Reframing Excuses
Bellows has a new show! The Human Instrumentality Podcast has a Patreon!
Good morning.
When I introduced the Drumming Upstream project in this newsletter back in January I made a point to say that new entries wouldn’t arrive in your inbox every week. And yet, every time I reach Monday without a new drum cover and 2k+ words to accompany it I feel like I’ve let you all down. There’s external source for this feeling. No one has ever complained about not receiving a new entry of Drumming Upstream. Heck, I’ve had more people ask me about Lamniformes Radio1 than ask when the next drum cover is coming. All of the pressure to deliver comes from within.
I put this pressure on myself because I want to do something great with Drumming Upstream. The project takes a lot of time and a lot of work, but it is all work that I find rewarding. I’m getting better at working with a camera and video editing software. My writing is at worst staying sharp and at best slowly improving. I’ve definitely gotten better at drums. I want to keep honing those skills and this project is the best way to work on all of them at once.
The downside of this pressure is that when I don’t learn a song fast enough or struggle to formulate my thoughts I lapse into high school grade excuse-craft. This week I had to learn a couple of brand new Bellows songs and then spent my Friday jamming with some new musicians. When I sat down to write I first had to take care of scriptwriting for The Human Instrumentality Podcast. My weekend got absorbed by The Mets’ brief appearance in the MLB post-season.
But if I zoom out I realize that I’m not ashamed of having spent time on any of these other pursuits (well, except maybe rooting for The Mets, but I’ve long since reconciled myself with that long departed and perpetually leaking ship). The new Bellows material sounds great, and since we have a show coming up on November 5th at Berlin, we need to get back in the habit of playing with each other. That new group I tried jamming with already sounds really, really good. The Human Instrumentality Podcast just launched our Patreon, so of course I need to devote time to keeping episodes humming. My problem isn’t that I’m not living up to my own expectations of myself. My problem is how I frame what keeps me busy. These aren’t impediments toward my goal of getting better at writing and playing drums. They are tributaries of the same stream. What’s really slowing me down is the need to beat myself up instead of the need to beat down on some drums, you feel me?
Anyway, I’ll be in the studio again tomorrow to record the song that I alluded to in my last letter. The letter will follow shortly. I hope you have a lovely week.
If you’re one of those people, there is a new episode in works. Check back soon.