mindset, I now believe that if you need that sort of motivation to inspire you to do great work, then you’re not much of an artist. Sorry. Or, maybe you’re a great artist who just has their priorities mixed up. If that’s the case, there’s plenty of hope for you yet!

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photo by ccharmon

In the book Food Rules, author Michael Pollan realizes he can summarize everything we should know about eating well in a paltry seven words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Pithy. Succinct. Easy to remember. Most importantly, true. The rest of the book elaborates on those seven words, but the bottom line is that an issue like nutrition that has become overly complex in today’s society can generally be summed up in a single, incredibly simple phrase. (It reminds me of a funny George Carlin bit where he boils the ten commandments down into two general rules that encompass the spirit of them all.)

Naturally, I surmised that there must be a way to sum up all of the ideologies and methodologies of living a happy and fulfilling life in a similar way. Undoubtedly there is a way to take the most relevant and true aspects of all the millions of pages written on philosophy, religion, self-help (which I had a few things to say about in my previous post), and every other path to happiness and reduce them down to a simple axiom that was both impossible to forget and universally applicable.

Realistically, it could probably be summed up in the phrase “Don’t be a dick,” but I wanted to find something that was a little more poetic than that. I’m no scholar, but I have spent plenty of time learning about the many philosophies and value systems of the world, so I felt reasonably well-equipped for the task. Besides, I wanted something effortless and universal. Solutions like this have to be easily within anyone’s grasp, regardless of educational background or life experience. I was slightly taken aback to discover that it didn’t take me very long to come up with something that I was pretty satisfied with.

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photo by funky_abstract

I think it’s time to get over this whole “self help” thing. There is an entire industry based around telling us that they have the elusive secret to happiness, that if you just read this book, watch that video, do these exercises, or think this way you can become a better, fuller person. I’ve read a lot of stuff like this, and even though I appreciate good advice, I’ve come to almost resent the whole idea of “self improvement.” I resent it because it tricked me into putting my energy towards trying to find something that I had all along.

You know those cheesy maxims that say you’re already perfect the way you are? It turns out they’re right. And if they’re right, that pretty much negates the whole business of helping you improve yourself. How can you improve on perfection? Thing is, you’ll never be satisfied if you’re bent on self-improvement. If you’re anything of a perfectionist, you’ll never be good enough. How can that be healthy? You’re not a work in progress. You’re a human being living a life in progress. You don’t have to work toward being a complete person, hoping you can achieve that fullness someday. You have it now. You just have to make the decision to recognize that.

Of course, if you’re already perfect then how can you explain all those bad habits you’d like to be rid of? Well, just because you’re perfect doesn’t mean you can never—or should never—change. Things are always changing. That’s how life is. And it’s in this seeming contradiction, that you’re already perfect but you should embrace change in yourself, that we can find the key distinction that shatters the fragile framework of “self-help.”

I think it’s as simple as changing one key word: Evolve, don’t improve.

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photo by prawnpie

I’ve been called cynical a good number of times in my life. Most of these times were when I was a little younger, particularly in my teenage years when I wore the label as something of a badge of honor. I believed that cynical people weren’t deserving of criticism because they simply saw things for what they really are, which just happened to be a harsher view than the average person. I felt as though being called cynical was really just a way of saying that I thought differently and saw clearly. I was proud of that.

These days, I try to distance myself from the term when I can because I recognize the negative edge that cynicism can have. Now I generally think in much more positive terms (or at least I try to), and consequently I’m far more aware of when negativity creeps into my thoughts and words. I think it’s true that being an authentically hardened cynic can genuinely be detrimental to a person’s life experience (or at least diminish the enjoyment one can have in their life, even if they don’t realize it). Still, every now and again I run into the cynic label and have to address whether I’m being misunderstood or if it’s coming from the tiny cynic that’s still hiding deep inside me, rearing its ugly little head. But I think I’ve pinpointed a key distinction that draws a practical line in the sands of cynicism.

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photo by mpeterke

Modern science can do some amazing things. The technology we use every day is the result of centuries of research, discovery, and ingenuity. The observations and experiments we’ve made allow us to probe the outer limits of our imaginations and understand how the universe works to an incredible degree of accuracy. In order for all of this to be possible, thousands of people have devoted their lives to asking the big questions, searching for the life-changing answers, and going out on the longest of limbs.

