Ten Years, Part One: Starting

Nobody starts a ten-year album. You start a song. Then another one. Then one day you look up and your twenties are gone and the thing is still not finished.

That is the honest version. There was no plan that said ten years. If there had been, I would not have signed up for it.

Nobody gives you a deadline

This is the part people do not understand about making something independently. There is no label calling. There is no release date on a calendar somewhere with money behind it. There is no producer whose rent depends on you finishing.

That sounds like freedom and it is, for about eighteen months. After that it becomes the problem. A deadline is a forcing function, and without one the work expands to fill every year you are willing to give it. You can always make it better. You can always come back to it. And "I will come back to it" is how a decade disappears.

What I actually had at the start

Songs, a city, and a stubbornness I would not describe as healthy.

San Antonio is not a music industry town. Nobody is scouting here. There is no scene machine that picks you up and carries you. That cuts both ways — you are not competing for a spot in a line, but there is also no line to stand in. Whatever happens, you are building it yourself, from here.

Something's growing where it shouldn't be. I didn't ask. Nothing that spreads ever does.

The thing I got right

I kept going. That is genuinely it. I am not going to dress that up into a philosophy.

Most of the people who started around when I did stopped. Not dramatically — nobody quits with an announcement. They just had a kid, or got a promotion, or got tired, and six months went by without opening the session, and then it had been two years and they did not call themselves a musician anymore.

I do not think I was more talented than them. I think I was worse at stopping.

Next

Part two is about money, because every honest version of this story is about money, and most of them skip it.