As is my wont, I’ve been noodling around with Garageband recently, making loops out of old 1960s songs without any real purpose beyond just wanting to see if I can do it and make it sound pretty good. (So far, the answer is yes, but it helps that I’m playing with music that I know and love as closely and clearly as I do.) It’s a mental exercise as much as anything else: finding something and reshaping it to create something new, but in a method (and a format, let’s be real) that is somewhat alien and I’m uncertain about and uncomfortable in. It’s play, but play in such a way to keep me on my toes and allow for all kinds of mistakes that could end up being as thrilling as they might be frustrating.
I mention this, as much as anything, because I’ve been revisiting a bunch of music I loved from years and years and years ago — Primal Scream and Delakota and a bunch of the late 1990s “dance” music of the era — and realizing how much of it is, if not born from the same lack of skillset and incompetent bumbling around in software I barely understand, then the same approach of playing and building things block by block and seeing what happens.
I shouldn’t be too surprised, of course; there’s part of the wonderful Beastie Boys Story documentary where they talk about making Paul’s Boutique and that’s not a million miles away from their attitude with that album — of course, they had more patience and more skill behind their efforts than I did, as well as infinitely more taste and finer record collections — and it even feeds into a similar version of how the Beatles went around recording their albums, with a sense of, “I think I want to do this, but I don’t know how to get there, so let’s just see what happens and hope for the best.”
As I said above, the core of all of this is play: of doing something with no set goal in mind, and being ready to embrace and appreciate the journey as much as the destination, in large part because there is no destination when you set off. As I find myself approaching more and more defined goals professionally, such play outside of work becomes so much more important to me — a way to connect back to what animated me throughout so much of my life, and what makes me happy and curious and, well, what keeps me going even now.