My new album "If You're Reading This, Good Morning," came out this evening (12 pm Eastern) on all streaming services, but while an album release sure sounds like a momentous occasion, I'm always surprised by how it feels much more like the end of something than the start of something.
Sure, I absolutely still celebrate the occasions, but by the time the release day comes around, you're so beaten down by the entire process that you're mostly just happy you officially can't fiddle with the tracks anymore. After listening to each of these songs easily 100 times, my ear can only hear the mistakes, my fingers instinctively reach for the rewind button every time I think I hear the SLIGHTEST imperfection in the recording, and I've sung the songs so many times in the span of a few weeks that there is no such thing as a "new performance" anymore. Every time I sing one of the songs, I'm just doing an impersonation of what I sounded like the first 99 times I sang it.
Recording music is an absolute labor of love. 95% of the process is sitting on your bedroom floor pulling every last hair out of your scalp because you can't understand how you changed a single setting on a single Logic plugin and somehow caused a parade of "clicks" throughout the entire track. But the last 5% is such creative euphoria that you write the other 95% of frustration off as a fluke and jump head-first into the process all over again. And I love it.
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