Welcome to My Process
REVIVAL isn't finished. Come hear it anyway.
Art gets treated like it lives exclusively in the clouds. Like the work is just waiting around for a feeling to visit. I understand why. The finished thing can feel that weightless. But rarely does anyone talk about the rigor it takes to get there. The versions that didn’t make it. The verse I paired with four different music compositions because it was almost right, but almost right still ain’t quite right.
Making REVIVAL is solidifying the lesson that the clouds are maybe ten percent of this. The rest is meticulous. It’s going back to a song I thought was finished because one word was doing the wrong job. It’s listening to the same sixteen bars on loop until I can hear what to remove that will give the story more space to breathe. That’s not romantic. It’s just necessary.
What I’ve come to believe is that you need flow and you need discipline. The flow is what lets the song show up in the first place. The discipline is what keeps me in the room after the excitement of the idea has worn off, when what’s left is the actual labor of making it true. You need both. Flow without discipline is a nice voice memo you’ll never finish. Discipline without flow is a well-built room with nothing alive in it.
So this is me pulling the curtain back a little on process — not to demystify it, but to honor it. Because the process is where the real story is. Not the moment the song is finished. The hundred moments before that, when it could’ve slipped away, where it almost wasn’t.
So on July 16 come join me at Poise for a pre-mix listening session. I’m sharing unpolished playbacks of an album still in production. You’ll hear the meticulousness and the flow sitting right next to each other, because that’s actually what the songs sound like right now.
– JP