I saw this wonderful video by Marie Forleo on YouTube:
Can’t Seem To Get Started? This One Idea Could Change Your Life
Never a truer piece of advice.
And well worth spending the seven minutes to watch.
I’ve already talked about Marie TV in a previous post:
Performance Tips (No, Not That Kind…)
As I mentioned before, the channel is really targeted at entrepreneurs and business activities, but many of the pieces of advice are relevant to any sphere of activity.
Marie is quite a character, has a big following with her YouTube channel and is fun to watch.
A little personal story here.
Almost exactly a year ago, I brought out my second full album of original music, MY TITANIC.
Now bringing out the first album, THE LESS YOU DO, in 2010, had been somewhat of an uncomfortable experience. I’d gone into the studio with eight musicians and an arranger and it had all got rather complicated.
So for the second album, I wanted to go a different direction and I was thinking about trying to record some tracks on my own, but I didn’t feel ready.
I was wondering what to do when I discovered a remarkable and now unfortunately defunct site called CrowdAudio which allowed artists to run mixing competitions.
As it happened, I’d recorded a ballad with just a piano-voice arrangement a fews days previously, so I decided to put it in and see what happened.
147 mixes and much listening later, I’d discovered the engineer with whom I went on to record the whole album. 3ee happens to live in Romania.
Now I wasn’t at all sure about recording the album on my own at home. But I liked the initial mix and I thought I could maybe try to record a few more songs before getting stuck and hiring session musicians in to a studio. Although I worried that the song arrangements would be too thin and the instrumental playing too weak, I persuaded myself to give it a shot.
So I started recording the album and sending the results off to Romania.
I decided to get each song mixed and mastered before moving on to the next.
Gradually, the number of completed songs built up.
And finally, I reached a tipping point where I said to myself, “What the hell, let’s do the whole thing like this.”
And the interesting thing was that the experience of recording at home generated new songs as I went along, songs that perhaps I would not have written otherwise.
In the end, many of the songs that I had initially wanted to record didn’t get on the album because I was enjoying the process of writing songs from scratch and recording them, all within the space of a few days. Some of them really sped through the “factory.”
Did I feel ready to record the whole album by myself before starting?
Absolutely not.
Is the result perfect?
No.
Could the arrangements be better?
Probably.
But it doesn’t stop me from being proud of the album and grateful for the experience.
And as Marie points out in her video, there’s really only one crime.
Everybody has to begin somewhere. Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has to change things around.
The only real crime is not starting at all.
Love
Richard
