Musician’s Notebook

As readers will know, my band Midnight.Haulkerton does a weekly Tuneback, a song that is written, recorded and published online all in one hour or less. Since most songs go through the same process over days, weeks or even months (and in a few cases, years, like one of our songs Pages which was written years ago and continues to evolve) to achieve refined quality, the quality of the Tuneback process can really vary.

Compare Creative Commons for the Common Man and Reality. Sometimes it works, and other times it doesn’t work out so well. Creative Commons for the Common Man was something that we felt had the basics of any good and polished song, while Reality came from not having a whole lot of inspiration or motivation during the specific time and day of week when we do this.

It’s interesting to note that while I’m a proponent of uncompromising quality in works of art and entertainment, I still strongly advocate the Tuneback and what it can do for both the band and listeners. For the band, it’s a skill strengthening exercise, and for the listeners, there’s new material, week after week. But why publish substandard material if one advocates what any artist should, that character of uncompromising quality?

We know, and our listeners know, that a Tuneback isn’t a polished, commercial product; it’s the rough and raw output of our creative energy. It’s like a sketch compared to a painting; they don’t compare at all–but one can still find beauty in a sketch.

In fact, one can sometimes find more beauty in a sketch, than in a painting. While refining and polishing a song is usually a good thing, it can also take away the edge of the song, that rawness that excites and ignites listeners.

I still believe we should incessantly seek uncompromising quality, but we also need to recognize artistic beauty in its various forms, and appreciate that different musical formats deliver different purposes and expectations. A song from an album or a single faces the public expectation of polish and a certain healthy dose of commercialization; the Tuneback, on the other hand, demands the opposite, an unrefined snapshot of an idea.