Too Many Ideas
Every so often it all gets a bit much.
Since I was young, I remember having an over-active imagination. It wasn’t so much daydreaming about fighting dragons etc; more “what if I did this!?”, “what if we could do that?!”. I’ve actually got scans of projects I’d invent - clubs, secret societies, mini businesses. Here’s one where we formed an X-Files influenced agency exploring paranormal activity and I’d write reports of unusual happenings (limited strictly of course to my or my friends’ houses) - I must have been about 10 yrs old :
As I moved into my teens this migrated into building worlds based on artists, bands and DJs. I started off releasing tapes as DJ 1/2 Ear (not a joke, and based on being deaf in right ear). Then I became Mista Mekon (or I think it was ‘The Furious Mista Mekon’ in full) and that was the first project that I really took out to the world at about 14 or 15 - I made a load of mixtapes (on actual cassette) which my friend illustrated and started doing gigs and so appeared on posters/flyers etc as that.
(A scan from an old school notebook…)
It hasn’t stopped since…To pick a few projects there’s been: Please Will (my solo music), Tape Club Records (record label), Sayno (management company), Ocean (record label imprint), Composer Magazine (formed at Spitfire with Loren), SA Recordings (another label, at Spitfire, with Harri), mondayhyperfidelity (my collaborative music), Song Athletics (my business) and loads more. I’ve just had this constant urge to name things and imagine brands or worlds, and I suppose it’s ultimately served me well.
But it’s also a total pain.
I can’t stop my brain from creating new homes for ideas and seeking out/inventing opportunities, and what I’ve found is that it periodically gets too overwhelming and I just kinda explode in a quiet mania (don’t worry it all happens calmly and with a smile on my face).
It’s been happening this week. Working solo means that there are less buffers to stop my brain running wild and so I have to channel an extraordinary amount of discipline to pull focus on what I ultimately know are the priority projects. There are so many exciting possibilities, though, with products, projects, content and so on!
At first it’s a real mental wrestle, but soon comes a surge of clarity and relief. Like a sea of blinding light, it obliterates all of the nonsense and mind-threads, leaving me with the key items in front of me.
So it’s been an exhausting week but I feel great right now. And everything’s ultimately very simple with respect to what I’ve got to focus on. I’ve temporarily disbanded some lofty concepts and rehomed some good new ideas into Song Athletics - the place I wanna have my head in the majority of the time.
It’s nice to have had a brain tidy.
I remember the last time this happened I arrived at a commitment to focusing on samples and plugins. That remains the same but with the added condition to stay in the lane I know best: sounds and music relating to the genres I love and simple tools that are limited and intentional. There’s so much other tempting stuff to explore and having an interest/background in records, hifi, hardware etc makes it so easy to go DEEP down rabbit holes but I know from past experience that actually resolutely focusing in one area may bring me into contact with other areas more naturally and easily.
So here I am with an even tighter focus, and excitement, ultimately on producing some beautiful sounds and tools. I wanna take all those meandering/exploratory hours and instead be in the studio; recording inspiring players and spending time with artists making the most exciting music today. Time is short, and there’s so much fun to be had in the space, alone!
I’m doing more and more recording myself, and shall keep up that trajectory, and I’d like to soak up more than ever around the practise of sound and recording. I’ll try to share as much of that as I can, too.
Here’s a video that happened to land on my feed and it’s particularly fitting; Jony Ive talking about Steve Jobs’ view on focus…
Stay on track, all. Best,
Will
p.s. I realise that - brilliantly - the next product I’m lining up is not samples or plugins. But there is a studio link! And it’s been in the work for a while; long before my thinking above. So there. (This wouldn’t be interesting if I followed my own rules, would it?)