3rd quarter
resisting creative despair
For me, the hardest part of making a record is the bottom of the 3rd quarter.
At kickoff, I’m possessed by some idea and all its potential avenues for expression. There’s plenty of energy to carry me all the way to halftime. The beginning of the 3rd quarter is fine—I’m less inspired but I’m coming off some rest, or at least the milestone of having made it halfway. And I know the sheer adrenaline of finally seeing the finish line will buoy me through the 4th.
But the end of the 3rd quarter is rough. Yeah, we’ve made it halfway, but now I’m tired, and there’s still a whole ‘nother quarter ahead. This is where I’m most susceptible to doubt, and this is where I’ve spent most of this past month.
One throwaway piece of advice that I took to heart when I first started putting out music was “No one cares until you do.” Within a few years, I’d tweaked it slightly to make sense of my own path: “No one cares until you do—and even then, no one cares.” Its bluntness is soothing when I’ve gone overboard on chiseling out the wittiest lyric or fine-tuning the perfect guitar tone. It reminds me not to miss the forest for the trees.
In the third quarter, though, that same piece of practical advice becomes sour and damning, even nihilistic. Judge not lest ye be judged—and now my soothing “no one cares” has become an indictment of my work. No one cares.
More music was released on a single day in 2024 than was released throughout the entire year of 1989. No one cares.
In the 3rd quarter, I stare into the abyss of the internet until it stares back into me. “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher, imploring me to smash my masterpiece on the ground, leaving a 72%-complete album on some 2015 thumbdrive, doomed to outlive the polar bears only to be vaporized by some final sigh from our solar system’s tired, dying star.
But it is not this day.
This day, the goal falls short of the reach.
This album will get done. Not because the world needs it or wants it, but because this is what I do. I slap myself, dunk my head in a bucket of ice water until I believe it, hollow as it feels. In fighting off creative despair, my language gets loftier. The practice of songwriting becomes something bigger than songwriting; it’s reincarnated into a sacrament. I need this language to inspire me, to stand in for the dimension that I can’t see. Of course this album won’t matter, at least not in any measurable or tangible way. But only if the measure of a man ends with my own measuring tape. There is so much more than I see, than what I’ll ever see.
In the throes of the 3rd quarter, I lose hope and stumble under the spell of resignation. But my faith intervenes. I’m gonna give it my best, trusting that how I reach out for this song is how I reach out for every ideal—sure to fail, but sure to have gotten further than I would have if I hadn’t reached at all. Aiming higher than I’ll ever reach to land somewhere higher than I’d otherwise land. The work of art is recast as a work of faith.
So yeah, I’m out of money, and this song needs strings. Maybe the school orchestra will let me record them? But I can’t afford a professional arrangement. OK, I’ll YouTube my way there. Only one mic? Alright—quartet, piece by piece, stack it, hard pan. This will get done, and it will be glorious. Not for my glory but for the weight of glory itself.
[Steps off soapbox. Resumes turning knobs on guitar amp.]
-J