I have spent an embarrassing amount of my life watching people draw. Not the polite museum glance, the real thing: standing a little too close, trying to catch the exact second a coffee cup, or a stranger’s face, or nothing at all, turns into six confident lines on paper. I find that moment genuinely thrilling, in a way I’ve never fully managed to explain to people who don’t draw. For years I wanted to know what it felt like from the inside instead of just watching it happen to someone else.

Edward Hopper was the first to pull me all the way in, and he still hits hardest. Everyone talks about the light in his paintings, and fine, the light is doing a lot of work. What gets me is the stillness. A man sitting alone in a diner at two in the morning shouldn’t be able to hold my attention for ten minutes. And yet here I am, ten minutes gone, feeling a very specific flavor of loneliness that only seems to exist under fluorescent light. I’ve spent hours trying to work out how he pulled that off with a brush and some restraint. Gotten nowhere. Still hooked.

Typography got me next, and in a more hands on way, because I actually got to ask people how it works instead of just admiring it from a distance. Guillaume Brack, Stefan Nitzsche, and Erik Spiekermann have each, at different points, sat with me and talked through the parts of their craft that never show up in a font’s marketing copy. The reasoning behind a curve in a letterform. The decision nobody notices unless it’s missing. People don’t usually hand you their time for free just to explain why a serif bends the way it does. I’ll never forget that they did.

Then there’s comics, where the bar for “unreasonably talented” gets raised again. Charlie Adlard drew The Walking Dead and made a zombie comic read like reportage from a war you’d genuinely survived, which is a strange thing for a comic about the undead to pull off. Moebius, born Jean Giraud, drew alien worlds so particular and lived in that they felt more real than photographs of places that actually exist. And then there’s Milo Manara, whose L’Art de la Fessée I still can’t open without a small jolt of awe, because the man draws a human body with a confidence that borders on rude.

And yet. Ask me to draw a circle and what you’ll get back is something closer to a pancake that lost a fight.

So about three years ago, I decided to stop just watching and actually do it myself. I bought books. I signed up for courses. I started cornering working artists and asking them uncomfortably detailed questions about their process, the kind that probably made them regret answering the first one. None of this is new behavior for me. I taught myself to program two decades ago, and that somehow turned into a twenty year career. I taught myself music composition after that, and now it is my full-time job, close to ten years in. Piano happened somewhere in between, mostly because I have never once in my life left well enough alone. At some point, learning to draw stopped being a vague wish and turned into a foregone conclusion, the way a cold is a foregone conclusion once your kid brings one home from school.

The first year was rough in ways I hadn’t expected, and I’ve been bad at things on purpose before. I was bad at code once. I’m still bad at piano most days, if I’m honest. But drawing turned out to have its own particular cruelty built in. Everyone can tell instantly when a hand doesn’t work, in a way nobody can tell your fourth chord voicing is slightly off. My early pages looked like they’d been drawn during an earthquake. That’s being generous. None of it made me want to quit. If anything it made me want to understand the thing more, the same way a piece of music I can’t quite play yet makes me want to sit with it longer instead of walking away.

There’s a less flattering reason for all this too, and I’m not going to dress it up. Generative AI, or plagiarism with a better publicist, has made it very easy for people to stop learning anything at all. Why spend a year producing garbage with a pencil and a trackpad when a prompt can spit out something that looks fine from three feet away? It only looks fine from three feet away. Get closer and it’s a laundered average of other people’s real effort, wearing a style it never earned a single hour of. Learning to draw badly, and eventually in public, is a small and probably useless act of defiance. I’m doing it anyway.

I take a long time to show anyone what I make. Music. Code. Now this. Partly because most of what I make is for myself, and nobody else was ever invited to look. Mostly because I never think it’s finished, or that it’s good enough to survive somebody else’s eyes on it.

Here’s the first one I’m letting out of the house. It’s called Other Men’s Wars.

There are a lot more where that came from, each one built around a bit of writing that started the idea in the first place. Eventually I want to put them together into a physical book. I already know almost nobody will buy it. The art book market makes the music market look downright lucrative, and I’ve spent a decade finding out exactly how unlucrative that one could be. But I want the thing to exist anyway, printed and bound, sitting on a shelf somewhere. Proof that a guy who couldn’t draw a straight line three years ago went and drew a whole book of crooked ones on purpose.

I used to write code for video games. This was years before my music career took off, back when I’d burn entire nights hunting down why some trigger volume refused to fire in whatever engine I was cursing out that month. It was real work, the kind that leaves you with a headache and a strange, private sense of accomplishment at four in the morning. And without fail, mentioning it at a dinner party got me the same polite little nod, followed by some variation of “oh, so nothing too serious.” As if I’d told them I spent my twenties folding napkins into swans for a living.

It still happens now, from the other side of the same coin. I score films and television these days, and the second someone finds out I also write music for games, I can watch the recalculation happen behind their eyes in real time. Film, apparently, is culture. Games are toys you’re supposed to have outgrown around the same time you stopped believing in the tooth fairy. Nobody ever asks whether the game outsold the film, or made more money in a single weekend than the film made across its entire theatrical run. The assumption just sits there, smug and unexamined, coasting on a permanent hall pass it was issued sometime around 1995.

So where does this idea actually come from? Trace it back far enough and it has nothing to do with the games themselves. It comes down to one extremely specific, extremely American panic that nobody ever bothered to revoke.

In December 1993, Senator Joe Lieberman called a press conference to personally denounce two video games, flanked by Bob Keeshan, a man best known for playing Captain Kangaroo on television, presumably wheeled in to lend the whole affair some moral gravity. The games on trial were Mortal Kombat and Night Trap. A week later, Lieberman and Senator Herb Kohl hauled Nintendo and Sega executives in front of Congress and played them clips of fatalities and grainy horror, to a room of senators who looked like they’d rather be doing literally anything else. Somewhere in the C-SPAN archive there’s footage of grown adults in suits solemnly discussing a finishing move that removes someone’s spine, and if you have never watched it, you are wasting your life. The threat underneath it was blunt: regulate yourselves, or Congress will do it for you and you will not enjoy the process. The industry folded fast. It built what’s now the Entertainment Software Association that same year, and the ESRB not long after, the little letter grade box that’s been staring at you from every game case since.

That’s it. That’s the entire founding myth. One Senate hearing, aimed at exactly two games, both of which are now old enough to legally rent a car and buy a beer. And somehow the label just calcified, the way labels do when nobody bothers checking whether they’re still true.

Meanwhile, while everyone kept picturing a teenager in a basement, the industry quietly became the biggest entertainment business alive on the planet. Global gaming revenue landed close to 190 billion dollars in 2025 and is tracking toward roughly 205 billion this year, which already beats what film and recorded music make combined. It’s not even a fair fight. The average American gamer, according to the ESA’s own 2026 numbers, is 37 years old. Seventy one percent of Millennials play weekly. So does more than half of Gen X, and exactly half of Boomers. Two hundred and twelve million Americans pick up a controller or a phone every week, which is most of the country, and the fourteen year old everyone still pictures the moment you say “gamer” is a rounding error standing next to all of that.

Here’s the part that took me a while to actually believe, because I used to buy the escapism story too, the idea that adults play mainly to disappear from their lives for a bit. A study out of Boston University this year asked people why they actually play, and the number that jumped out was 64 percent using games specifically to cope with stress. The researchers were deliberate about the word choice, calling it coping instead of escaping. After a session, people reported feeling calmer and more settled, roughly the effect of a walk around the block, minus the shoes and the weather. That’s an adult managing a bad day with some genuine competence, whatever image your brain insists on defaulting to.

And it’s not a boys’ club either, whatever mental picture “gamer” conjures up for you, probably still involving a Coke bottle and questionable posture. The ESA’s global survey, almost twenty five thousand players across twenty one countries, puts women at 48 percent of gamers worldwide, and in a handful of countries, Brazil and South Africa included, women actually outnumber men. That’s about as close to a coin flip as any major entertainment category manages. The genre data also torches the other tired assumption. A 2024 survey of nearly two thousand women found their most played genre wasn’t some cozy little farming sim, it was action adventure, at 56 percent, comfortably ahead of shooters at 49 and battle royale at 47. The genre everyone assumes is “the women’s genre” limped in dead last, at 40 percent. So much for that theory, whoever came up with it.

Now here’s the part I actually care about, since this is supposed to be a blog about art and I’ve gone this entire piece without saying the word once. Games are art, and at this point that’s such a boring thing to type out loud that I feel a little silly doing it. The argument stopped being interesting around 2012, when the people whose actual job it is to decide what belongs in a museum settled it without consulting anyone on a forum.

In November of that year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York added fourteen video games to its permanent design collection. Pac-Man, Tetris, The Sims, Portal, games most people had filed under arcade filler or “thing I wasted a Tuesday on,” now sitting in the same building as an actual Picasso. Senior curator Paola Antonelli didn’t hedge for a second. Her exact line was that video games are art, and they sure are, which is a startlingly blunt thing for a museum curator to say about anything, let alone Pac-Man. The Smithsonian ran its own exhibition that same year tracing forty years of the medium, presumably to double down in case anyone missed the memo.

Worth remembering that this happened right after Roger Ebert, the most influential film critic America ever produced, spent years loudly insisting the opposite. In 2010 he published an essay with all the subtlety of a brick through a window, titled “Video Games Can Never Be Art,” arguing no game had ever come close to the great poets, filmmakers or novelists, and picking a public fight with game designer Kellee Santiago over it. He never fully walked it back, though he did later admit he probably shouldn’t have stated it as some kind of law of nature, given that by his own admission he’d barely played any. Two years after his essay ran, a museum put Pac-Man behind glass and answered the question without waiting around for his sign off.

But the point I actually want to linger on is the music, because it’s the one nobody can argue with once they’ve heard it. In 2012, the soundtrack to a small, quiet PlayStation game called Journey, composed by Austin Wintory, became the first video game score ever nominated for a Grammy, landing in the actual Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media category, the one shared with film, up against John Williams for Tintin and Howard Shore for Hugo. A guy who scored a three hour indie download was suddenly in a room with two of the most decorated film composers alive, nominated on merit, no participation trophy involved. It took the Recording Academy a few more years to give the genre its own permanent category, Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media, but once it existed it stopped being a novelty almost immediately. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor won it in 2024, and nobody so much as blinked. The Academy didn’t care what screen the music was written for once they actually pressed play, which is frankly more open mindedness than most people manage at a dinner party.

Hollywood eventually came around too, though it took three decades and a spectacular number of humiliations to get there. The 1993 Super Mario Bros film is the origin point of what people used to call the video game movie curse, a grim, vaguely dystopian mess that turned the Mushroom Kingdom into something closer to a fever dream about municipal plumbing, losing money on a forty two million dollar budget in the process. For the next twenty five years that was the pattern, one studio after another adapting a beloved game and somehow making something worse than its loading screen, all the way through Warcraft and Assassin’s Creed.