Consequently, there are many people who have devoted the better part of their lives to a complete failure, whether it’s an idea that never comes to fruition, a discovery that’s made by someone else first, or a theory that ultimately leads nowhere. Naturally, we only really hear about the successes, so it’s easy to forget the trail of failed destruction that those success stories have clawed their way through. Even the successful people themselves have a seemingly countless number of stories of their own previous failures.

But the reality is that there are a good number of people out there who wind up committing almost their entire lives to a mistake. For example, there are thousands of theoretical physicists today devoting their lives to figuring out if string theory is the ultimate unifying theory of the universe. While it could turn out to be the answer, there’s also a possibility that it’s not, meaning that all these great minds have dedicated all their time to calculations that lead nowhere.

A success could mean they’ve contributed to something that literally changes everything we know about the universe. A failure could mean immeasurable lost time and resources that could have been used working towards a correct understanding of our world, or towards innovations and discoveries that could save lives, not to mention the lost money spent on building costly lab equipment and experiments.

This isn’t limited to scientists, of course. In many ways we all risk the same mistakes in our own lives—pursuing a dead-end career, being in a long-term relationship that turns out to be a lie, losing our life’s savings in a scam, putting everything we have into what eventually leads to a dead end. But I don’t think any of it really is a mistake, even if things don’t pan out the way we pictured or hoped for ourselves.

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photo by Images_of_Money

I was very fortunate to have grown up in relative comfort as a kid. While my family wasn’t exactly wealthy, there was never a question of whether there would be food on the table or bills would be paid. I was encouraged not to live wastefully and to be smart with my money, but it was never a situation where we were conserving energy for fear that we wouldn’t be able to cover the electric bill.

Then I went to college.

Many of us get a pretty good dose of living the “poor college student” life, then graduate to join a workforce that pays a reasonable—if modest at first—salary and holds the promise of future growth and prosperity. But I didn’t do what most people do. I chose to pursue the artist’s life, one that all too often lives up to its “starving” cliche.

And so I’ve spent the better part of my 20s being poor. Sometimes it’s been broke-ass, knee deep in credit card debt, holy-shit-what-am-I-going-to-do-about-rent poor. Other times I’ve done OK, but anything beyond basic needs and a few small luxuries here and there has been out of the question. It didn’t help that I lived in two of the most expensive cities in the country (Boston and Los Angeles) from college onward.

As with any situation, I’ve tried to make the best of it whenever possible. Looking back, I think I’ve learned some valuable lessons from being poor. Some of them are in tune with the old “money doesn’t buy happiness” adage, while others are the result of the harsh realities of living paycheck to paycheck. Here are some of the things I’ve learned:

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photo by ToniVC

“Nothing is worth more than this day.”
–Goethe

I was staring irrelevance straight in the face, and I didn’t like it. The conversation began innocently enough: We’re in an interesting time musically, I was explaining to a friend, because popular music as we know it was created at a time that has allowed us to see an amazing amount of creative innovation, but recently enough that we don’t have to be completely overwhelmed with the amount of music we could potentially explore as listeners and performers. (Though sometimes I still do feel overwhelmed when trying to cover enough musical ground to feel as though my grasp of music history is reasonably comprehensive.)

I told my friend that with the Internet allowing thousands of indie and self-released artists to find their way into my listening space these days, I do find it challenging to keep up to date with the trends. Imagine, I postulated, how hard it will be to feel encyclopedic about music in 50 or 100 years. There won’t be enough hours in the day; there will just be too much music to sift through. You could never feel like you’ve been exhaustive in your listening experience. I’d be so stressed about hearing as much music as possible and connecting all the dots that I’d probably never relax enough to actually enjoy the music I did hear. I sure am glad I live now and not then, I told him. What a privilege it is!

I sat there feeling satisfied by my position in the universe when he lobbed the bomb at me: “In 50 or 100 years, it won’t matter. None of the music that’s important now will have the same importance then. It will be as relevant as the music from the 19th century is today.”

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