I Just Want To Make Music
I want to explain the totality of how I feel something when I’m really being juiced by it, really fueled, really on a path that is good. Not to brag—just to help people see it in their own life, as so often people are like ‘what should I do’ about stuff, not realizing that barring objectively harmful shit, you really just can do what feels good, and because it feels good. That is not hedonism, or narcissism, or solipsism, or whatever—that is consonance, that is music. You are vibrating at a particular frequency at a particular time, and you are finding something that your vibration is in harmony with, or in unison even. What better way to express this concept than through my triumphant return to the art form of music.
I am not giving up on filmmaking, by the way—I am not even putting it on ice, like I did with my music-making for over a decade. I will always make movies. I will always do whatever the hell I want, is really the lesson—not that I didn’t know that, or ever forgot that. But I did put my music sword down and walk off the battlefield.
I fought so long and hard to get my music right, and I just couldn’t do it. Now picking it all up again, I realize I was so close—yet I don’t think I ever could have cracked it back then. My motivation and philosophy about art was so different—everything I truly know about expression, I learned through moviemaking and writing. Back when I was trying to make music, I thought that if I wrote catchy and undeniable enough songs, maybe some day, far away, someone would let me make movies. Well, I got my wish, but I didn’t have to sell my soul to do it, because I let myself to do it—and I learned a hell of a lot about just doing whatever the hell you want to do. I learned that you can do anything, and fuck everyone who tells you otherwise. ‘Fuck’ as in forget, but also fuck as in love—the opposition, the institutions, know not what they do to young, budding minds. They certainly poisoned mine, for a time during my teenage years, but whatever. I escaped.
Thinking about how fucked up I was back then—and not that I was any more fucked up than people even twice my age now, just that I see desire to be absorbed into a system as fucked up—I am so glad that I never finished the plethora of song demos that I have. I am grateful that I never got to the point were I would have had any success or fame or riches from music, as my priorities were all out of wack. It probably would have killed me, or worse—deprived the world of so much that I was supposed to create in the last decade or so. You wouldn’t have had any one of my ten-plus feature films—imagine that. I wouldn’t have known it was even possible for me to make movies myself, and I wouldn’t have been able to help others know it too. An entirely different me would be before you today, writing these words—probably a piece of shit.
Now that I’m making music again, I’m doing it just because I want to make music—there is no other goal as I take these old demos of mine and flesh them out into the pop rock masterpieces they were always destined to be. It’s coming together, man—I’m skating through corridors in my mind that I used to walk with a cane down. The universe, and my muse, are opening up to me—her legs and her cunt, and the vastness of space, one and the same. Something is happening here, and it feels like sunlight sat inside me—I don’t need to go outside to feel it. I feel it deep with in, and it makes my mouth water with warmth, and it puts smiles on my face. If anything gives you this feeling that I am describing, go to it—and do whatever it is with the most purity of heart you can possibly muster. The reason my films, my books, are any good is because I just wanted to make them. Whatever your passion, check your ‘if I do this then maybe’ at the door, and just do it to do it. Want it and only it.
Thank you for reading, and if you enjoyed this piece, and enjoy my films, consider contributing $2 per month to my film studio, Kill The Lion Films.