Then in 2023, HBO’s The Last of Us landed twenty four Emmy nominations for its first season, second only to Succession that year, and walked away with eight of them. It became HBO’s most watched debut season ever, averaging close to 32 million viewers an episode within two months, and season two beat that with almost 37 million. In 2024, Amazon’s Fallout became the platform’s biggest show to date, pulling 65 million viewers in its first sixteen days and getting renewed after nine, a turnaround usually reserved for shows about billionaires or dragons. The Witcher and Arcane pulled off the same trick from different angles. These are prestige television productions, Emmy nominated and picked apart by critics, built entirely out of material everyone spent thirty years calling disposable.

If you want the cleanest proof that this industry stopped playing around, look at Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s rated Mature for blood, gore, nudity and a genuinely heroic amount of sex, exactly the kind of content that would have gotten a game frog marched in front of Lieberman’s committee in 1993. In April 2024 it became the first game ever to win Game of the Year, or the closest equivalent, at every single major ceremony in the same calendar year. The Golden Joysticks, the Game Developers Choice Awards, the D.I.C.E. Awards, the BAFTAs, The Game Awards. All of them. Larian Studios reportedly had to send staff to award shows in rotating shifts because attending them all was starting to eat into actual development time, possibly the single funniest problem a video game studio has ever had. That’s the industry’s version of a clean sweep at the Oscars, for a game that would have made Joe Lieberman need to sit down and have a very long lie in a dark room.

So the next time someone hears I used to write code for games, or that a chunk of my composing work still goes toward them, and I watch that little downgrade happen behind their eyes, I’m going to ask them exactly what they think a 37 year old with a full time job is doing with the 205 billion dollars this industry is about to make this year. Kids’ stuff, apparently. Somebody really should go tell the kids. They’re missing out.

Someone told me once that a friend of theirs plays incredible guitar because he’s “just talented.” I asked how long the guy had been playing. Eighteen years, most days, for stretches long enough that his fingers used to bleed a little before they calloused over. That’s not a talent reveal. That’s over a decade of unglamorous repetition getting flattened into a single adjective so nobody has to think too hard about the part where he kept doing it after it stopped being fun.

I hear some version of this constantly and it annoys me every time. Someone gets good at something, and instead of asking what they actually did with their time, people reach for “talented” like the word explains anything. It doesn’t. It’s mostly something people say right before admitting they tried the same thing for two weeks and quit.

I should be honest about my own limits here, because I’m not about to pretend genetics has zero say in any of this. I’m towering at a mighty 174cm (that’s five foot seven in Freedom units, for the one country that still needs the translation). I was never walking into an NBA gym and outjumping anyone, and no amount of practice was going to change that, because my body settled that question before I was old enough to have an opinion about it.

Fine. I’ve made peace with it. Some doors were shut before I showed up.

But look at what that actually covers, and what it doesn’t. It covers height. It doesn’t cover the person born with perfect pitch who still fumbles their way through a simple scale, because knowing exactly what a note should sound like has nothing to do with training your fingers to move fast and clean under pressure. That’s a completely different skill, and it only gets built one repetition at a time. Genetics handed them a shortcut on one very specific thing. It never once taught their hands what to do. Somebody still has to put in the hours, and the hours are boring, and most people who could theoretically have that same ear never will, because they’d rather spend their afternoons doing almost anything else.

So when “talent” gets used to explain away a skill, there’s usually an assumption riding along with it that nobody bothers to check: that the hard part was being born the right way, and the actual work was just a footnote. I went looking for research instead of arguing about it in a forum, and I landed on a study I can’t stop thinking about, because it’s simultaneously annoying and, once you read it properly, closer to my point than I expected.

It’s a 2014 study out of the Karolinska Institute, led by Miriam Mosing, looking at just over ten thousand Swedish twins. Real sample size, published in the journal Psychological Science, not some newsletter with a stock photo of a glowing brain. The researchers tested musical ability with pitch, rhythm and melody discrimination, and compared each twin’s score against how much they’d practiced over their lifetime.

Two things came out of it. How much someone practices turned out to be substantially heritable, somewhere between 40 and 70 percent depending on the measure. And when the researchers compared identical twin pairs where one twin had clearly practiced more than the other, that extra practice didn’t translate into a meaningfully higher score once genetics was accounted for. Same genes, different hours logged, roughly the same result.

My first reaction was something close to betrayal, because that reads exactly like ammunition for the “they’re just talented” crowd. Read it again, though, because what it actually shows is different: whether you show up at all, and how many times you’re willing to repeat something that stopped being fun around rep two hundred, seems to be wired into you the same way your height is. Nobody sits down at nine years old and rationally decides, through pure willpower, to spend their entire adolescence indoors running the same sixteen bars until their fingers stop hurting. Something underneath that decision was already pointing them there, long before they had words for why.

That’s the part I keep circling back to. People hear a solo that sounds effortless and assume it arrived that way, fully formed, no visible seams. Nothing sounds effortless on the first ten thousand attempts. What actually looks rare, once you strip the mythology off it, is whatever lets a person survive ten thousand reps of something most people abandon by rep two hundred. The part of someone that keeps showing up on the days it’s raining and nobody’s watching and the improvement is too slow to even register. That’s the part nobody claps for, because it never happens anywhere near a stage.

Which means the “they’re just talented” crowd isn’t entirely wrong that genetics is doing something in there. They’re just pointing at the wrong spot. They’re crediting genetics for the finished result, when the more honest place it might actually be working is much further upstream, in whatever lets a person sit still long enough to build that result in the first place. That distinction matters, because it changes who gets the credit. The person still did the work. Nobody handed them a finished solo in their sleep. They happened to be built in a way that let them survive the boring stretch long enough to get good, and the boring stretch is exactly where everyone else quits.

I won’t pretend this makes the whole conversation tidy. If your capacity to grind through something for years is itself dealt to you rather than chosen, the moral high ground of “I worked hard and you didn’t” gets shakier too. That’s an uncomfortable thought and I don’t have a clean way to wrap it up. But it still beats the alternative, which is watching someone hand over a decade of their life to get good at something, and getting a shrug back dressed up as a compliment.

So next time you catch yourself calling someone “just talented,” ask how many hours are sitting behind that word. If nobody can answer, they’re not describing talent. They’re describing something they never looked at closely enough to actually see.

Here’s the part I actually believe, past whatever a study can prove. I think everyone is walking around with some genetic disposition for something, an obscure setting that would let them survive years of boring repetition if they ever landed on the right activity for it. The catch is that disposition doesn’t come with a label, and it rarely lines up with whatever you happen to be passionate about, or whatever happened to be sitting around when you were a kid. Plenty of people spend an entire life standing just next from the one thing they were actually built to grind at, and never once trip over it. Most people don’t die without talent. They die without ever meeting theirs.

Every couple of weeks the same fight breaks out somewhere on the internet. Someone with a SoundCloud link posts that real musicians don’t need theory. Hundreds of replies pile up. Paul McCartney gets dragged into it like he’s a hostage. By the end nobody has learned anything and the original poster has written another track in C major using the same four chords as last week.

Let me put my cards on the table. If you want to write music, learn theory. Not all of it. Not to a PhD level. But yes, you need it. The people screaming the loudest against it are usually the ones who’d benefit the most from twenty hours of YouTube and a piano.

The McCartney argument is the favorite weapon of the anti-theory crowd. Paul can’t read music, so why should I? Here is the problem with that. Reading music and understanding music theory are two completely different things. Notation is a writing system. Theory is the grammar of the language underneath it. Paul McCartney does not write dots on staves. He has also spent sixty years working out chord substitutions, modulations, key changes, and voice leading that most graduate students couldn’t dream up on a good day. The man knows theory. He just doesn’t write it down. There is a difference between being illiterate and being a genius who never picked up a pen.

The second problem with the McCartney defense is statistical. By citing him you are placing yourself in a category occupied by maybe a dozen humans across the entire twentieth century. Reality check time. You probably are not one of them. I am not one of them either. Most of us are working musicians with bills to pay and brains that benefit enormously from having frameworks to lean on. The McCartney path works for McCartney. For the rest of us mortals there is studying.

Now the other classic. Theory will hold you back. It will kill your creativity. Or so I keep hearing.

I genuinely do not understand how anyone says this with a straight face. How is knowing more things bad. Imagine telling a painter that learning about color will ruin their art. Imagine telling a novelist that grammar will smother their voice. The argument falls apart the second you apply it to any other discipline. A vocabulary of two hundred words can still make a poem. A vocabulary of twenty thousand words gives you Shakespeare. You are allowed to choose simplicity. You are not allowed to pretend ignorance is a strategy.

Theory does not write the music for you. It tells you why the thing you just wrote works, or why it does not. It is descriptive. It looks at thousands of pieces across centuries and says, here are some patterns that tend to land emotionally. Here is what tension feels like. Here is what resolution feels like. Here is what happens when you slip in the flat sixth chord. Here is why the bridge in that pop song hits like a truck. None of that information forces you to use it. It just means when something feels off, you have a way to diagnose it instead of staring at your DAW for three hours hoping inspiration strikes.

Which brings me to deadlines, which the hobbyists never have to think about, so let me explain. When you are scoring a scene that drops on Friday and the director wants something warmer in the second act, you cannot try and fail thirty times. You need to know that a Lydian color under the strings will brighten the harmony without losing the minor key feeling, and you need to know that in the next ten minutes. Theory is the difference between firing a ballista and correcting your aim over and over, and putting one bolt straight through the bullseye on the first try. When the lights are on you do not have the budget for trial and error. You have one shot. Two if you are lucky.

Then there is structure. This is where the wheels really come off for self-taught composers who skipped the homework. I listen to a lot of music from aspiring writers, and the most common problem by an enormous margin is form. The piece starts somewhere. It does some stuff. Maybe it loops a riff for a while. Then it ends. Or worse, it ricochets between five different ideas without ever giving any of them room to breathe. Music needs to go somewhere. It needs an architecture. Tension and release. A sense of departure and homecoming. Verse-chorus, sonata, AABA, theme and variations, whatever shape you want to borrow from. You need one.

Inevitably somebody shows up here to say but Nico, what about Stairway to Heaven, that song doesn’t have a normal structure and it’s a masterpiece. Glad you brought it up. Stairway is built on what’s called cumulative form. The energy and instrumentation pile on over time, the texture thickens, sections grow longer and more intense until the climax. Jimmy Page did not stumble into that. It is a known structural model that goes back centuries in classical music. The fact that you didn’t know it was a model is the entire problem. Page knew. Page studied. Page absorbed thousands of records and worked out how to build a piece that arrives somewhere. The accident theory of great music is mostly a myth told by people who do not want to do the work.

A point I rarely see made in these arguments. Theory is also a language for working with other people. The minute you have to communicate with a session player, a co-writer, an arranger, or a producer, you will be very glad you can say give me a tritone sub in the second bar of the chorus instead of waving your hands and humming. Music has had a shared vocabulary for centuries. Refusing to learn it is not edgy. It is just slow.

There is also survivorship bias. For every Paul McCartney there are ten thousand people who tried to wing it and never finished anything bigger than a four bar loop. You hear about the geniuses because they made it through. You do not hear about the casualties because they quit and got jobs in marketing. Picking the McCartneys as your evidence is like deciding to skip seatbelts because some people walked away from car crashes.

