John M Davis

Paul Valéry: A work is never completed, but merely abandoned.

I disagree with above quote. I guess it depends on how you look at your art and how you balance the difference between process and product. It does beg the question though, how do you decide that you’re done?

As an artist, I love the process. I go to my studio space almost daily and make music. Much of it you get to hear, a good chunk of it you don’t. Somewhere along the line, though, I have to decide if something I’m working on is going to get out there for people or if it’s going to languish on my hard drive. So to make that determination, I had to decide for myself what constitutes “a work.”

I’m what my writer friends call a pantser. While that sounds like a locker room prank it really just means I write by the seat of my pants. I have an idea and I just sit down and play with that idea and see what happens. If (and I do mean if) that idea develops into a story, a narrative that I want to tell, I’ll have a “work” in progress. And that is the crux of the biscuit. I do approach my compositional ideas much like a writer tells a story. I want the music to convey a narrative even if that narrative only exists in my head. My singles are my short stories and my albums are my novels. An attentive listener will sense it if I’m successful (or not).

This framework works for me. I don’t concern myself much with musical “forms” at least not in the traditional sense of classical sonatas or symphonies. My background is in rock bands so maybe “songs” underpin how I write. And what is a song if not a story? So there you have it: while I do value the process over the product, my artistic drive is to tell stories. Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends so at some point, it’s just… done. I’ve said what I have to say, I’ve avoided repeating myself, time to wrap it up and share it with youse 🙂

I’m happy to say that I’ve passed that point with ‘Fisher King’. It’s a little shorter than I thought, might still need some polishing here and there, but it’s doing what I set out to do. Now we go through the mixing/mastering/artwork/distribution/etc/etc release process and eventually out to your ears.

So that’s me. How do you know when you’re done? Whether you’re a composer, painter, writer, any kind of artist… when do you know it’s time to call it finished?

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-person-hands-woman-6671610/