Heavy breathing bounced across the empty canvassed walls of my old bedroom.
Hands clasping my head to keep everything from spinning as my eyes blindly stared at the computer screen of another remix project. After two years of transforming songs for other people, my mind finally slammed into a wall it couldn’t break through. This day is burned into my memory because it’s the singular moment where I started to face the facts that I didn’t want to remix music anymore. Coming to this revelation was not immediate and took almost eleven months to get there.
Personally, I don’t believe writer’s block exists. If I’m stuck on something it either means that I’m overthinking the material or haven’t made the time to sit down and actively write. However, there’s a major distinction between problem solving in creative work and fending off mental demons. Nothing captures this better than when Patrick Rothfuss said, “You write with your head. You could break your leg and then still write. But if, say, your dog has fucking died, that’s in your head. If your relationship is a mess. If you have a mood disorder...or any of the myriad host of things that can legit go chemically wrong in your brain…Nobody would expect you to make beautiful jewelry if your hand had been caught in a hydraulic press.”
When I originally started writing remixes it was for myself and was enjoyable to occasionally do. By the time I was remixing for record labels, there was an immense amount of pressure because every song I did had a one week time constraint and I wouldn’t hear back for months about them. During that time, it was very difficult to sit in front of my computer and write much of anything. This led to finding joy in the discovery of hobbies like painting and woodworking. I will never claim to be good at either, but they both helped me learn more about myself, particularly about patience. Listening to fantasy novels in the car and staying up late with music I grew up with were the alarm clock for my dormant desire to write again. It didn’t take long for me to explore completely unknown territory for myself combining singer-songwriter lyrics with pop, rock, electronic, and soul influences. I very clearly remember telling myself, “I have no idea what this is, but it feels good.”
A lot of the stress and mental clutter of that year eventually found its way onto pages of my pocket sized lyric books and later into songs. The way melody, chords and words interact with each other has always fascinated me. When words melt together into a syrupy string of metered words, it’s like a magic trick on the page. It never gets old. I’ll admit actively sitting down every day to write is not as sexy as others think it is, however what I get as a result of finishing a verse or replacing a word with one that stimulates the senses makes all the difference to me.
It’s been a year since I started writing again and I’m proud to tell stories not as panicked remixer but as a songwriter.
Links to Myles Travitz
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