Last thing. The people who say rules are made to be broken almost never know the rules. You cannot deliberately break what you have not learned. Picasso could draw a horse. He chose not to. There is a difference between a violation and an accident.

Theory won’t steal your soul. It just shortens the walk between the idea in your head and the sound coming out of the room. People who refuse to learn it are not free spirits. They are taking the scenic route every single time, and pretending they meant to.

I’ve had this conversation three times in the last month. Different people, different contexts, same circular argument. Someone brings up an artist they admire, someone else questions whether the person actually qualifies, and then the whole thing dissolves into a debate no one wins because no one can agree on what we’re even debating. Is being an artist a personality type? A professional designation? A spiritual calling? A vibe?

Everyone has an answer. None of them are satisfying.

The most common take is that artists are just people who feel things more intensely. They’re sensitive. Emotionally porous. They see the world differently, they suffer beautifully, they make everything about them in a way that somehow gets called depth instead of narcissism. You know the type. The person at the dinner table who turns every conversation into a meditation on their own interiority.

That’s not an artist. That’s just someone who hasn’t learned to shut the fuck up.

Sensitivity and intensity are raw material, not output. Plenty of people feel things deeply and produce nothing but elaborate justifications for why they haven’t made anything yet. The personality framework for “artist” is largely a cope, I think. It lets people claim the identity without doing the work, and it lets the culture romanticize the posture without demanding the substance. We’ve collectively agreed that tortured is interesting, so people perform tortured, and then we all pretend that’s enough.

It isn’t.

OK so maybe it’s about output then. You make things, therefore you’re an artist. Simple, clean, no gatekeeping. The furniture maker, the graphic designer, the person who writes fanfiction at 2am, the kid who draws in the margins of every notebook he owns. Output as the criterion democratizes the whole thing and that feels good to say in an era where access to tools has genuinely flattened a lot of the old hierarchies.

But this one falls apart too.

I know people who produce constantly and whose work leaves me completely cold, not because it’s technically bad but because there’s nothing behind it that I can feel. No angle of vision. No sense that the person making it was changed by making it. They’re executing. They’re skilled, sometimes impressively so, but the work is a product of their hands, not of their thinking or their discomfort or whatever it is they can’t stop trying to figure out. The output is there. The artist, I’m less sure about.

And I say that knowing full well that I could be wrong about any specific person. But the feeling is real, and I think it’s pointing at something.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: what is the work facing?

Most of the time when someone makes something and it feels thin to me, it’s facing inward. Toward the maker. Toward proof of the maker’s competence, taste, or existence. The work is a mirror being held up to the creator, and what they’re really asking is: do you see me? Do you see how good I am at this? Do you see that I belong here?

That’s fine as a human impulse. It’s not a crime. But I don’t think it’s art.

When work actually lands on me as art, it’s pointing somewhere else. At something the person found or felt or couldn’t shake. It’s not asking you to look at them. It’s asking you to look at the thing they’re showing you. There’s a kind of self-erasure in the best work, even when it’s extremely personal, maybe especially then. The artist becomes the medium rather than the subject, and what comes through is something you could recognize even if you had no idea who made it.

That’s obviously a fuzzy line and I’m aware of that. But fuzzy doesn’t mean false.

The brand question is where this gets genuinely uncomfortable, because we’re all in it now and pretending otherwise is dishonest.

There are people I see online, a lot of people, who are clearly building something. They have a consistent aesthetic, a clear target audience, a content strategy whether they’d call it that or not. The work is good enough, sometimes very good. But when I watch them, what I’m really watching is someone building a case for themselves. The music is evidence that they’re a musician. The paintings are evidence that they’re a painter. The newsletter is evidence that they’re a thinker. The work is a portfolio in the most transactional sense: here is what I can do, please value me accordingly.

I’m not saying those people aren’t creative. I’m not even saying they’re cynical, because I don’t think most of them are. But there is something structurally different about approaching your practice that way. When the primary product is your own image as an artist, the work stops being the point. It becomes a vehicle. And at that point you can argue about the label, but the activity has changed into something else.

The revealing test is simple and brutal: would you still make the thing if no one would ever see it? If the answer is no, or if you have to pause before answering, that tells you something about the relationship you have with the work. It doesn’t make you a bad person. It just means you’re operating a different machine than the one that makes art.

I want to be careful here because the suffering thing is always lurking nearby and I don’t want to fall into it. There’s a cultural habit of treating struggle and obscurity as proof of authenticity, like the person who gave up and got a regular job was somehow more real than the person who managed to make money from their work. That’s romantic nonsense. It’s also classist in ways people don’t like to examine. Not everyone can afford to be obscure. Not everyone has the luxury of making work that has no commercial consideration attached to it.

Commercial success doesn’t disqualify anyone from being an artist. Neither does ease. If something comes to you fluently and you make it and it’s good, you don’t need to have suffered to earn it. The suffering mythology is mostly useful for people who haven’t made anything, because it reframes the absence of work as a kind of credit.

But here’s the thing that is true: the work has to cost something. Not money, not comfort necessarily, but something. Some genuine risk of being seen or being wrong or being unchanged by what you made. Work that costs the maker nothing tends to do the same to the audience.

So where does that leave us. I think “artist” is a description of a relationship to making things, not a personality trait, not a job title, and not a volume target. It has something to do with what the work is oriented toward, and whether the person making it is available to be affected by it. Available meaning not sealed off behind the brand, not performing creativity, not treating the work purely as output.

I’m aware that this definition lets in people who would fail a formal skills test and keeps out some people with genuinely impressive technical ability. I’m mostly fine with that.

The harder question, the one I haven’t fully answered for myself: where do I fall on this? I make things for money sometimes. I make things for myself sometimes. I make things because I want people to hear them. The orientation shifts. I’m not always the person I’d like to be when I’m making something. And I think if you’re honest, you’re probably in the same position, wherever you land on the rest of this.

Maybe the most honest definition is just this: an artist is someone who keeps asking the question, rather than someone who’s already decided the answer is yes.

Actually no, that’s too tidy.

An artist is someone who would keep making even if the answer came back as no. Whether most of us would is a different conversation.

A composer I know once told me he wrote sixteen bars of music that had to work whether the player stood in that room for thirty seconds or thirty minutes. No edit point. No timecode. Just a loop that had to breathe forever without anyone noticing it was breathing at all.

That sentence alone should tell you why game music and film scoring are not cousins. They are not even in the same business, even though every five years someone writes an article comparing them like they are interchangeable skills you pick up over a weekend.

Film and TV exist on a fixed timeline. The picture is locked. You know exactly when the door opens, exactly when the gun goes off, exactly how long the silence lasts before the actor delivers the line that wins them an award nobody remembers two years later. You write to that. It is craft, and a difficult one, but it is craft with a map.

Games do not hand you a map. They hand you a player who might stand in front of a vending machine for four minutes deciding whether to spend in game currency on a hat, then sprint through the next three rooms in eleven seconds because they already know where the loot is. Your music has to survive both of those players. Sometimes in the same level. Sometimes in the same minute.

So composers had to invent ways to write music that does not know when it will end. That is the whole game, pun unfortunately intended, sorry about that one, I just had to do it at least once.

There are two main tricks, and once you see them you will notice them everywhere, which will ruin some of your favorite games in the best way. And hopefully, if you write music yourself, maybe it will even give you new ideas about what the structure of music could also be.

The first is horizontal resequencing, which is a fancy way of saying the music switches between different versions of itself depending on what is happening. Exploration music swaps to combat music. Combat music swaps to victory music. The trick is making those transitions not sound like someone yanked the needle off a record, which is harder than it sounds when your transition point could be triggered by a player who decided, against all reason, to fight a rat for ninety seconds before noticing the actual boss.

The second is vertical remixing, and this one is sneakier. Instead of swapping entire tracks, you layer stems on top of each other and fade them in or out based on intensity. Drums creep in when a fight starts. Strings swell when health drops low. Nothing cuts. It just thickens, like the game is quietly raising its pulse to match yours. When it works, you do not notice it working, which is the highest compliment you can pay this kind of writing and also the reason nobody outside the industry talks about it.

Now here is where FMOD and Wwise come in, two words that get thrown around by sound designers like everyone already knows what they mean, when in reality half the composers nodding along have no idea what these tools actually do.

They are middleware. That means they sit between your audio files and the game engine, and they let you build the logic that decides what plays, when, and how it blends. You are not handing over a stereo file and walking away anymore. You are setting up parameters, states, and transitions, telling the system that when a value called “intensity” crosses a certain threshold, layer four fades in over two seconds while layer two ducks by six decibels. You are programming behavior, not just delivering a performance.

This is the part that throws traditional composers the most, because nobody warned them that the job now includes thinking like a systems designer. You are not just asking “does this melody work.” You are asking “does this melody still work when triggered out of order, interrupted halfway through, and looped four hundred times by a player who is grinding the same dungeon for a rare item.”

There is also a blurrier line in games between music that exists in the world and music that exists for the player, something film mostly keeps tidy. A car radio the player can change. A guitar a character can pick up and actually play. The line between diegetic and non diegetic gets messy fast, and the messiness is often the most interesting part of the design, even though it rarely gets discussed outside of postmortems nobody reads.

And then there are the constraints nobody mentions at dinner parties. Streaming bandwidth that’s shared between audio, textures, and geometry the moment your open world loads three rooms ahead of where you’re standing. Real time processing that has to run without choking the frame rate, because nobody is giving audio its own dedicated thread out of pity. Mobile and Switch still fight memory limits the way consoles did a decade ago, so half the industry is solving a problem the other half forgot existed. And loops that need to survive being heard for the two hundredth time without making the player want to mute the game entirely, which, let’s be honest, some of us have done more than once to music that deserved better than our patience.

What all of this adds up to is a job description that has quietly shifted underneath composers who are still applying for it like it is 2005. Studios increasingly want people who can patch logic into middleware themselves, not just hand off stems and hope the implementation team gets it right. You are not just composing anymore. You are building a small machine that composes on the fly based on what a stranger decides to do with a controller (or a mouse and a keyboard, because I’m old school and I suck with a controller).

Film scoring asks you to respond to a moment that already happened, locked in an edit, finished, permanent. Game scoring asks you to prepare for a moment that has not happened yet, might happen differently every single time, and might not happen at all if the player decides to alt tab and look something up on their phone mid boss fight.

You’re not scoring what happens. You’re scoring what might.

I’ll say it upfront: I’m a genuine admirer of Antoine Fuqua. Training Day, The Equalizer, The Guilty. These are films I have watched multiple times and would watch again without a second thought. So when a director of that caliber takes on the life of Michael Jackson, one of the most documented, analyzed, and genuinely fascinating figures in the history of popular music, you’d think the result would at least be... something. Some point of view, some interpretation, some evidence that someone in the room cared about getting it right.

Michael is not that film.

Calling it a disappointment would be doing real diplomatic work. This is the worst biopic I have ever seen, and I’ve sat through some genuinely painful ones. Not just because of the obvious compromises baked into a Jackson-estate-approved production, but because the film fails on nearly every level that a biopic can fail on. Factual fidelity, depth of character, structural coherence, and the basic responsibility of treating its subject as a complex human being rather than a licensed brand.

