Recording an album is perhaps the most complicated mental health minefield I have to navigate as a human.
I don't necessarily consider it a "choice" to make music. Or at least not in the same way you might choose between two different flavors at an ice cream shop. I make music because I need to get it out of my system, the same way you might desperately need to vent to a friend after someone pisses you off at work. It's trapped inside you, and you know you won't feel better or get any sense of closure until it's out of your system, so you empty yourself. That's what creating music feels like to me. It's not me saying, "I think the idea of creating music is cool, so I am going to create music." It's me saying, "I've got too many song ideas swimming around my head that if I don't record any of them, I'm going to go mad."
But every time I open Logic, I'm reminded of how creatively, mentally, and physically exhausting the process is. It's a staggering amount of work. Sometimes you'll spend five hours trying to get the perfect lead guitar take and just when you think you've nailed it, you realize the guitar tone sounds a bit too dirty now that you've heard it in the full mix, so you have to adjust your amp accordingly and repeat the entire process over again. Sometimes you know the song is missing something but you can't put your finger on exactly what it is so you go through every single Logic synth trying to find what that missing texture might be, and you never find it. Sometimes there's a little "blip" in the vocal track and you cannot for the love of Christ figure out what's causing it until after three hours when you decide to just redo the vocal part.
If my bedroom door is closed because I'm recording, I can almost guarantee I will come out in a worse mood than when I walked in. Sure, there are insane creative highs when you listen to the playback and it sounds even better than what you heard in your head, but every two minutes of elation is usually the result of two days of toiling, and that adds up on the psyche fast.
Which leaves me in this ultra-weird position where I know I have to get this music out of my system but I know doing so will be hellish until the final second is mastered, and that's a terrifying barrel to look down. It's genuinely a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. But I always decide to record the music. Because if you're going to be damned either way, you might as well be damned with an album to your name.
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