About Completion
Complete. There I said it. It’s a word that describes energy forced to a halt regardless of it’s completeness and serves a purpose in language to mark an end to a process nothing more. As art evolves moment to moment in various stages it seems perpetually unfinished. How I perceive a colour, a book, a piece of music or bug that lands on the tip of my finger one moment is not the same as I will remember it or feel about it the next day. Perceptions change, ideas change, the direction of the wind changes from a window where I sit and write this, to parse Kerouac “All is ephemeral.”
Song after song sequence after sequence I create without any sense of satisfaction that something will get finished and I’m fine living in that world. It’s like an old farm-hand who suffers the mercy of mother nature and continues on, it’s simply a state of being and reacting. If I were satisfied with several tracks as a grouping for an album it would be finite and easy instead I never am so nothing gets packaged arranged or mixed how I’d like and end up living with it for what it is. I wake the next morning to a song I slaved over the night before and it sounds like shit, but I don’t dwell there I move on. To derive confidence in a momentary satisfaction of saying “it’s done!” is futile so I step back listen again weeks even years later. It can always be better when time sheds it’s light.
To put it in the right context “complete” means more to an audience than it does an artist as it represents finality of choices, something tangible deemed ready for an outside world, a word most can understand because it offers comfort and can be finally checked off their eternal list. I’d rather live with it, question it, steep myself in it, the details are important the distance is important, if I get bored I come back when my head is in a different place. I may abandon one instrument for another or scrap the entire project without remorse. Commitment phobic? Hell yes!
Let’s scratch this sociological constructivist term from our vocabularies and live instead with a more appropriate word that stirs: incompleteness. It’s just so much more conducive to creativity it’s what keeps the process evolving and moving forward birthing new thought and ideas with open eyes, ears, and arms. It’s the state of being at one with your uncertainty. William DeKooning once said in so many words: it’s an anxiety of dissatisfaction that propels the artist. Should the name of a painting be unresolved it becomes “untitled”, yet if an artist does decide on the title of a painting he/she is always under suspicion of that title.
“I’d love to hear the words” is something I get a lot and to be honest vocals being heard is not always the point it’s another colour mixed in there, I’d rather leave you with something unresolved because you’ll hear it again and discover another layer or word play after play. It’s what I’m attracted to the most but it really depends on the intent of the idea. I couldn’t for a second see Lou Reed, Stephin Merritt, or Billy Bragg in this same boat (maybe Lou with The Velvets) and I love them for it. There is a time for vocals and words can get in the way.
Space between songs, time between words, meals, sleeps, miraculously when the guizer of inspiration shoots through this posessed skull and out the other side into someone else’s ears this is the point when the old man in the deep voice says “let it go.”
“The End.”
