Kill the part of you that cringes
Jordan Keller / June 1, 2023
Redshift took seven years to make. It took another ten months to release.
(Did you cringe reading that? I didn’t cringe when I first wrote it, but editing this now, I cringed a little bit. Ah, well.)
By its nature, Redshift was doomed for a drawn out production timeline: My initial idea was a “survival guide for your 20s” and, well, first, I had to survive my 20s.
But in addition to working through the shame, doubt, fear, and despair required to make it out of my 20s, I had to work through those feelings in relation to my first work of art.
(I submit my use of that word just now as evidence of my own progress with regard to the latter. Throughout most of the writing process for the album, “art” was a word I could only speak, when referring to my work, with ironic detachment. I’d preemptively shield myself in conversation by speaking about my “art” in a tone best conveyed via oNe GiF iN pArTiCuLaR.)
I spent days/weeks/months/years mulling over questions from a mob of nagging voices in my head: Would a real artist take this long to make something? Would a real artist have to work this hard? Would a real artist have a day job? Wouldn’t a real artist sleep in a van? Under a bridge? Live off grass and drippings from the ceiling? Rather starve? Rather die?
These are the eddies of neuroses a larval artist can easily get caught in. They’re useless at best, harmful at worst. Mostly, they’re a nuisance. Because they get in the way of the important questions, which are, of course, the ones you should be asking of your work—er, your art—itself.
I am cringe, but I am free
Shortly after sending away all the tracks to be mixed,* *and while prepping for the album’s release, I saw this** reply** to a since-deleted question. The original tweet asked, “People in your 30s, what advice would you give to people in their 20s?” This response stuck with me:
do not kill the part of you that is cringe kill the part of you that cringesThat was June 2022. With the work of making the album done, I felt a new variant of cringe mutating inside me: It was not the embarrassing swath of hours sunk into the unsatisfying grunt labor of making art that was causing me to cringe, but rather the thought of having to talk about the songs, of—buhhh—promoting them. This variant of cringe was vicarious: it was the not-quite-hidden wince I would picture on the faces of old friends, family members, co-workers, people from my hometown, and/or strangers when I imagined them seeing me talk openly about my ArTwOrK—ah, shit, I’m doing it again.
It’s June 1st, 2023. I’m a little over three months removed from releasing Redshift, and in some ways I’m back where I started in 2015. But I feel that I have indeed returned home with the elixir.
I still often feel that making songs, and taking so long to do it, and talking about and performing them, and sharing them, and—yes—starting a self-indulgent blog about all this is cringe. It’s just that—unlike in my 20s when the thought of “being cringe” could kill the wind in my creative sails for weeks—I don’t let that feeling get in the way of making stuff for longer than a day or two.
Jane Schoenbrun, writer/director of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair — a movie about which I felt things — did me a solid and summed it up:
. In my 30s, cringe feels more like a unit of measurement – the amount of dissonance between two or more distinct feelings about the same subject.
It’s the amount of space, for example, between the pride and excitement I feel when finishing a song that I feel I nailed, and the mortification and doubt I feel when I have to talk about or perform that song. Part of growing, both as a person and as an artist, is about accepting one’s capacity to feel multiple ways about the same thing. And, in general, about letting yourself do something that might make you look stupid/sincere/heartfelt/mid/[INSERT THING YOU FIND CRINGEY WHEN OTHERS DO IT].
I’ve learned that how I feel about my work art depends on the emotional weather that day. Some days I believe in it. Others, I don’t. The feeling is not a thing I have any control over. The biggest lesson I learned by finishing Redshift was to keep doing the work, even on the days where it seems as if all those hours wont lead to anything meaningful.
A few weeks back, I sketched out an outline for a new album and noticed many of the same themes and subjects I wrote about for Redshift. But I feel differently now. I see new facets I want to shape and polish. And I want to write about how my life is now, right or wrong; messily, imperfectly. Cringe or not.