An Album a Year
I’m sitting here listening to Tim Carroll’s new album, High and Low, and thinking about what he wrote to accompany the release:
Because I like doing it, I’ve written and recorded another album, this one to be called “High and Low” - approximately my 20th album since coming to Nashville in 1993.
Pushing myself to make an album every year has helped me to continue to develop my writing. I’m still interested to see where it goes, and where it takes me. I hope you’ll have a chance to give it a listen when it comes by.
First and foremost, though I’m just a few songs in, it’s really good. But to his point, and my point to this blog…
The M.B.A. in me thinks this is a terrible idea. All the music marketing experts will tell you to make the best record you can and then spend 10x as much time and money promoting it as you did making it. Just keep promoting the same record over and over. More posts, more ads, saturate every space you can as much as you can.
But, I have an M.B.A., it’s not who I am. Whether you want to say it’s what we are, or if it’s who we are, or perhaps both, we’re artists. I’m sure Tim’s been told not to make an album a year, I know I’ve been told I put out too much music. And, for the average person, I think they assume the end is fame or financial success, but for the artist, the end is making art. Would I like to quit my day job and make music for a living? You bet your ass I would. But at the end of the day, external success is completely out of my hands. Internal success, on the other hand, is completely in my control.
The only thing that matters is that every album is better than the one before it.
That doesn’t mean you’ll like it better, or even necessarily, I’ll like it better, but is objectively better? Am I growing as a composer, arranger, lyricist, vocalist, instrumentalist and producer? Quite frankly, it’s why I get out of bed in the morning. An artist swings from thinking they’re a genius to thinking they should quit, sometimes within the span of a single day. That’s a tough burden to bear, but both are important. Thinking you’re a genius is important because you have to be crazy to make art and put it out into the world and you have to think you’re capable of greatness. Thinking you should quit is important because in order to become a genius, you have to be humble enough to know you’re never going to be as good as you want to be. That’s what keeps you working and what keeps you pushing yourself - knowing you’re capable of doing it, but you’re not there yet.
I don’t write every day, but I write most days. And I work every damn day. Make no mistake, it is work, but it’s a labor of love. It doesn’t matter if you like it, only if I like it. You liking it is nice, I want you to like it, but I need to love it or I need to move onto something I do love.
As I finish this, I’m at the end of Tim’s record and I think he’s succeeding. Like me, he plays everything but drums, which is a burden unto itself, but he is always finding new nooks and crannies to explore without trying to reinvent the wheel. The highest compliment I can pay this record and give to Tim is, it sounds like Tim Carroll and no one else.
We should all aspire to that, whether you make a record a year, or a record every five years. Find you and put it on tape.