Ten Years, Part Three: Why So Long

The assumption is perfectionism. That is close, but it is not quite it.

You get better, and that ruins everything

Here is the actual trap.

You write a song. It is the best thing you have ever made. Two years later you have improved — genuinely, measurably — and now that song is not good enough to sit next to the new ones. So you rewrite it. Or you cut it. Either way, two years of work just became a lesson instead of a track.

Now do that repeatedly for a decade.

The cruel part is that the improvement is real. You are not imagining it. The version of you that finishes the album is a better artist than the version that started, which means the early work genuinely does not belong. You are chasing a standard that moves because you are the one moving it.

Life does not pause

The other reason is boring and nobody puts it in the documentary.

Ten years contains jobs. It contains money being tight. It contains stretches where the right thing to do is not work on the album, because something more important is happening, and you are not going to be the person who was in the booth during that.

Those gaps are not failures of discipline. But they do add up, and at the end they are indistinguishable from procrastination on a timeline.

What finally changed

I picked a date and said it out loud in public.

July 27, 2027. 07.27.27. It is on the website, it is on the fundraiser, it is in this sentence. I cannot quietly let it slide by six months, because people know, and a date somebody else is holding you to works very differently from one you hold yourself to.

Ten years of no deadline, and the fix was announcing one before I was ready. I should have done it in year three.

Next

Part four: turning 36 in a genre that is extremely interested in how old you are.