What’s Harley Working On?
There are two answers to this question, and I’ll spoil the surprise: I’m working on a music album, and I’m working on myself. I don’t confuse or conflate them; they aren’t the same thing. The album is a very personal project, sure, and I mean for it to both have a piece of me and to give me a piece in return, but it’s a finite collection of attempts to put an impression into the world through song. Working on myself, however, started long before and will continue until I’m dead. (And maybe even after that–who’s really to say?)
But I want to heed the impulse I’m feeling to link them together, because something feels new about this. Make no mistake, I don’t think there’s ever really been a time when I wouldn’t have said I’m working on a music album with varying degrees of sobriety and/or certainty. And yes, while you’re wondering, I can also tell you at any given point what novel I’m working on, even if it’s been over a year since I last opened the file. (It’s called The Double Flip and it’s about an unlikely friendship between a troubled teen and a man in a nursing home, thanks to a few card tricks and a dark secret. In my head, it’s glorious.)
What makes this time feel different is, among other things, I’m actually saying I’m not working on The Double Flip right now, and what’s more, I’m not feeling bad about it. I’ve spent a lot of time carrying around a lot of guilt and shame about not working on things I say I care about. And these really are things I do care about–I care about them so much, I’m unwilling to bring them forth because I fear they’d be destroyed in the process. Fumbled by my clumsy hands, distorted by my dim vision, deformed by my inarticulate invocations. But several things have conspired to make this music project so exciting, so compelling, and so demanding that two things are true: I believe it is important–vital–that I make this album, and it’s worthy of setting aside other ambitious creative projects. And maybe it’s also exposing how flimsy my commitment to some of those other projects has been.
There are so many threads I can tie together in this project, so many elements converging to indicate the time is now for this music, all of which I’m sure are worth unpacking. Changes within my spiritual paradigm, a reorganization of priorities in my personal and professional life, new mental health practices, multiple job changes and those related instabilities, vulnerable conversations with dear friends and family… and these are just the main things, let alone the countless interactions and synchronicities happening all the time that each point me back to this music.
I don’t want to say too much about the project itself, because that isn’t quite ready to be told, and it needs to be told in its own way. I worry that telling it prematurely, and telling it in an insufficient format like conversation, will diffuse or disperse some of the energy that is currently a holocaust fire inside my heart, mind, and soul. I think I’m going to need all the fuel I can get for this, in part to overcome the incredible inertia that I’ve created these many years of intending to make a record but not doing so. I will say, however, that this will be the most personal music I’ve ever created, the most authentic, such that I have for the first time been able to disregard any concern for what anyone will think about it, including and especially those closest to me.
I’m chuckling now as I write, because this is why we write to learn: I have just discovered that what feels new about this project is that for the first time in perhaps my entire creative life, I am compelled to make this because I need it to exist. This album, to a degree unlike any other creative attempt I’ve ever made, is for me.
Post contributed by Harley Ferris
(Photo: “Guitars” by Chris Hawes is licensed under CC BY 2.0)