Take the opening section, which covers the Jackson 5. The film rewrites so much of the historical record that some critics have compared it to a Michael Jackson multiverse rather than a biography. How the Jackson 5 were discovered, who was present, which siblings existed (the film apparently has no room for Janet, Randy, or Rebbie) all get rearranged or quietly erased to fit a cleaner narrative. The movie glosses entirely over Michael’s four solo LPs recorded during his time with the Jackson 5, which produced hits including the 1972 chart-topper “Ben,” implying instead that his solo career only began with 1979’s Off the Wall. That’s not a dramatization choice. That’s just wrong. And it matters, because if you’re going to tell someone’s story, the least you can do is not actively invent a different one.

I hate criticizing the work of fellow artists. I genuinely do. But I have to be honest: apart from Colman Domingo, who turns Joe Jackson into something genuinely menacing and human at the same time, the performances are dreadful. Jaafar Jackson clearly worked hard. He has the physical imitation down. But there’s a difference between doing an impression and playing a person, and the film never gives him the material to get anywhere near the second thing.

Now. Quincy Jones.

The film reduces Quincy Jones to turning up the volume whenever Michael steps up to a microphone. He appears, delivers a few light lines, and is gone. Kendrick Sampson plays him, does fine with what he has, and then has essentially nothing to do for the rest of the runtime. The movie gives him maybe three minutes of meaningful screen time across the whole picture, and that’s being generous.

Here’s why that makes me genuinely angry. The Jackson-Jones collaboration is arguably the most consequential producer-artist partnership in pop history since George Martin and The Beatles. Without Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson would have almost certainly remained a very talented R&B artist. What Quincy did was hear something bigger in him and know exactly how to build around it. He brought in Eddie Van Halen to play guitar on “Beat It.” Eddie Van Halen, on a pop record, in 1982 for fuck’s sake! That single decision changed what pop music thought it was allowed to sound like. And the film treats the whole relationship as window dressing. A few studio scenes, some warm looks across a mixing board, and we move on. There’s an entire film in that collaboration alone.

But the film doesn’t want entire films. It wants moments. Fast ones.

This is what bothered my wife when we walked out of the cinema, and she put it better than I would have: the movie feels designed to be watched with one eye on your phone. Dialogue scenes rarely last more than two or three exchanges. Then there’s a cut, or a music cue, or a slow atmospheric shot that fills time without communicating anything. It has the rhythm of something that expects you to be distracted. Not because cinema has to be fast, but because the pacing here isn’t kinetic, it’s anxious. It’s afraid of holding your attention for too long. There are long silences and tableaux that feel less like artistic breathing room and more like dead air calculated not to punish the half-watching viewer. You could look up from your scrolling, catch thirty seconds, and not feel like you’d missed much. That’s damning.

The film ends with the 1988 Bad World Tour concert at Wembley, with an epilogue card reading “His story continues” doing a lot of work to acknowledge that, yes, quite a lot happened after 1988. The choice of endpoint is understandable given the legal constraints around depicting certain people and events. But it still produces an odd film, one that stops just before its subject became the most culturally complex figure of the following two decades.

And here’s what pains me most about all of it. The film opened to $217 million globally in its first weekend, making it the biggest opening in history for a musical biopic. It will make an enormous amount of money. And studios will read that as a green light. Not a green light for “make a great biopic about a musical icon.” A green light for “sanitize everything, keep it moving, get the estate’s approval, cast someone who looks like the subject, and let the nostalgia do the rest.” That’s the template now, apparently ratified by a quarter billion dollars in ticket sales.

Michael Jackson deserved better than this. Not as a moral judgment, just as a basic artistic one. His life was strange, painful, spectacular, and genuinely strange again. There’s a film in there somewhere that could have honored that complexity without either exploiting or erasing it. This wasn’t it.

The money says nobody cares.

I remember finishing tracks in a single session. Not good tracks, mostly. But finished ones, which is a thing that counts more than people admit. I’d sit down, make something, feel reasonably okay about it, move on. There was a kind of momentum to it that I haven’t fully recovered.

Then I learned things. Spent years learning things. How harmony actually works. What makes a mix feel wide without sounding fake. Why certain progressions land and others don’t. I got better, objectively. And somewhere in the middle of getting better, I started spending forty-five minutes on a two-bar transition that would have taken me four minutes before I knew what a two-bar transition was supposed to do.

Nobody tells you this is coming. Creative education, formal or otherwise, is sold as pure accumulation. You add skills, you get stronger, you make better work. Linear. Clean. Completely wrong.

What actually happens is you build a second brain that lives slightly behind the one doing the work, and that second brain has opinions. Strong ones. You reach for a chord and it sighs. You write a line and it pulls a face. It has heard the reference you’re accidentally quoting. It knows the version of this you were probably going for and how far short you’re falling. It’s assembled from every record you’ve studied, every piece of work you’ve admired, every conversation about craft you’ve had at whatever weird hour people have those conversations.

Useful, right? Sure. Also exhausting in a way that beginners don’t have to deal with. A beginner doesn’t know the gap between what they’re making and what they could theoretically make, because they don’t know what they could theoretically make. They’re working in the dark and the dark is actually quite comfortable once you’re used to it. You start developing taste and someone turns the lights on and now you can see everything, including all the furniture you keep walking into.

I’ve talked to enough other people who do this for a living to know I’m not describing anything unusual. The pattern is consistent. Early work: fast, instinctive, sometimes embarrassing in retrospect but alive in a way the later stuff occasionally isn’t. Later work: more considered, more refined, harder to start, harder to finish, haunted by the awareness of its own inadequacy before it’s even done and even worse: sometimes before it’s even begun.

The common advice at this point is to “trust the process” or “get out of your own way” or some variation of those things. I understand why people say this. I also think it’s borderline useless because it treats the internal critic as something you can just decide to ignore, like a notification you can swipe away. You can’t. It’s built from real knowledge. You can’t unknow what you know.

And here’s what I actually think is happening, or what I’ve come to think after enough time with this problem: the speed I had early on wasn’t really confidence. It was just the absence of comparison. I wasn’t moving fast because I believed in what I was doing. I was moving fast because I had no framework for measuring it against anything. The moment you build that framework, speed requires something different. It requires being willing to make something you can already see is imperfect, while knowing exactly how it’s imperfect, and doing it anyway. That’s a much harder thing than just not knowing.

Some people seem to find a way through this. You can hear it in their work. There’s a looseness that coexists with obvious skill, like the two things made peace at some point. I’m not sure how that happens. I suspect it has something to do with deciding, at a fairly deep level, that the work being done is more important than the work being good. Which is easy to say and genuinely difficult to mean.

I think about the work I made before I knew anything, and sometimes I miss it the way you’d miss a version of yourself that was wrong about almost everything but walked into rooms without hesitating. The hesitation is the knowledge. They came together. I’m not sure you get to keep one without the other.

There’s a thing that happens when you watch enough films closely. You start noticing the seams. Not in a bad way. You start hearing where one person’s brain ends and another’s begins, and how the join between them is actually the interesting part.

Burton and Elfman. Spielberg and Williams. Nolan and Zimmer. More recently, Nolan and Johansson, who I think is one of the most underrated collaborations going right now. People talk about these pairings like they’re cute industry gossip, like it’s a fun fact you file away next to “did you know Kubrick was afraid of flying.” But I’ve been thinking about them differently lately. Less as trivia, more as evidence.

Evidence that the best version of the work usually came from a specific collision. Two people, two sets of obsessions, and something that couldn’t have existed without both of them being in the room. Elfman’s carnival darkness wasn’t just matching Burton’s visuals. It was an argument. A conversation between equals who happened to have very different jobs. Williams didn’t score Jaws. He argued for what Jaws could feel like at a frequency you can’t put words to.

I’m a composer. I have my own thing. And I spend a lot of time thinking about what my thing actually is, which is its own kind of rabbit hole, but I do have one. A sound. A set of preoccupations. A way of thinking about how music exists inside a story rather than on top of it.

Drama is where I live. Orchestras, big and small, with just enough modern texture to keep things from feeling like a museum piece. And I’m still firmly in the camp that believes a theme has to be memorable. Not wallpaper. Not a vibe that sits behind dialogue so politely you forget it’s there. A real theme, the kind someone can hum in the shower three days later, the kind that tells you something about the story before a single word of it does. If you’re the type of person who can identify a film or a game from four bars of its score, we probably already have a lot to talk about.

What I don’t have is a Tim Burton.

I’ve worked with directors and developers I genuinely liked. Some of them I’d call friends, or something close to it. There’s real warmth in those collaborations, real trust in the room, and I don’t want to flatten that. But there’s a difference between making something together and building something over time. The pairs I mentioned didn’t produce a masterpiece and then move on. They kept going. The second project learned from the first. By the fifth, they were finishing each other’s sentences in a language they’d invented between them. That’s not something you get from a well-run project.

Here’s the part I find genuinely uncomfortable to sit with: those relationships aren’t equal. They never were. The director picks the composer. Full stop. The composer serves the vision. You can dress it up in collaboration language all you want, but the asymmetry is baked in. Williams didn’t greenlight Raiders of the Lost Ark. Elfman didn’t decide Batman needed to be about a traumatized billionaire in a rubber suit.

And yet. The best of those pairs managed to make the hierarchy feel irrelevant, which is its own kind of magic trick. You can’t quite tell anymore who had the original idea. When Elfman writes a theme that Burton then builds a scene around, the arrow of influence reverses. The score becomes the blueprint. That’s not a hired gun situation. That’s something else.

I’ve been mostly in hired gun territory. You get the brief, you read the room, you deliver something that fits. And honestly I’m good at that. Being useful inside someone else’s vision isn’t nothing. But it’s also not the thing I’m describing. It’s not the collision.

So this is me, putting something in writing, half to clarify my own thinking and half because I genuinely don’t know where else to put it. If you’re in films or games, if you’re building a world and you feel like something is missing from how it sounds, and you’ve got the patience to actually develop something with someone over time rather than just hiring the need away, I want to know you. Not in a networking way. Not in a “let’s grab a coffee and exchange cards” way. I mean the real version of this, where we both bring something stubborn to the table and see what happens when it collides. And if you’re not that person but you know who I’m talking about, just send this their way. Play matchmaker. I’ll owe you one.

The pairs that mattered didn’t start as business relationships that warmed up. They started as creative arguments that happened to be productive. That’s the thing I’m looking for.

There is a particular kind of humiliation reserved for artists who try to play by someone else’s rules. I recently experienced it firsthand, at the hands of a platform I had managed to avoid for years and whose entire existence seems designed to make me feel like I was born in the wrong century.

Here goes...

I just released an EP. Three piano tracks, one full orchestral piece. Neoclassical, emotional, the kind of music that lives somewhere between melancholy and whatever comes after it. Music I am actually sort of proud of. Music I spent real time on. And because nobody makes music to have it rot on a hard drive, I decided to do the responsible thing and try to get people to hear it.

