hazy beginnings

It's in the middle of the night, just a couple of minutes before this blog entry should be dated as 'tomorrow', rather than 'today'.

I'm on the edge of catching a cold, and as is usually the case around this hour of night my head is spinning in ideas and creativity, but I've come to the kind of bitter conclusion that I just don't have time to do or explore everything I want to do - at least not right now, or without diligent planning and.. well, pruning of ideas I guess.

So, this blog, will be kind of a way - or at least I hope it will - to scratch that itch, I guess. Lots of maybes.

I guess I'm a bit of an overthinker, but I really don't want to overthink this too much.

All I can say is that I've felt frustrated lately, regarding a lot of things I guess.

Almost all of my creative endeavors circulate around music in some ways. I mean, ever since I started working with software development, I've found that it does scratch the itch of creative problem solving - even the itch of being creative in general as well. But even when I do software development outside of work as a creative outlet, it usually has to do something to do with music.

• Like this website and blog
• or the chatbots and interfaces I've built for streaming with twitch
• or the content management tools I've built for social media

Every time I come up with an idea like that, I usually get completely consumed by it (and when I'm done with it I usually completely abandon it instead, lol). I do hope that a blog like this can help with solving that issue as well, the issue of staying consistent at providing an insight to what I'm actually up to. To share my process with you, and myself as well.

a change of pace, and mindset

You know, I've struggled with the notion of visibility, and branding as an artist. An artist. Like, I still slightly cringe at calling myself that.

Something deep in my core wants to devaluate, or even shame that term, I think. I don't know. Just starting to think about unwrapping that makes me feel like I could write an essay about the why to that.

But I am a creative person, and to be real, a pretty sensitive person as well, and getting older, I really want to shed any facades or masks that I wear. I guess sharing your art with people sort of pushes you to put up your guards, or a mask, in order to protect yourself, and your ego, but the thing is that, I really want to share my art with people. And I really do hope that it's just a matter of exposure. Or maybe it's an exercise in not exposing yourself to it.

Anyways, I've felt that having Instagram, or YouTube, or whatever other platform that's our of my control being the place to reliably share my experince and creativity isn't really turning out to be a good idea. I get caught up in the game of each individual platform.

On YouTube you gotta do x to get more viewers, and on Instagram you gotta do y. You have to stream this much to be successful on Twitch..

..and right now I'm much "screw that". I'm don't want to be a YouTuber, or an influencer or a streamer. I want to play guitar, make my music and my projects and share it with people. I don't want to be, or try to be anything or anyone else anymore.

so what's actually going on

Right, let's get to the meat and potatoes of it, what projects am I actually juggling at the moment? (in no particular order)

• New ÖDESMUST EP
• New Julian V Eriksson EP
• A documentary on the making of Otona Mirai Pavilion
• A couple of covers for YouTube
• A guitar transcription software
• Tab book for "a silent shore"
• 3 guitar books (the Shred Masterclass series)
• More website updates (revamped tab section, and a fleshed out discography section to begin with)

... and I think that's it for now.

where to begin

That's the million dollar question. Maybe at all of them at the same time? (srsly, that might be the only right answer)

Just before I started writing this though, I had a long hard think about the documentary in particular.

It's something that I feel I've been putting off for a long time. Like, it needs to be something more or bigger than I think it is at the moment. Like, I want to make it kind of grand I guess, I really want to tell that story, and do it justice.

And maybe even more so, since the passing of Takahata-san. I think I want to make it as a tribute, and thanks to him, and to be real, I am beating myself up for putting this off for so long, and that he never got to see it.

That I never had the chance to show him how important that album was for me, and his belief in me and my capacity. In that sense, it feels the most urgent to make. But it needs to be good.

And here we are again, with the overthinking. Probably the way forward is to just make it. just get it out there.