Sometime in mid-2024, I was reminded of the age-old saying, "Perfection is the enemy of progress.”
In 2018, I was just learning how to make anything close to music and vowed to myself that every year, on the 31st of January, I’ll make music in a day and publish it for my own sake. I’ll put something out that not only challenges my skills but also helps me learn, unlearn, and track my progress over time. No sweat, right? I make "music,” and I publish it.
Slowly, however, my insecurities crept in. The notion of how music is made by artists and perceived by the audience clouded my own style. It’s a struggle, I won’t lie. I don’t know who set the standards, but everybody seemed very into it, and it seemed only logical to fall in. I fell in! Bad idea. I started becoming too skeptical of whatever I made; there was always something I could do to make my work sound better. It was forever sitting in my drafts and never “good enough” to be out there. I told myself it’s okay to skip a year just so I could work on perfecting an album that I really don’t know when it’s going to be done. And just like that, two years went by, and I am still ideating my album without any fruition. At this point, I’m still figuring it out, and I really don’t know when the album will really come out, but I do hope it’ll be soon. I'd like that. Up until I get there, I’ll be working on putting out my imperfect drafts for the world and for me to see where I stand and where I’m going.
xxxi is me revisiting the promise I made to myself when I started this journey, and I hope you stick around to see where it goes.