Sometimes in the middle of recording an album, I'll listen back to a track, get frustrated that I can't get the guitar tone to sound nearly as vibrant as I want it to be, and start second-guessing why I'm putting so much effort into recording a piece of music almost no one will listen to.
But when this frustration simmers, I remember how cool it is to just create something because you see it or hear it or feel it somewhere in your being, and that sensation needs to get expressed for nobody's sake but your own. Benjamin Franklin has a really awesome quote that goes, "Human felicity is produced not so much by pieces of great good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day." I think that applies to art too; human creativity and ingenuity isn't defined by our ability to build the Pyramids but instead by the ability of any bored man or woman to paint a halfway decent polar bear. It's these smaller projects — the bedroom hobbies, the backyard passions — that make the human race special. They're what give us culture.
So what if no one hears my album? I want to create something because I have been gifted with the capacity to do so, and why would I waste that? Making art is adding one more block to this larger pyramid of man's creative works, and that is never a waste of time.
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