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.