As of this moment I’m waiting for Distrokid to finalize my original song and send it off to itunes, amazon and wherever else I clicked “yes” to on the publishing list.
It’s not a world-breaking single, it’s certainly not my best composition for either voice or guitar. It’s a little thing I wrote in high school that’s stayed in my muscle memory for all the years after. I remembered it only two years ago when someone on my Twitch stream asked if I wrote songs. Yeah, but it’s been a while.. Uh, I’ve got this one. And I played a few bars of what I could.
To my surprise it was well received. So recently, having time before school starts and the intense desire to actually put my music within ear-shot of the general public, I polished the little thing with a final verse and sent it off.
I am the first to say I’m a perfectionist. Unfortunately it’s a trait that goes far past the “redo it until it’s perfect” and goes right into the “never get anything finished even if I have pretty good recordings because I’m always sure I could do it better tomorrow.”
It’s a crippling habit and partially why I haven’t published any music until this point, even though I’ve been writing songs since I was 11 years old. But so much has happened in my journey as a musician and I’ve realized that, even if this song busts, I will have still gotten more out of it than having it locked away on a computer file.
If I can work through the “Perfection Paralysis” then I’ll be able to fix mistakes, learn from the results and eventually be able to publish better and better pieces.
I know self-published musicians are a dime a dozen. At first this is a scary prospect, being thrown into a sea of competition with people who are much more advanced at this than you are. (Frick, I don’t even have a way to record the keyboard in this apartment, I’ll have to rent a practice room in the city, carry my microphone and laptop through transit and set up shop there for two hours.) But at the same time it’s a little relieving. There are tons of people doing this, they haven’t burst into flames if their songs aren’t “one-hit wonders”. This is also a side project for me, a way to share my art with people while I’m in school getting my bachelors in composition. What have I got to lose?”
If you’ve got something on the back-burner cause you’re afraid it’s not good enough, just put it out there. There are always going to be people better and worse than you at that thing, but the art they’ve got is not your art.
https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/megvdm/the-circus-acoustic
Chasing Keys 