I was talking to a fella once about music and he was telling me about this fairly famous local band he absolutely loved – the sort of band he’d follow from one end of the country to the other. You could tell he was genuinely passionate about them and I was enjoying listening to him talk about it because I knew the band. Good band too. Not really my sort of thing personally, but I appreciated he was in awe of them.
Anyway, after a while he turned to me and asked, “So who do you listen to then? What’s your favourite band?” And I answered honestly. “My own.” His response was immediate. “That’s a bit arrogant.” And I remember thinking at the time that it almost perfectly summed up the difference between a musician and someone who simply consumes music as a product.
Generally, the music I most enjoy listening to the is my own. Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t listen to other music. Of course I do, I’ve spent decades listening to music – every genre imaginable. I love discovering songs, sounds, production ideas, performances. Music has been part of my entire life. But if I’m completely honest, the music I get the most pleasure from is the music we create ourselves in OLDER.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with consuming music as a product, as musicians we love to have listeners and we want people to enjoy our music too. We hope people connect with it, play it in the car, put headphones on and disappear into it for a while.
But if you’re the person creating the music, it becomes something entirely different. When I listen to our music, I go beyond the hundreds of production decisions, the endless hours writing, editing and mixing. I hear the final ‘whole’ of a song – the emotional reason for it existing. The simplest way to explain it is that there’s a joy in hearing music that sounds exactly the way your brain wants music to sound.
When you create original music, particularly over decades, you slowly carve out your own sound. So naturally, when you listen back to it, you relate to it better than anything else because it came from you in the first place.
Now, before anyone gets the wrong idea, this isn’t me claiming to be some incredible musician or songwriter. Far from it. I could line up ten thousand musicians more talented than me without even trying. Better players, better producers and better writers.
That’s not really the point. The point is that I have to love what I create. If I don’t, then why on earth am I doing it? Unless you’re making paint-by-numbers commercial music for purely business reasons then surely the whole point of making your own music is to create something which you most want to listen to?
I genuinely think a musician’s favourite music should be their own.