Every music forum I read keep saying the same thing: TikTok. Organic growth. Algorithm. Discovery. In 2026, this is apparently still the gospel. So I did what any reasonable skeptic does when he thinks he might be wrong about something: I gave it a shot.

I want to be clear about my baseline relationship with TikTok before I continue. I do not use it. I have never used it recreationally. Every time I have accidentally spent more than four minutes on it, I have emerged slightly dumber and inexplicably angry. The fake pranks alone should be classified as a form of psychological warfare. How many times can a grown adult watch someone pretend to accidentally drop a birthday cake before their will to live quietly dims? I do not know the number, but I suspect it is lower than the platform’s average session time.

Still. I kept an open mind. I did research. I spent time looking at what other solo musicians, specifically people making the kind of quiet, serious instrumental music I make, were actually doing on there. What I found was... instructive.

The playbook is basically one move, executed at infinite scale. You either film yourself playing for ten to fifteen seconds with a text overlay that says something like “POV: you just found a track that speaks to your soul,” or you find a moody shot of rain on a window and caption it something like “For those moments when life is too loud.” That second one is the kind of sentence you would find in a teenage girl’s journal, tucked between a dried flower and a photo of someone’s back.

Now, what do I know about teenage girls? I have six daughters. Try me.

I understand the emotional vocabulary. I even understand why it works, in theory. But standing there trying to channel that register felt, to put it delicately, completely alien to who I am. These are not the words I use. This is not the voice I have. I was essentially cosplaying as a more palatable version of myself in order to be discovered, which is one of the more quietly depressing sentences I have written in recent memory.

But fine. That’s the game, right? So I played it.

I built a clean template in Final Cut Pro, got ten videos in that exact style using the best segment of the EP’s saddest track, and scheduled them out, two per day, one piano-focused video for mornings, one atmospheric one for evenings. I posted consistently. I did what the forums told me to do.

Then I looked at the stats.

Between 700 and 1,000 views per video. On the surface, that sounds reasonable for someone starting from zero. Except that over 90% of those viewers skipped at approximately 1.3 seconds. One point three seconds. The first two words of the overlay had barely appeared. The music had not had time to establish a single phrase. Whatever you think of my music, you cannot form an opinion about it in one second. Nobody can. You barely have time to register that sound is happening.

Six or seven likes per video. On a thousand views.

I dug deeper, because that is what you do when the numbers make no sense and you are too stubborn to just accept that you failed. What I found was that TikTok was geofencing my content, at least in my case, and serving it almost exclusively in the area around me. I live in Switzerland, right next to the French border. 96% of my viewers were from France.

I thought: ah, language barrier. The overlays were in English.

So I redid a fresh batch in French. Same format, same music, same scheduling logic. Same result. One to two seconds of watch time, roughly a thousand viewers, the same wall.

Then I found the second number, and that is the one that actually made me put the phone down and stare at the ceiling for a moment. 87% of my viewers, across both rounds, were French-speaking women between 18 and 24.

Nothing against that demographic. Genuinely. But my music is not being heard by them. It is being scrolled past by them. And the question of how I might change my content to catch their attention for more than a second is one I am apparently not interested enough in to pursue, because the honest answer is: I do not want to make content for people who are not looking for what I make. That is not bitterness. That is just clarity about what the whole exercise was supposed to be for.

I uninstalled the app.

In the meantime, a few playlist curators picked up tracks from the EP on Spotify. My audience grew by around 500 listeners in under a week. No videos. No moody rain footage. No soul-speaking POV captions. Just the music, sitting in a context where people were actually looking for it.

I am not drawing a lesson about TikTok being evil or useless, because it clearly works for some people. I am drawing a much smaller, quieter observation about what 1.3 seconds tells you about the current relationship between humans and content. We have built systems so efficient at delivering stimulation that they have trained us to reject anything that does not deliver its entire promise in the first heartbeat. And music, real music, any music that asks you to sit with something for longer than it takes to swipe, is fundamentally incompatible with that contract.

The platform is not the problem. The attention span is not even entirely the problem. The problem is the assumption that being seen and being heard are the same thing. They are not. They have never been. And no amount of rain-on-a-window footage is going to close that gap.

At some point I started measuring my days by output. Not happiness, not quality, not whether I actually made something worth a damn. Output. Did I produce a thing. Was the thing finished. Can I point at it. If yes, good day. If no, something is wrong with me and I should probably lie awake thinking about it.

I can’t tell you exactly when this happened, but I can tell you it snuck in quietly, disguised as discipline. There’s a whole industry behind it. Courses about creative habits, newsletters about morning routines, podcast episodes where extremely productive people explain that they wake up at 5am, journal for forty-five minutes, and somehow still have time to build a business and bake sourdough. It sounds admirable. It is also, I’ve come to suspect, a kind of madness we’ve all agreed to call ambition.

Productivity culture didn’t invent the idea of hard work. That’s old and mostly fine. What it did invent is the idea that every hour has a yield, and that yield is the point. It took the logic of a factory floor and applied it to things that have nothing to do with factory floors. Writing. Painting. Composing. Making things. Suddenly those things needed metrics, systems, daily targets. And creative people, who are historically terrible at feeling okay about themselves anyway, absorbed all of it without much resistance.

The logical endpoint of this is the content creator. I don’t mean that as an insult, I mean it as a diagnosis. The content creator is what you get when making things becomes a production schedule. You stop asking “is this good?” and start asking “is this done?” Those are very different questions. One of them has an answer you can put in a spreadsheet. The other one might keep you up at night indefinitely and force you to reconsider everything you thought you knew about the thing you’re making. Productivity culture obviously prefers the first question, because the second one is inconvenient and doesn’t fit into a weekly review template.

Once you’ve swapped those two questions, the whole creative act changes shape. You’re not trying to make something true or surprising or genuinely yours anymore. You’re trying to ship. You develop a mild allergic reaction to anything that takes too long, because time spent on one thing is time not spent producing the next thing. You optimize. And optimized art is, almost without exception, boring art. Smooth edges, familiar shapes, nothing that snags on the way down.

Here’s the part I find harder to admit. I do this to myself. Not in the content creator sense, I’m not sitting here with a posting schedule and a ring light. But I have a version of it that is probably worse because it’s entirely internal and there’s no audience to even justify it. On days where I don’t produce something, I feel like a failure. Not tired, not resting, not thinking. Failing. There is a specific low-grade dread that kicks in when I realize the day is not going to yield anything I can point at. It feels moral. Like laziness is a character flaw I’ve been managing rather than a completely normal state that every human being on the planet cycles through.

This is why I am genuinely terrible at taking time off. Not bad at it the way some people are bad at it, where they check email once on holiday and feel a bit guilty. I mean structurally incapable of it. A free day doesn’t feel free, it feels like debt accumulating. Like somewhere a counter is ticking and I will need to account for these hours at some point. Vacations are fine in theory, I can read about people taking them. In practice I last about forty-eight hours before the absence of output starts to feel like a threat.

What I know intellectually, and what my nervous system refuses to accept, is that the blank, unproductive days are not empty. They are where the actual thinking happens, the slow, underwater kind that doesn’t look like anything from the outside. Every piece of work I’ve made that I’m proud of had a long, apparently useless stretch before it. Weeks of not quite knowing what the thing was, what it wanted to be. That period looks like nothing. It shows up as nothing in any productivity system. And it is, I now believe, the most important part of the whole process. Productivity culture has no word for it except “procrastination,” which tells you everything about what productivity culture actually values.

The problem is that I built an identity around making things. And identity is a difficult thing to put on pause for a Tuesday. So I keep the counter running, I keep checking whether I’ve produced enough to justify the day, and I call this work ethic. It’s not, really. It’s just anxiety wearing a very convincing costume.

Maybe the most creative thing you can do right now is stop treating your brain like a machine that should be running at capacity at all times. Machines are better at that anyway. What machines can’t do is sit in a room and not know what something is yet. That specific discomfort, the thing that feels like wasted time, is probably the only part of this that matters.

Somewhere along the way, “sharing” became a virtue. Not just something you do, but something you owe. Post your process, show your work, bring people along for the ride. Give. Be generous. Be accessible. Be real. And while you’re at it, be consistent, because the algorithm rewards consistency, and you want to be rewarded, don’t you?

What a beautiful scam.

I’m not talking about community, or genuine connection, or even self-promotion in the honest sense where at least people admit that’s what it is. I’m talking about the slow, largely unexamined transformation of “sharing” into a moral category, a personality trait, something that separates the open-hearted artist from the guarded, selfish recluse who apparently just makes things in a room and never posts about it. As if the whole point of making something was always to hand it immediately to an audience and wait for a response. As if the private act of creation was just a draft state before the real thing: publication.

This didn’t happen all at once. Platforms didn’t announce it. Nobody sent a memo. But somewhere between the early days of social media as a genuinely chaotic, unmonetized mess and what we have now, a behavioral shift occurred. The platforms didn’t just host content. They trained people. They trained them to think in posts, to see a beautiful moment and immediately begin captioning it, to experience a feeling and wonder whether it’s shareable. The editing doesn’t happen after the fact anymore. It happens before. Before you finish the thought, before the song is written, before the photo is taken, you’re already considering the frame. The audience arrives before the work does.

Which gives rise to something that I think is a genuinely new psychological condition, one nobody really has a clean name for: the guilt of not documenting. The faint but persistent unease that arrives when you do something meaningful and don’t record it. You have a great conversation, take a long walk, spend a weekend absorbed in a piece of music that cracks something open in you, and there’s this residual feeling, vague and slightly embarrassing, that it doesn’t quite count. That it happened off the record and therefore barely happened at all. That’s not a small thing. That’s an identity disorder wearing casual clothes.

Now, I want to be clear: this isn’t exclusively a creative problem. It runs through everything. Travel, parenting, fitness, food, grief. The logic of content has colonized pretty much every domain of human experience. But it hits artists and musicians with a particular cruelty, because the pressure doesn’t just compete with their time. It competes with the exact quality of attention that making good work requires.

In May 2022, Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park tweeted something that got passed around a fair amount, and it deserved to. He wrote that he was tired of musicians being told they weren’t investing enough in social media content, and that every artist he spoke to was feeling the same strain. Then he asked the question that actually matters: “How is a young artist expected to put in enough time to get great at their craft when they need to feed all these content channels? The time they spent generating mind numbing ‘content’ might have been at the expense of the best song they never wrote.”

That last sentence. The best song they never wrote.

Think about what that means if you take it seriously. Not a vague cultural loss, but a specific, irreversible one. Particular songs, paintings, films, books, that simply did not get made because the person who might have made them was too busy performing the identity of someone who makes things. There’s no way to measure that. There’s no archive of the unmade. But it’s real.

The deeper issue, the one beneath the scheduling and the burnout and the platform economics, is a confusion about what creative work actually is and what it’s for. And I think most people, including people who call themselves artists, have stopped being able to tell the difference between expression and content. They use the words interchangeably. They’re not the same thing.

