Was listening to a few of my old bands yesterday. I only really enjoyed the stuff one band did - it was clever, inventive and different. In truth it was the only really good band I've been in. Yet we got zero interest. The rest of the stuff was either generic, badly played, badly produced or just boring.
Then had a spin through my sound cloud and was a bit. Hmm. there's not much of interest going on there.
Found it all a bit depressing. Music is cruel. I love playing, performing and recording, but it's almost always completely unfulfilling.
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I enjoy listening to an originals band I was in about 20 years ago. We were on the end of the Madchester scene and we had members with al sorts of different musical backgrounds: indie; blues; rock; pop; reggae. The material was interesting to play and decently recorded but we never got beyond anything other than very early A&R meetings.
My last band was amazing fun to play in. It was classic rock covers but we had a great vocalist and an awesome drummer and it was raucous, loud fun. It was played well and it was entertaining for both us and the audience.
I think the "fulfilling" bit is right, but a lot of it is downt to the association you have with when the misuc was created, not necessarily to do with the music itself. From my classic rock band, no-one else needs to hear our version of "The One I Love" or "20th Century Boy" recorded off the desk at the Dog & Duck but I enjoy listening to occasionaly it becasue it was so much fun in the band.
All I hear are the mistakes, or the bits that we improved with gigging.
@vasselmeyer I guess listening to music brings back memories of cool gigs and good friends which is nice in a nostalgic way. But I think by unfulfilling I mean more that I've sunk so much of my life and money into music yet have all but achieved nothing with it beyond a 2 year period where everything came together. Sure I've earnt some money and played some biggish gigs but it's essentially been a lurching from one failed project to the next.
I'm depping for an old band in a couple of weeks at a big gig near St. Moritz. Listening to the stuff is depressing. I think there are good songs but a singer who is not up to scratch (which is why I left). So I know the comments in advance will be cool sound but nothing will come of it (by that I mean repeat bookings) and the struggle for them will go on.
Getting a good recording that translates what you like about a song is different and quite tough though. For a lot of people who self-record there's always going to be an element of regret with older recordings, as your own skill set will improve over time.
The problem I have is that I can only be objective for the first few listens, then my ear gets used to the mistakes.
The band i'm in now has one or two well recorded tunes that are listentoable, the rest is easily missable
An awful lot relative to the amount you've listened to? And what counts as again and again?
I reckon I've listened to close to 1000 albums completely, the percentage that pass a high listen count (let's say 30+ times) is almost definitely less than 10% of that, at a guess. When it starts to get to 50, or even 100 times then that number is really small, for me at least - by that point it really is your favourite stuff. Over a lifetime sure you'll end up with a decent sized list of favourite stuff but it's still going to be a low percentage of total music you've listened to.
Given how many times you'd hear a song through writing, rehearsing, gigging, and recording it, it isn't surprising that you either burn it out at some point, or your tastes change, or you wish you'd done it differently as you later don't feel it is good enough.
You'd think that'd help.
However, as soon as music gets involved often logic, and ironically, timekeeping goes out the window