Not even 24 hours has passed since 2025 began and I’ve already hit the ground running.
Last night I stayed up until 7 AM. I started designing an album cover right after the clock hit 12, just spur of the moment and got overwhelmed with excitement, experimenting and experimenting until I started to feel happy with the result.
I’ve never really designed anything visual before. I’ve tried making flyers for work and YouTube thumbnails but none of those were things I felt 100% expressed what I came to this world to express. They felt more like work. Even if I enjoy teaching and making videos, it’s not nearly as core to who I am as music and writing is.
And I’ve never been extremely satisfied with the quality of flyer or thumbnail I made. At first the idea of making an album cover stressed me out. It’s actually one of the two or three reasons this releases for 14 years late.
That’s right, you heard me. 14 years late.
I never really knew the joy of creating art until recently. It’s something I’ve been learning over the past 5 or so years. I always made something with some goal in mind, to move people or to change their minds, to feel accomplished, to feed my ego.
That’s been changing.
It started with my novella series and continued into the music demos I made in 2019. Just the fun of artistic exploration. Not planning how to make a perfect product.
I’m not against all commercialization of art, but there really needs to be a separate term, a different way to talk about art which comes from a different starting point. Commercial art expresses one end of the spectrum but what about the other? Commercial vs. what? Personal art? That just sounds like it isn’t going to make any money and it’s just for a hobby, and that’s not what I’m talking about.
Art for art‘s sake is part of a growing or healing process. It’s an exploration. It’s akin to self discovery. It’s not against making money, it’s just not concerned with it while it’s being created. The priority is the process. To undermine this kind of work as a hobby is a crime. It’s damn near spiritual. The greatest works of art all come from this drive to explore and to play, not from strategy.
Strategy is how you end up in between, good enough to get some attention, but always chasing after your idols. That’s commercial art. It pays the bills (if you are talented and lucky) but it doesn’t change the way you see the world. It doesn’t really justify it’s own existence. It needs to sell to feel like a success.
Some art starts out as a discovery process and then becomes a commercial product. I’m ok with that. The whole idea of packaging and sharing comes after something honest is created for its own sake.
But something that started from a commercial impulse will never create the same level of inspiration. It has to have that primal childlike impulse to begin with or it’s always just a product.
I’ve always struggled with this. I want my art to feed me. I wanted people to like it. I tried to create from inspiration, but I was always holding myself back because I didn’t think it was impressive enough or it wasn’t what I had hoped to create.
But what fun is an exploration where you know exactly all the things you’ll find along the way. The surprises, the unexpected circumstances, this is half the fun. And so I’m no longer making art that I want to look a certain way or feel a certain way, I’m just exploring to see what’s there and sharing the best of what I find.
There’s only one condition that indicates whether something is worth making or not. Am I having fun with it? Am I learning? Am I growing?
If the answer is no, I am not doing it right.
And if the answer is yes, then it’s worth making. If I like it more than what I’ve shared before, then it’s worth sharing. No more worrying about whether or not it fits into some kind of image I’ve created for what kind of artist I want to be.
I am serving the art. It creates itself if I tune myself to it. Anyone who’s been creative long enough knows what I’m talking about.
You write a story and pretty soon the character start telling you what to do. You’ve started a song and goes in a completely different direction than what you were planning. Real art has a life of its own. It comes from somewhere else, and all we do is channel it through our own filter.
From now on I want to do whatever the art asks me to do. I don’t need any advice on whether it’s good enough or not. If someone can help me to refine my technique, that’s another story, but as for what deserves to be shared I’ll start leaving that entirely up to my own judgment.
If the work excites me, it’s just a matter of following the flow as best I can.
I don’t want to create anything thinking about whether it will sell or gain attention or not. Will my friends like it? Will people think it’s cool? Who cares.
I’ve got to love it because it’s coming through me.
If I’ve done my work to the arts satisfaction and put enough love into it, it will sell itself, and if it hasn’t I will probably know why.
Maybe I was too lazy at some point. Maybe I compromise because I didn’t want to say something that I thought would be embarrassing. Maybe I waited too long. Maybe I let myself get distracted by things that weren’t as important. Maybe I wasn’t confident enough.
I’ve never learned how to design anything visual before. But the whole process of learning, that’s the art itself. You don’t really learn from the textbook or from YouTube videos. you learn from going out and doing whatever it is you’re trying to do. It’s all trial and error, and if this is playful and fun, you’ll end up making something interesting.
Tonight I’ll upload five songs for distribution. After 14 years I finally have some thing I can call an official release. I’m not sure how long it will take for it to be available but I’ll share it here in the coming weeks.
The final cover art will be a secret until then but here is a rough draft as a teaser.
“Sun Shone Blue” will be 5 tracks and just above 20 minutes. I’ll make a post explaining the history of it soon!
You can hear two of the tracks at my YouTube. Some of you may have heard them before:
“Art vs. Artist” by I+Everything MV
“Mirror” by I+Everything MV