Content is made for an audience. It is, at its core, communicative. It wants a response. It is shaped by anticipated reception, by what will land, by what will be understood or liked or shared. None of that is inherently bad. Communication is important. But expression doesn’t work that way. Expression doesn’t need an audience to justify itself. It’s not shaped by anticipation. It happens because something internal requires it to happen, and whether or not anyone ever sees it is secondary, sometimes completely irrelevant. The distinction isn’t about format or platform. A painting can be content. A TikTok can be expression. A novel can be content. A voice memo you make at 2am that no one will ever hear can be expression. What matters is the intent driving the thing, and more specifically, who the thing is being made for.

Most people have lost the thread. They can’t identify their own intent anymore, because the habits of content production have become so automatic, so structurally embedded in how they move through their days, that they no longer notice when they’ve shifted from one mode to the other. They think they’re expressing themselves when they’re actually producing for an imagined audience they’ve internalized so completely it feels like their own voice. That’s the quiet crisis underneath all the noise about algorithms and virality and monetization. It’s not a platform problem. It’s a self-knowledge problem.

I spend a fair amount of time on Substack. More than I probably should admit, actually. And I like it. Compared to the relentless pace of Instagram, reading long-form writing there feels like leaving a party to sit outside for a bit. But even there, the distinction shows up almost immediately if you’re paying attention. There are writers on Substack who have something to say. You can feel it in the first paragraph: the thought came first, then the writing. And then there are writers who have committed to posting twice a week because they read that consistency builds an audience, so they do it, dutifully, and the posts arrive like performance reviews: competent, forgettable, clearly produced on schedule. The writing is fine. The thinking is fine. But nobody was burning to say it. And you can tell.

The personality-first economy that platforms have built is particularly absurd for musicians, because music, real music, the kind that gets inside you and stays there, is almost by definition the result of someone disappearing into a room for a very long time and doing something that looks like nothing from the outside. It doesn’t photograph well. It has no story arc suitable for a three-minute video. The interesting part, the part where the actual thing is being figured out, is invisible and slow and frequently involves failure. Turning that process into content is possible, but it requires such a fundamental re-orientation of attention that you’re no longer quite doing the thing you’re supposed to be doing. You’re demonstrating it. And demonstration is not the same as practice.

So we end up with musicians who are personalities first and practitioners second. Not because they wanted that, but because the industry, the labels, the platforms, and eventually their own internalized sense of professional obligation pushed them there. Shinoda’s frustration wasn’t just personal. It was diagnostic. The system is optimized for visibility, and visibility and depth are not the same axis.

I don’t have a fix for this. I’m not sure there is one, not at the structural level. The incentives are too entrenched, the habits too deeply formed. But there’s something worth preserving in the ability to make something and not immediately turn it into an event. To finish a song and sit with it. To read a book and not post about it. To have an experience that belongs entirely to you.

The best work anyone ever made probably didn’t start with a content strategy. It started with someone who couldn’t help themselves.

The problem is we’re building a world where that person increasingly can’t afford to exist.

Switzerland has a saying for everything. Most of those sayings involve being practical, keeping your head down, and absolutely not doing anything too flamboyant. Art falls squarely in the “flamboyant” category. Growing up here, you hear one sentence so many times it gets tattooed on the inside of your skull: music is a nice hobby. Not a career. Not a calling. A hobby. Like collecting stamps. Something you do to decompress after your real job. I heard that sentence from teachers, relatives, friends’ parents, and every well-meaning adult who felt entitled to map out my future for me. And here’s the shameful part: I believed them. For a very, very long time.

Let me back up.

Before I was writing music for a living, I wore a uniform. I’ve traveled to places most people only read about in the news, and usually not the good sections of the news. I’m not going to go deep into that chapter here. After that, I moved into tech. Game development, corporate software for finance, then teaching programming at a university. For most of my career I was a contractor, an indie developer moving between companies, writing code for whoever needed it. That background did something to me that I didn’t fully appreciate until much later: it made me very comfortable with being a service provider. With listening to a problem, internalizing it, and solving it. That skill, it turns out, is half of what film scoring actually is.

By my late thirties, my musical credentials were as follows: I could play bass guitar. By ear. Self-taught. Badly, some days.

What I also had, though I didn’t think of it as an asset at the time, was a brain that has been running a private soundtrack since I was a child. I’m autistic. Diagnosed by actual medical doctors, not by a three-minute TikTok video with a lofi beat under it. One of the things this means for me is that I hear music constantly, internally, like an ambient layer underneath everything I do. I always assumed everyone did this. Turns out they don’t. That’s a fun thing to discover in your late thirties.

Now. The open-plan office.

I was working for a corporation that had the brilliant idea of putting fifty to sixty developers in the same enormous hall. Open space, as they call it with a straight face, as though calling it that makes it a creative utopia rather than a noise machine with desks in it. I cannot work with background noise. I don’t mean I find it distracting. I mean it is cognitively impossible for me. Someone laughing three rows away is enough to send my concentration straight off a cliff. So I bought noise-cancelling headphones and started listening to music while I worked. Music with lyrics, though, turned out to be just as disruptive as the conversations it was masking. Words are words, whether they come from my colleague’s weekend recap or from a hook in a metal song. My brain processes them the same way and refuses to let go.

So I started building playlists of instrumental music. Which led me, almost immediately, to two things: classical music and film scores. I didn’t approach either of them as a genre nerd. I approached them as someone who desperately needed to get some code written without losing their mind. It worked. And for a while, that was the entire story.

Then came the evening I got in my car.

My phone connected to the car stereo and kept playing, except this time it wasn’t one of my playlists. It was an auto-generated one. Stuff I’d never heard. I was driving home, not paying particular attention, and then a piece started playing and something happened to me that I did not have a name for and still struggle to describe accurately. I started crying. Not the polite, cinematic kind. The pull-over-on-the-side-of-the-road kind. I sat there in the car as it got dark, listening to the whole thing play out, genuinely confused about what had just occurred in my own nervous system.

The piece was Table for Two by Abel Korzeniowski, from Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals. I had never seen the film. I didn’t know who Abel Korzeniowski was. I knew absolutely nothing. And yet roughly three minutes of music had done something to me that three decades of living had not managed to do: made me stop completely and feel something I could not outthink.

From that point, I became, in the most autism-coded way possible, obsessed. Not in a casual “I’ve been getting into film music lately” way. In a “I have purchased seven books on music theory and I am going to understand exactly how this happened to me” way. Books on theory, on music psychology, on the history of orchestral composition. That gave me the framework but not the thing itself. So I got a piano. Then online courses. Then I needed to understand orchestration, which meant software. I ended up with Cubase Pro, and if you’ll allow me a brief moment of genuine enthusiasm: Thank you people at Steinberg for building something extraordinary with that program. It does exactly what I needed it to do, which is take the music that has always been running in my head and turn it into something another human being can actually hear. My background in coding helped enormously here. I automated what I could, built custom workflows, compensated for the fact that I had not been sitting at a piano since age six.

I was coding during the day and writing music at night. My original goal, to understand why that piece of music had floored me, quietly dissolved somewhere in the middle of all of it. I stopped trying to analyze the feeling and started chasing it instead.

Once you have written enough music and convinced yourself it doesn’t completely embarrass you, you put it online. I uploaded tracks to SoundCloud and YouTube. The first time someone clicked the thumbs up, the number went from zero to one and I reacted as though I had won something. I’m aware that this is objectively ridiculous. I do not care.

Then came the email from Max.

Max was a music supervisor for an ad agency. He had been searching by keywords, found one of my tracks, and wanted to know if a deodorant brand could use it for their campaign. I said yes. They paid me. Not a life-changing sum. But a sum. Real money, for music I had written, from someone who had found it without knowing me. I realize that the connection between “making music” and “getting paid for music” is obvious to most people. It was not obvious to me. I was Swiss, I had been told my whole life that this was a hobby, and somewhere in my subconscious I had filed music under “things that don’t count as work.” Getting that payment was the first crack in a wall that had been standing for thirty-plus years.

Max and I collaborated on a bunch of projects after that. Then he moved to a position as music supervisor for a major TV network. He called me about writing for a documentary film trailer. I said yes. Around the same time I discovered production music libraries, started writing for those, picked up short film work, then feature film work. I met composers who brought me on as a technical assistant and as a ghostwriter. Ghostwriting was, honestly, a great deal for me at the time. I was in the studio, doing the work, not in meetings, not managing anyone’s feelings. I am a fan of this arrangement.

Max eventually brought me to Los Angeles. He set up meetings, introductions, dinners. I ended up in rooms with directors and musicians I had spent years listening to from a significant geographical and psychological distance. That part remains somewhat surreal to think about, especially that some of these people are now friends.

And then Aurélie walked into my life. I wrote a whole post about what a muse actually is, and I’ll point you there rather than repeat myself, but the short version is this: she looked at what I was doing, looked at me still treating music as a secondary thing, and told me it needed to stop. Not suggested. Told. She was right. I went full time.

So here is what I want to say to whoever is reading this while sitting on something they have always wanted to do but have been quietly talked out of for years. There is no age requirement. There is no deadline. The people who told you to be realistic when you were young were not oracles. They were just people who had made their own compromises and found it comforting when others made the same ones. You don’t have to. The only actual condition is that you still have a pulse and you still want it.

As for Abel Korzeniowski: I eventually had the opportunity to tell him this entire story. What his music had done to me, where it had led me, who I had become because of three minutes and twenty-four seconds of strings and piano in a car on the side of a road at dusk.

He answered. I’m putting his reply right here below.

The man whose music broke something open in me took the time to write back.

Some hobbies just have better endings than others.

There is a folder on my hard drive I never open. Not because I’ve forgotten it’s there, but because I haven’t forgotten. It contains the wreckage of things I started and couldn’t finish: sketches of pieces that never found their shape, half-built arrangements that stalled somewhere in the middle, ideas that felt urgent at two in the morning and embarrassing by noon. Drafts for an online course. Photo edits I’ll complete someday. Bits of code for apps I started writing a lifetime ago. I’ve moved this folder from computer to computer for years, the way you move a box from apartment to apartment without ever unpacking it.

I used to think of it as evidence of something. A record of failure, or at least of inconsistency. I’ve since changed my mind.

Paul Valéry wrote, in 1933, that for a certain kind of artist, a work is never completed. It is only abandoned. The line has been misattributed to Leonardo, to Wilde, to whoever the speaker needs it to be, and it has been used almost universally as consolation. A way of saying: it’s fine that you didn’t finish. Even the greats didn’t finish. Rest easy.

But that’s not what Valéry meant, and it’s not the interesting part of the idea.

What he was actually describing was a particular relationship with perfection, the kind that makes completion impossible not because the artist is lazy or distracted, but because the work can always become something else. The abandonment isn’t a defeat. It’s a decision made under pressure, a letting go that happens when the gap between what the thing is and what you wanted it to be becomes too exhausting to keep staring at. The work goes out into the world, or goes into the fire, because something had to give. Not because you were done.

That distinction matters more than it looks like it does.

Here is what I’ve come to believe: finished work lies to you.

Not maliciously. But by the time something is completed, it has been edited for coherence. The doubt has been resolved, one way or another. The wrong turns have been smoothed over or cut entirely. What remains is a version of events, a retroactive narrative in which every decision seems to have led somewhere. The finished thing presents itself as inevitable. As if it couldn’t have been otherwise.

