About a week before I started my music degree I met someone at a party who had studied a similar degree overseas. He told me to just do the first year, learn the essentials, and then quit. This is what he and his friends had done, and he said they were more successful and making "better" music than the people who stuck it out until the end. In his opinion everyone who finished the degree was brainwashed by the jazz education, and the music they were making was either boring, complicated or weird.
Read MoreA proper update on this project is well overdue. I think I have quite seriously contemplated giving up every day for the past couple of weeks. I've been trying to put my finger on what the real issue is, and it seems to be a number of things compounding. The most perplexing problem seems to be a loss of confidence in myself. I have managed to make over 100 pieces of music in as many days, and many of them I'm really proud of, yet I have lost faith in my ability to continue. What if I've exhausted all I had in me? What if I've just proved my mediocrity 100 times over? What if I just repeat the same ideas for the next 100 and become a broken record? These fears are ridiculous, but I'm finding it hard to switch them off.
Read MoreOne of the reasons I started this project was to give myself permission to create whatever kind of music that day inspired. After releasing my debut album Twelve Moons last year I spent a lot of time struggling to categorise the music I liked to make, and trying to fit it into predefined genre boxes (folk? jazz? experimental?) that it was never quite the right shape for.
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