Well, whether you have found yourself in that position before or not – I am in that position right now. For more than half of my life (read: over 18 years), I have been making music one way or another. From my old punk band to making music solo, I have been writing, recording, performing and producing tunes for so long, that it feels like it is an integral part of my person. For the longest time, I have defined myself as a musician.

When the world has got you down

Lately though, music has been a point of frustration for me. I begin projects, play around with them and then abandon them, sometimes even without saving anything. Nothing feels good enough, nothing tickles my creativity enough to interest me. I collect ideas for projects I am working on and when I begin putting them into music, they just feel boring or stupid. I end up using the same tricks I picked up over the years to turn something into sound, making every new track feel like I have written it twenty times over. I stare at my DAW and feel as empty as the timeline.

There are likely many factors contributing to this feeling: The general state of *gestures wildly* everything, the staggering descent into open fascism of the country I live in, my rather taxing day job as an audio engineer, the basically non-existent listener counts of my music on streaming services – the list goes on. I certainly can’t blame it all on external factors. I constantly feel like bumping into the walls of my music theory knowledge and performance skills. Often I am simply not able to perform or write a track in the way that I hear it in my head. This often leaves me frustrated and disappointed with myself and making music in general. All these things make it hard for me to come up with creative ideas that tingle my brain in the way they used to.

This has been going on for long enough, that I have been thinking about retiring from making music altogether, possibly even selling my gear and instruments in the process. I was ready to close that chapter of my creative life for good.

But I realized, I did not want to give it up. I wanted to keep making music, play with my synthesizers and my guitars and spend hours deep in my DAW recording, tweaking and mixing music. But I needed a motivation, a reason to do it again.

Why not make it harder for myself?

Let’s rewind the clock to June of 2023: Back then I joined an album writing challenge, set up by a small label from the UK. Every participant had one month’s time to write and produce an album of any genre and length with the winner getting the chance to release their album on said label. While I did not win the challenge, the experience was very fun to me. And it was also successful, resulting in my EP “best before 05-31“, that I released a few days after the challenge concluded. And while I surely would do a few things differently now, roughly three years later, I am still intensely proud of those songs and the production.

All of this popped back into my head when I was very close to retiring from making music. And it made me realized, that I wanted this experience again. I wanted this kind of pressure, these constraints to work within. Limits breed creativity, as they say. Or as I said before. Anyway.

So… what?

I made a decision: I will use the month of June again to create something. An EP, an album, maybe even just a single. But I will make something fun, something I will be proud of. Even if this will be my last release, I will make it count. Maybe this will reignite my love of creating music. Maybe it will be the last hurrah. But it will be fun and challenging. And I think this is what I need right now. As a distraction from *gestures even more wildly than before* everything.

As of now – I am writing this in the early days of May – I don’t have a genre or topic in mind, that I want to work on. I have asked my wife to think of something for me, since this will likely push me a little more out of my comfort zone, as I probably would myself. Let’s see if end up writing a polka album, a symphony or a spoken word album with bongos being played in the background.

If you’d like to follow along on my journey, you can follow me on Bluesky, Instagram or Mastodon. I might also be live on Twitch for some of my writing and recording sessions, but we will see about that.

It seems to be a common thing to not get along with your given name. Maybe we got it from a grandparent that we don’t know or like, maybe we got it from a fictional character or a historical figure – but no matter the heritage, sometimes you just don’t want to be a Michael, Jason or Simon.

When I was a kid, the name Simon felt weird to me. And my middle name Laslo even more so. It all felt wrong. In hindsight, this might have hinted at some other things going on with me. Nevertheless, I had to live with my name for the time being.

A remedy came in form of a video game called ‘Simon the Sorcerer’. It must be on of the first games I have ever played, and I am still a huge fan. The game’s titular character is a teenager, who is thrown into a magical fantasy world by accident and now needs to find a way back home. And Simon was a quippy, snarky, dark-humored main character. I enjoyed every minute of it!

After I showed the game to my friends from Elementary school, they would start calling me ‘Simon’. Not the German pronunciation, mind you – they called me Simon in English!

A few years later, people had stopped calling me Simon. I still needed a nickname, as suddenly there were two more Simons in my class. So naturally, my middle name was excavated: My friends began calling me Laslo. That became so natural for me, that when a classmate and me started a rock band together, I didn’t go on stage as Simon, I’d go to stage as Laslo. Inspired by other punk musicians, I would form a stage name for myself. As everyone was calling me Laslo anyway, I took the first letter of my real last name and turned it into a name: Jott. Laslo Jott was born!

But as we all know: Nothing lasts forever. As the band slowly stopped existing, I began writing and producing music on my own, publishing it as Laslo Jott. My releases from that time are wide in variety. Between prog-rock, EDM, ambient music, a classical score and much more, Laslo Jott never really released any punk rock anymore.

So after a few years, it didn’t feel right to be Laslo anymore. My music had changed and frankly – I had changed. To mark this change, I released my first punk EP in years under my given name, as Simon Janssen.

Why have a moniker at all?

But the most important question remains: Why have a different name at all? Personal reasons aside, of course. For me, it is also about disconnecting your normal self (for the lack of a better term) from your artist self. Stepping out of your identity and creating something completely new. Many comedians for example use characters for their public appearances. And they often try their hardest to keep their normal self out of the spotlight.

Maybe it’s not only about the art, but also about protecting your normal life. Take Daft Punk for example: At the height of their popularity, barely anyone knew, what they looked like under their helmets. Imagine being an artist known around the world and still being able to get to the super market to buy some toilet paper without Paparazzis swarming your shopping cart. I guess in that way, some artists are like super heroes: Protecting their secret identity to keep their personal lives out of the public eye.

Of course with most artists, it is well known what they look like and what their actual name is. A quick trip to Google will tell you everything there is to know about an artist. There is not too much to protect in that regard any more. And still, every rapper has a moniker. Are all of those stage personas as well?