Abandoned work doesn’t do that. It stops at the exact moment the doubt became unlivable. It preserves the break point in amber. And that break point, if you’re willing to look at it honestly, contains more information about who you actually are than any finished piece you’ve ever made.

I don’t mean this in the motivational sense, as in: your unfinished projects reveal your “true passions.” That framing is just self-help wearing a turtleneck. I mean something more structural. The moment you stopped is a data point about your actual limits, your real values, your instincts before they were curated. Finishing something requires you to make peace with the gap. Abandoning something means you refused to. And that refusal is, in its own way, a form of integrity.

There’s a specific kind of abandoned project that I find most useful to think about: the one that didn’t fail because of external circumstances, because of time or money or competing obligations, but the one that failed because you simply lost the desire to make it. One day you were working on it, and then you weren’t, and the reason is hard to articulate even now.

Those are the interesting ones.

Because the loss of desire is never random. It tracks something. A shift in what you find meaningful, a quiet revision of who you’re trying to be, a growing mismatch between the work and the person doing it. You didn’t abandon the project. You outgrew it, or you walked away from the version of yourself that needed to make it. Either way, the abandoned file is a timestamp on a transformation you may not have consciously registered at the time.

Finished work shows you who you were willing to become. Abandoned work shows you who you decided not to be.

There’s also a less flattering reading, and I think honesty requires including it.

Some abandoned projects aren’t timestamps on growth. Some of them are just projects you were too afraid to finish. The ending felt too exposing, or the work got hard in a way you didn’t want to deal with, or you sensed that completion would require you to find out whether the thing was actually good. Abandonment, in those cases, is not integrity. It’s a way of keeping the possibility alive. As long as the project is unfinished, it could still be anything. The moment you finish it, it becomes only what it is.

I’ve done this. I know what it feels like to stop working on something not because I stopped caring but because I cared too much and didn’t trust what I’d find at the end. That’s a different kind of abandonment, and it leaves a different kind of residue. Less informative, more uncomfortable.

But even that version of the unfinished work teaches you something. It shows you where your nerve ran out. And knowing where your nerve runs out is, arguably, the beginning of doing something about it.

I’ve stopped thinking of that folder as evidence of failure. I think of it now as a record, the way a journal is a record, not a collection of achievements but a sequence of moments that didn’t resolve. It tells me things about the arc of what I’ve been trying to make that the finished work doesn’t, because the finished work has been tidied up, presented, released into the world to be whatever it needs to be for whoever is listening.

The abandoned work is just for me. It never had to become anything. And in that, it stayed honest in a way the finished work couldn’t afford to be.

I’m not saying don’t finish things. Finish things. The discipline of completion is real and it matters and it changes you in ways that stopping never will.

Don’t throw out the folder. Don’t delete the drafts. The unfinished work knows something the finished work has already forgotten.

Your finished pieces are who you became. Your abandoned ones are who you were, before you decided. That’s not nothing. That’s the whole story.

For a long time, I thought I understood what a muse was. A beautiful person, nearby, existing in a way that somehow makes the creative juices flow. Be there, be pretty, radiate some intangible energy, and the art takes care of itself. Very romantic. Very useless as a concept. I filed it away next to “divine inspiration” and “the tortured genius” as things that sound profound in a museum pamphlet and mean absolutely nothing in practice.

That was my operating assumption until she said something that broke the whole theory apart.

We were early in our relationship. I was deep into a tech career that quietly drained something out of me every single day. I wasn’t complaining about it out loud, not that much at least, but she saw it anyway. And one day she just said it plainly: “You’re not happy. That’s not who you are. From now on, you’re going to be who you are. A composer who writes music for film, because he loves stories. Both listening to them and telling them.”

That was it. No lengthy analysis. No soft-footed approach. Just the thing, stated clearly, by someone who knew me well enough to see past whatever face I was putting on for the world. It needed to come from the outside. I would not have said it to myself that way, not then. And in that moment, without either of us naming it, she stepped into a role she’s been holding ever since.

People ask me how I produce the volume of work that I do, within the timelines that I do. I always give the same answer: I have two unfair advantages. First, I don’t need that much sleep. Second, and more importantly, I have my muse. And before you picture what I used to picture, let me walk you through what that actually means.

Yes, the “be there, be pretty” part is fully covered. She’s always here, and she’s always beautiful. That part holds. But if I’m being direct, which I always try to be, that part is also the least of it when it comes to making art.

Here is what I mean when I say muse.

She is my number one fan. I know this without a single doubt. And I want you to sit with that for a second, because it sounds like a nice thing. Like something sweet you’d print on a greeting card. What it actually is, is weight. Real, constant, productive weight.

I love her more than anything in this life. That’s not a line, that’s just the operating reality. Which means she’s the last person I want to disappoint. Every piece of music I write, I know she’s going to hear it. I know she’s going to feel something, or not feel something, and I’m going to know which one it is because I know her face. That awareness lives in me from the first note of a new piece all the way through to the final mastering pass. It doesn’t make me anxious. It makes me not cut corners.

That’s what accountability looks like when it comes from love rather than obligation.

Then there’s what she feeds me. The raw material.

I’ve always believed that for an artist to be worth anything, the artist needs to have something to say. A technique without content is just a demonstration. And she keeps my supply of things to say absolutely inexhaustible, mostly because from the first day we met, we started talking and we have not stopped. We talk about everything. She challenges how I see the world, how I think about people, how I construct ideas. She doesn’t always agree with me to be agreeable. She can push back, and I can push back, and something comes out of that friction that neither of us had going in. There is also something else that happens in those conversations, something harder to name but probably more important. I don’t wear anything around her. No version of myself curated for the room, no instinct to self-edit before the words come out. The fear of being judged, which I think quietly shapes more of what most people say and don’t say than anyone likes to admit, is just not there. Which means I can voice things I wouldn’t be able to say to anyone else. Half-formed thoughts, uncomfortable observations, things I’m not even sure I believe yet but need to say out loud to find out. She’s the only place those get to exist. And some of my best work started as exactly that kind of unguarded, unpolished thing that I would never have let out in any other room.

Music, for me, is what happens when words aren’t enough. It’s the vector I use to try to translate a feeling into something someone else can actually touch. The problem with vectors is that they need something to carry. She gives me that. Because of what she makes me feel, because of the life we have actually lived together, I have a thousand stories to tell and a genuine reason to tell them.

We have had times so good they don’t feel real in retrospect. The kind you see in films and assume are fiction because nobody actually gets to have those moments. And we’ve had times that went the other way entirely. Bad in ways that also don’t feel quite real when you look back. What she does, and what we do together, is construct the narrative around those experiences. We talk them through, we find the shape of them, we figure out what they mean. That collaborative processing of a shared life is not a small thing. Without it, I’d just have raw experience. With it, I have material.

I also need to talk about the part nobody thinks of when they romanticize the muse.

I am, organizationally, a disaster. I don’t say this as false modesty or as one of those charming artist quirks people perform. I mean it practically: left to my own devices, things spiral. She keeps a lid on it. She makes it look simple, which is its own kind of mastery (I’ll get into what mastery actually looks like in a future post, because I have a lot to say on that).

We have kids. She has a demanding job of her own. And yet she’s consistently the one who makes the schedules work, who makes life bend around what I need to do. I don’t work a nine-to-five that I can pause at a set time and pick up tomorrow. I work in an industry built on aggressive deadlines. I can start a session more or less whenever the conditions are right, but I never know in advance when I’ll be done. The machine starts when it starts and stops when it stops. Living with that is not nothing. Making it sustainable, over years, for an entire family, is genuinely hard work that I think gets undervalued in the stories artists tell about themselves. She does it, and she makes it look like it’s not hard at all.

That’s not luck. That’s her.

I could keep going. There are dimensions to this I haven’t touched. But it all leads back to the same thing.

The muse is not decoration. The muse is not ambient beauty. The muse is not a passive element in someone else’s creative life.

She is the reason the creating happens at all.

Not the inspiration, not the catalyst, not the muse in the old mythological sense where some external force descends and grants you the gift of making something. I mean the actual, structural, daily reason that any of it is possible. The one who held a mirror up and said “this is who you are, now go be that.” The one whose opinion lives inside every creative decision I make. The one who argues with me, challenges me, organizes the wreckage around me, and builds enough space and quiet and stability in our life that there’s room for the chaos that making things actually requires.

I didn’t know that’s what a muse was. Nobody told me.

She did.

One more thing. I know I said this blog would never be a place where I push my music. I meant that, and I still do. This is not that. But she deserves to be known, and I am not sure I can do a better job of that with words than I already have in this post. So I will let the music finish the sentence. I wrote this for her. It is not about anything specific. It is about all of it.

You know when people say that you have to find your own meaning in a painting, a song, an indie movie, or any other piece of art? This is touching on an academic concept called Reception Theory. It sounds intimidating until you realize it’s just a fancy way of saying that “the audience isn’t passive”. It’s a set of ideas developed mostly in literary and cultural studies from the late 60s onward, built around the uncomfortable suggestion that meaning doesn’t live inside a text, a painting, or a song. It lives in the transaction between the thing and the person experiencing it. The work is more like a prompt than a statement. You, as a consumer of art, are doing a lot more of the heavy lifting than anyone gives you credit for.

Hans Robert Jauss, one of the main guys behind this, talked about something called the “horizon of expectations.” Basically, when you sit down with any piece of art, you bring an entire invisible backpack with you: your culture, your history, your mood that Tuesday afternoon, the book you read last month, the relationship that ended badly. All of that collides with what the author made, and what comes out of that collision is the meaning. Not what was put in. What comes out on your end. The author is, at best, a collaborator in absentia.

Roland Barthes took it further and did that thing intellectuals love to do, which is make a dramatic declaration. He said the author is dead. Not literally, obviously, though he did write it in a way that made you feel like a funeral was appropriate. His point was that once a work is released into the world, the author’s intentions become essentially irrelevant. What the writer meant is just one possible reading, and not necessarily the most interesting one. Every reader who picks it up is, in a very real sense, writing a different book.

If that sounds abstract, think about your favorite song and then read an interview with the artist explaining what it’s “really about.” Half the time it kills something. You built an entire emotional architecture around those three minutes and forty seconds, you mapped your own grief or your own joy onto it, and then some guy in a baseball cap tells a journalist it was written about a parking dispute. Congratulations, your meaning was better. It was yours. And no one can actually take that away, which is the quietly radical part of all this.

The same thing happens with film, maybe even more so. Think about how many completely contradictory readings exist for something like 2001: A Space Odyssey or, more recently, something like Parasite. Critics, academics, regular people on Reddit at 2am all land somewhere different, and they’re all working from the same two hours of footage. Kubrick famously refused to explain his films because he understood that explanation is a kind of murder. The ambiguity isn’t a bug, it’s literally where the meaning lives. Fill in the blank and you’ve just written yourself out of the equation.

