What it's like to release music
It’s weird putting music into the world.
Not in the sense that it’s abnormal or rare or something. The opposite, actually. In 2022, making music is common, and song releases are so frequent that we may drown in them.
No, I mean that the experience of releasing music is strange. It makes you act and think in ways you otherwise wouldn’t.
When you make music, you develop a closeness with the song that’s like the familiarity you feel with family. You live with the song. You see it change. You know all of the little decisions that have shaped it, and so you’re uniquely situated to compare it against everything that it could have been (and find the real thing disappointing). You are, unavoidably, face to face with its flaws.
But you’re pridefully protective of it, too.
When you release a song, you’re anxious, like you’re anxious when you send a kid to school. Because while you reserve the right to critique your kid’s attitude or the fact that they pick their nose (after all, you know exactly what’s wrong with them), if anyone else says something, it’ll cut your heart.
When it comes to songs (and probably kids, but I have less experience with those), it’s very hard not to be a helicopter parent. You release them into the world – good luck out there, little guy! – but three minutes later it’s clear the cord wasn’t cut cleanly. You feel the pull back in, the urge to check and make sure they’re doing well.
I try very hard not to be on social media or tied to my phone, but on the day I released a song, I checked Instagram 53 times and refreshed Spotify for Artists when I blinked.
Releasing a song is mostly vanity.
It’s the human desire to shout your own name and to put your worth in your performance, or, more accurately, in what other people think about your performance.
But it’s beautiful, too, and sometimes necessary.
My friend wrote a song called “Through” after he watched the movie Boyhood. The film’s premise is crazily ambitious: It follows the same kid from the age of six all the way through adolescence, until he leaves for college. The script is fictionalized, but the actor really does grow up. They filmed him year after year for a decade.
My friend told me that, at the end of the movie, when the kid finally leaves his family and goes to school, he felt this ache:
“You’ve seen him go through hell since he was a kid, and now you see him go to college and start making friends, and you’re thinking, ‘These college friends that he’s making, they have no idea what mess he survived.’”
“They don’t know what he’s been through.”
I think that’s kind of what it’s like when you put a song into the world: It’s the nervous acknowledgement that your story is vital to you, but that other people don’t know it.
And it is an ache. It’s the discomfort of disconnection. It’s the reality that your closest friends can’t hear what you tell yourself in your head. It’s weird.
You feel that acutely when you release music.
That’s why you release music.
Updates!
Not 100% on this, but I’m probably going to take a break on writing / music next week for Thanksgiving and my birthday. We’ll see.
After that, I’m hoping to have another song out in December. Again, we’ll see.
Thanks for listening to “Signs” and, as always, thanks for reading! Enjoy the holiday week, and here’s hoping you find things to be grateful for.
-Jon