Looking Into The Abyss: Why I Started Writing Retrospectives on My Music
For a long time I believed that once an album was finished, there was nothing left to say. Or, at least, that the music itself would be able to speak my "side" of a story that would eventually find its way to the listener. After all - isn't the role of any particular art form supposed to be speaking for itself? And if it failed to do so, perhaps it simply wasn't good enough? Maybe it was somehow wrong or incomplete?
Over the last few months, however, I've found myself returning to old releases that I hadn't listened to in years. Some of them truly surprised me, even if those surprises weren't the most pretty. Others disappointed me immensely. Quite a few made me wonder what exactly I had been trying to accomplish at the time. More often than not, I discovered that I remembered the circumstances surrounding the music more vividly than the music itself.
That realization became the foundation of my retrospective series in which I'm going through my releases and making them somewhat archived and explained to the larger audience. The retrospective can be found here.
These writings are not reviews per se. They are not attempts to convince anyone that an overlooked album was secretly brilliant, nor are they exercises in nostalgia. If anything, they are documents, an effort to preserve the stories that inevitably disappear as time passes by.
I always felt that music has a peculiar relationship with memory. A listener hears a finished album, but the creator remembers unfinished demos, abandoned ideas, technical failures, relationships, places, conversations, and moments that never become audible. Every release carries a history that often remains somewhat invisible. Eventually those memories begin to fade, and with them the reasons why certain artistic decisions were made in the first place. I realized that if I didn't write those stories down now, I probably never would. And maybe that would've been for the better. But the inner piece of me made me feel like that wasn't suppose to be the way.
One of the more surprising aspects of revisiting these albums has been discovering how critical I remain of most of my own work. Time has not magically transformed forgotten experiments into masterpieces. If anything, it has made me more aware of their (sometimes fatal) flaws. There are releases that I genuinely believe failed. Others achieved only a fraction of what I originally intended. A few still embarrass me. And yet I no longer see those failures as something worth hiding.
Without them, many of the later albums simply would not exist. Without them I would not be considering starting something new. Every abandoned concept, every misguided experiment, every poorly executed idea eventually pointed me toward something better. Looking at my discography as a whole, I no longer see isolated successes and failures. I see a continuous process of learning. That perspective, which is still ongoing, has changed the way I listen to my own music.
The retrospectives have also reminded me how deeply personal many of these releases were. Some were built around relationships that have long since ended. Others emerged from periods of depression, uncertainty, or creative frustration. There are albums that document places I barely remember visiting and emotions I no longer recognize as my own.
Writing about them has been strangely therapeutic. Not because it provides closure of any kind (as that can be done only though working on yourself), but because it replaces vague memories with something concrete, physical. Instead of remembering only fragments, I now have a record of what those albums meant when they were created.
I've also come to appreciate how much my creative process has evolved. My projects often emerged from impulse. I recorded them quickly, released frequently, and rarely questioned whether an idea deserved to become a finished album. Today I try to work much more deliberately. I spend more time developing, considering choices, refining arrangements, and thinking about structure even before pressing the record button. Neither approach is inherently better. They simply belong to different periods of my life.
Perhaps the most important lesson from writing these retrospectives is that music never truly exists on its own. Albums are shaped as much by the lives surrounding them as by the sounds they contain. Without context, a listener hears only one version of the story. These "essays" offer another.
There are still many releases left to revisit, and I suspect some of them will be considerably more difficult to write about than others. Memory is unreliable, and honesty is not always comfortable. Even so, I think the effort is worthwhile. The music will always remain the center of my work and these texts simply explain how it came to exist.