What’s Harley Not Working On?

I am not working on my album.

The term I’ve heard used is “discouraged perfectionism,” and the idea is that you’re a perfectionist who holds yourself to unreasonable standards, while simultaneously knowing that the standards you’re holding yourself to are unreasonable. You don’t try to make things perfect; you know they can’t be perfect, and therefore you don’t try.

But here’s the real genius of it, the insidiousness of it all: a driven discouraged perfectionist learns to make it appear like they’re working on something while not actually committing anything to it. For me, I’ve learned to make activity look like motion. Sometimes I call it “productive procrastination,” because it’s pretty easy to convince someone (and more importantly, myself) that the thing I’m doing is legitimately in service of my goal. Similar to the whole “I’ll do my taxes… after I clean my desk!” thing, or “just a little more research and then I’ll be ready to write that story” ploy. When it comes to musical projects, I have several strategies that allow me to orbit this album without actually making obvious, significant progress. I’ll tell you right now, these are going to sound like good things, important and necessary things. And they are. And they’re also not.

It seems reasonable that some projects really need to percolate. Novelists I enjoy frequently recount how their latest book first occurred to them decades ago, and only just recently did it re-emerges with some new vigor and finally get finished. That happens. But that’s not what’s happening here. I don’t think my songs, nor the overarching concepts for the album, need to marinate. If anything, I worry I’m losing pieces of it the longer it sits–I say this from experience. I’ve been on the verge of making albums before, only to step away just before starting, usually lured by some shiny new idea. I don’t think my ideas necessarily get better with age. When I’m creating, creativity seems to expand. Ideas beget ideas, and when I’m in a daily groove of creative activity, it’s like I slip into a flow of inspiration. I think it gets easier to practice suspending my own judgment long enough to let ideas through the filters, and the more I let through, the higher percentage of ideas I like. But “letting it percolate” really gives me time to wrap every idea in doubt, to convince myself it’s not actually worth my time.

It’s almost like each idea I decide to pursue is a hot coal in a fire. It burns bright, captures my eye and imagination, and I pull it off the fire to examine it further. It’s brilliant, shimmering and shadowed, but as I keep it away from the rest of the embers, it starts to smoke and turn gray. Just then, a new flicker of light and heat draws my attention, and I am definitely more interested in this new coal I’ve just discovered. I set down the now cold, dusty coal and retrieve the new one, repeating ad nauseam.

So what do I do when I’m working-but-not-working on a musical project? I dial in guitar tones, I watch YouTube videos on recording and production techniques, I write lists of themes and phrases I want to include in my lyrics, I create presets for keyboards, I make sure there are new strings on my guitars, I buy a new notebook for this new project to show how serious I am… I march around the album like it’s Jericho, and if I just bellow and blast and have enough faith, those walls are going to fall and I’ll storm in, victorious.

I consider it real progress that I’m not moving on to a different project, that I’m not even entertaining the notion. And while I’m doing all that productive procrastination, I’m finding some great sounds, some exciting ideas, some compelling lyrics, some great production strategies that I’m truly thrilled to have discovered. Things I will definitely use. So it’s hard to discount the value of the way this unfolding–which is, again, exactly why this is such a devious character trait. At the end of the day, I know what I’m doing, and it’s slowing down the moment I cross the threshold between planning and doing. Because doing is where the discouraged perfectionism whiplash comes back around to remind me this’ll never be as good as it is right now.

Contributed by Harley Ferris

(Image by Romarek11)