Now here’s where it gets a little uncomfortable, at least for anyone who makes things for a living. If the audience is co-authoring the work, then you have less control than you think. You can obsess over every word, every note, every color choice, and someone is still going to walk away with something you never put there. Someone is going to cry at the part you wrote as a throwaway joke. Someone is going to find your most personal line completely forgettable. You don’t get to decide which parts land. You only get to decide what you throw into the room.

There’s a humbling version of this and an empowering version of this, depending on your temperament. The humbling version is that authorship is a polite fiction. The empowering version is that good work creates space. The best art doesn’t explain itself into a corner, it leaves room for someone else to move in and make it theirs. The work that lasts tends to be the work that’s a little unresolved, a little open-ended, a little too large for any single interpretation to fully occupy.

So the next time someone tells you what a piece of art “means,” including the person who made it, maybe just nod politely. You were there too. You brought half the materials. The question isn’t really what the author intended. The more interesting question is what happened in you when you received it, because that’s the version that actually exists.

I saw an ad today for a shiny new AI platform that claims it can analyze a video and instantly score it. Naturally, a lot the people in my network got their collective panties in a bunch. Complete panic mode even for some. But honestly? I don’t think I care that much. Let’s take a group breath and look at reality for a second.

Let’s be brutal here. Have you ever actually listened to AI generated music, felt a profound emotional shift in your soul, and thought, “Wow, I absolutely need more of this algorithm in my life”? No? Me neither. If your answer happens to be yes, then congratulations, you aren’t exactly my target audience anyway. There are people out there who are absolutely tone deaf and it’s not AI that changed that. The impending technological takeover really doesn’t change anything for what I do.

Think about it like this. Back before the robots came for our art, there was stock music. A director or producer who preferred slapping a generic, pre-fab track onto their project instead of getting a dedicated score crafted around their actual storytelling wasn’t someone I desperately wanted to collaborate with anyway.

If a filmmaker truly trusted their vision and cared deeply about their movie, they wouldn’t settle for off-the-shelf audio band-aids. They want a tailored fit. The exact same logic applies to AI. The people who are thrilled to type a prompt and paste the robotic result onto their film were never potential collaborators in the first place. We are playing completely different sports.

I want to work with humans who do things the human way. I want to create for other humans who are actually interested in what a living, breathing person has to say. I have zero interest in catering to people who are perfectly fine watching and hearing a machine regurgitate a blended smoothie compiled from various other human-made creations. Where is the fun in that?

If anything, I am seeing the exact opposite of an AI takeover right now. There is a resistance movement growing. Artists and consumers alike are craving actual, human-made art. See the post I made a few days ago regarding a new golden age of creativity. The novelty of the machine is wearing off fast, and people are getting incredibly bored of seeing what an algorithm has to say (or, more accurately, what it has to copy).

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not sitting here saying we should smash the servers and never use AI. That would be completely short-sighted. There are plenty of AI tools out there that help me clear up my schedule and streamline the boring stuff so I can concentrate on my core activity: actually crafting music. Using a smart assistant to speed up my workflow before I dive into a new track? Using something that streamlines the mundane tasks I need to do over and over? Great. Letting it make the art? Hard pass.

At the end of the day, AI or no AI, people like me don’t really have a choice in the matter. We do what we do because it is fundamentally who we are. No amount of shiny new technology will ever change that.

We need to talk about the state of making music right now. For the longest time, I have been writing the kind of piano tracks I actually want to make. Music with actual life in it. Music that tells a story and asks you to pay attention. But a little while ago, I decided to run an experiment. I wanted to see exactly what the almighty algorithms actually wanted from me.

So, I took a detour and churned out a batch of “soft background piano” tracks. You know the exact kind I am talking about. The musical equivalent of beige wallpaper. Safe, predictable, and entirely devoid of any strong emotions.

The result? Immediate success. Playlists scooped them up faster than I could hit publish. My Spotify monthly listeners shot up past the 8,000 mark in less than a month. I was practically a streaming superstar (slight exageration maybe). It turns out the secret to making it big is just making sure nobody actually notices your music is playing while they study or fold their laundry. That is the sad reality for piano musicians.

But I could not keep faking it. I abandoned the experiment and went right back to writing my actual music. Naturally, the playlist gatekeepers were horrified. The rejections started rolling in, and the feedback was nothing short of hilarious. I was told my tracks were “too dynamic.” Another curator complained that the “melody is too intrusive.” Read that again. My melody was too intrusive. Heaven forbid a piece of music actually contains a recognizable tune that might distract someone from their spreadsheets.

The punishment for my musical insolence was swift. My monthly listeners started a slow, agonizing slide backward. I am currently sitting at around 3,000, and honestly, the number keeps dropping every time I check. A few months ago, watching that line graph tank would have sent me into a total panic.

Now? I honestly could not care less. I have officially stopped fixating on the metrics. The truth is, I do not want to make background music. I refuse to be the audio equivalent of a houseplant. I would infinitely rather have a small handful of listeners who actually know who I am and actively choose to sit down and listen to my music, rather than 8,000 ghosts who just forgot to turn off autoplay.

Chasing numbers is just exhausting. The sheer amount of time I was spending trying to figure out the perfect Instagram post, agonizing over which hashtags to use, and trying to maximize clicks was draining my soul. More importantly, it was stealing hours away from doing the only thing that actually matters to me: writing music.

So, the algorithm and I are breaking up for good. I am sticking to making art that is entirely too dynamic and rudely melodic. If that means my streaming numbers look like a total failure to the industry, so be it. At least when someone presses play, they are actually listening.

I have this friend. He works as a designer and is utterly convinced that what he does is purely a function, a straightforward service to be rendered. He is incredibly opinionated about the absolute “right” and “wrong” ways to do things in his field, treating design as if it is a rigid mathematical equation. But let me tell you a secret: what he does is absolute art. To me, art is born entirely from intent. If there is one thing this guy has, it is intent. He just refuses to see it that way.

Our latest debate centered around the state of creativity today. Predictably, Mr. Functionality believes we are in a downward spiral. According to his deeply cynical worldview, true creativity is dwindling, drying up like a puddle in the July sun. He genuinely thinks we have run out of original ideas and are just repeating the same tired concepts. I completely and utterly disagree. He is just looking at the wrong things, in the wrong places.

From where I am sitting, we are experiencing an absolute influx of creativity. Maybe it is the chaotic state of the current world forcing people to express themselves in new ways, or perhaps it is a stubborn, distinctly human resistance against the rise of generative AI. When algorithms start spitting out generic content, humans naturally want to rebel by getting weirder and more inventive. Whatever the catalyst is, we are practically drowning in new ideas… but finding them is hard, because algorithms also tend to favor slop over things with substance.

Take music, for example. We are not just recycling the same tired pop structures anymore. The Spotify top 20 could have you thinks so but I keep hearing completely new genres emerging, along with wild fusions of sounds that have absolutely no business working together, yet somehow they do. Artists are mashing up cultural sounds and historical eras to create tracks that defy all categorization, proving that there is still uncharted territory to explore.

Then there is the fashion industry, a space I always keep an eye on. The amount of innovation happening there right now is staggering. The latest trend I have noticed is a brilliant new method for reusing old fabrics in an eco-friendly way. Designers are transforming discarded scraps into entirely new, high-end pieces. It is a perfect blend of sustainability and pure, unadulterated imagination.

Cinematography is having a massive moment, too. Filmmakers are pushing boundaries with wild new visual experiments. Technology has advanced so rapidly that it is literally unlocking creative outlets and storytelling techniques that were completely impossible just a few short years ago. Instead of letting tech make things sterile, creators are using it to build entirely new worlds and capture emotions in ways we have never seen. But to notice that, you also have to get out of the mainstream blockbusters that are advertised everywhere. I’ve recently seen “The Bride!” by Maggie Gyllenhaal… Not many talk about this film but that’s fresh creativity right there.

We are actually standing at the absolute beginning of a new, booming era of human creativity. The democratization of creative tools means that traditional gatekeepers no longer control who gets to make art. When anyone with a smartphone can shoot a film or produce a track, the baseline for what is considered “good” goes up. This forces established artists to push themselves even further out of their comfort zones. People are connecting globally, cross-pollinating ideas at the speed of light, and creating cultural movements in days instead of decades.

So, no, creativity is not dead or dying. It is just evolving faster than some rigid designers can keep up with. I love my friend, but he needs to take off his functional blinders and look at the magnificent, chaotic art happening everywhere. Until then, I will happily keep pointing out every single groundbreaking piece of work I find, just to annoy him.

If you ask me about my absolute favorite movie, the answer never changes. It is Lost in Translation. Calling it a favorite almost feels like an understatement. Sofia Coppola captured a specific kind of profound loneliness and turned it into something so visually and emotionally beautiful that it just stays with you. It is a mood you can step right back into whenever the real world gets a little too loud.

Part of my deep connection to the film comes from having actually experienced the Tokyo nightlife. I remember walking those neon lit streets and stepping into those impossibly vibrant spaces. The sensory overload of that city is intense. You are surrounded by millions of people in this massive metropolis, and the movie perfectly captures exactly what it looks and feels like to exist in those crowds.

But the isolation I connected with in the movie was not about being in Japan. That crushing, silent existential dread was something I lived through in my own life in general. I first watched the film when I was in the exact same headspace as Bob Harris. I had been drifting for a long time, completely unmoored and floating through my days without an anchor. Bill Murray perfectly embodied that heavy desperation of feeling detached from your own life.

During those drifting years, my soul ached to find my very own Charlotte. I somewhat became jealous of their on-screen relationship. I knew this was just a story, but I wanted it to be true. For me. I desperately wanted someone who could cut through the unbearable static and just sit in the silence with me. The most beautiful part of looking back on that time is knowing that I actually did find her. The aching loneliness dissolved the moment I saw her, and when she really saw me. And unlike that heartbreaking whisper at the end of the film, my Charlotte never walked away. She has been my anchor every single day since.

Looking at the film itself, the sheer brilliance of their dynamic is how the deepest romance happens entirely in the margins. It is never cheapened by grand declarations or awkward explanations. Not everything needs to be explained, this is not a film for the superhero generation. The profound intimacy lives entirely in stolen glances, unspoken understandings, and the simple comfort of resting next to someone who just gets it. It is the purest form of human connection, completely stripped of pretense.

Critics constantly praise the visual language of the film for good reason. Cinematographer Lance Acord used available light and high speed film to create something that feels unbearably intimate. It looks almost like a documentary of a dream. That choice forces you to actually feel the thick atmosphere of the settings rather than just observing them. It is a visual masterclass in making alienation look gripping and beautiful.

Film scholars also point out the delicate tightrope Coppola walks between devastating sadness and deadpan comedy (and if any actor ever captured deadpan comedy, that is Bill Murray). The humor, like the brilliantly absurd Suntory whisky commercial shoot, never betrays the melancholy. Instead, it highlights the ridiculousness of the human experience. It feels profoundly authentic because real life is often incredibly funny and deeply sad at the exact same moment.

Ultimately, Lost in Translation is a masterpiece because it captures the immense relief of being truly seen by another human being. It perfectly articulates what it means to be hopelessly lost and the quiet grace of finally being found. For me, it is a permanent reminder of the cold drift I went through and the beautiful reality of the anchor I get to hold onto every single day.