Oils on 40 x 50 cm stretched canvas.
The last song in my planned set of 12 new Berlin-era songs: music, lyrics. When I moved here in November to focus on my art in what seemed to be the best European city for a young artist today—cheap(ish) food and housing, lots of other artists and intellectuals, everything you could possibly want going on most nights of the week, above all the feeling of freedom (and the safety to act on it)—I found I couldn’t sing my old songs. So I figured I would write new ones, and that would solve the problem. Most of my favorite albums have about 12 songs, so I settled on that number. I’ve written more, but these are the ones I could see learning to performance level and playing in the park.
But what I have now is not really 12 songs. It’s more like 12 draft vocal tracks of the sketches of a dozen new songs. In theory now I can listen to the 12 while I paint, sing to the drafts to learn them better without thinking too much, and play around with accompaniment on my Midi keyboard until it sounds right. In practice now probably I will just go “Oh, right—I’m not a musician! Haha! Other people are really good at this, have trained for 20+ years by the time they’re my age, and I just sort-of sing quietly to myself sometimes when I’m sure no one can hear!”
And refocus yet again on painting beautiful new art to sell, because my art is worth something.
