Fail Better

Fail Gloriously!

Hi All!

Wow, the newsletter really is late this week, but don’t worry, I’ve got a good excuse.

Starting on Sunday, we began recording the first tracks for my new band, Doghouse, consisting of Jannick Reichert on drums and percussion (Jannick is also a producer/engineer and you can see his website here), Greg Aubert on bass and backing vocals, Anikó Tóth on keys and vocals and yours truly twangin’ the guitars and singing.

Doghouse recording sessions at Soundfackery Studios

The short hand description of our music is blues rock, but I like to think there’s a heavy dose of groove rock in there. It’s a pretty rootsy, analogue vibe, if we ignore the sampled keyboards (I’ve been eying up a Hammoned C3 on Reverb for months now, but just about managing to control my GAS).

If you are wondering what groove rock might be, it’s a genre probably most personified by Clutch. You can read a great article about them here.

At this very moment, as I write, I’m listening to David Bowie’s Heroes album. It’s a work of genius and makes a great double bill with Low, which I have also been revisiting a lot lately (I’ve got some big news about a project coming soon that relates to Low, but I can’t tell you anything just yet).

Popular music mythology is made of up “facts” that are not true, or at best gross exaggerations, and Low and Heroes are no exception. It’s a largely repeated “fact” that Brian Eno produced those records, when, in fact, they were produced by Bowie and Toni Visconti. Having said that, there is no doubt that Eno contributed greatly to the creative team and his fingerprints are definitely all over that album.

If you’ve not seen it before, this hilarious animation is pretty much how I prefer to imagine those Low sessions at Chateau d’Hérouville taking place.

If that didn’t make any sense to you, it might help to watch Visconti talking about the recording of Heroes at Hansa Studios in West Berlin.

As Toni just explained, Eno’s oppo Robert Fripp also plays on Heroes, which brings us back round to my journey to become Hungarian, which I discussed here.

Back to the Point

One of the great thing about running a big recording session in my own studio for one of my own projects is that I get to find out where the weak links and bugs are, without upsetting any paying clients. Sometimes things go wrong and a bit of time gets wasted, but these are also the times when - if we adopt the right frame of mind - learning happens. I’m a firm believer that when we “fail”, that’s when we truly learn.

Failing Upwards

Once upon a time, just as social media was starting to turn septic, I used to bother engaging with people in political debates on Facebook and Twitter. Ultimately, I stopped for a number of reasons, but largely because it was pointless and it was making me miserable seeing how truly awful humans can be, when someone pokes the hornets’ nest. I decided at some point that I should focus on the real people in my life, rather than some angry bigot I barely knew.

One particular encounter was probably the final straw. I was engaging with a vague acquaintance over a particularly incendiary topic and actually, surprisingly enough, having a reasonable debate, when a stranger piped in and started making threats of violence towards me next time I was on a gig. Back in those days, I was touring a lot and it wouldn’t take Columbo to work out where I would be on any given night, so I did take the threats somewhat seriously, especially as this individual was a professional soldier. We all like to think we can handle ourselves, largely because we’ve seen a John Wick movie, but, let’s be honest, who would you put your money on? The guy who plays guitar and writes artsy fartsy music, or the guy trained to kill people for a living?

Fortunately, I never actually met this individual, so I didn’t have to endure the “lesson” he promised me. However, I do still have his best shot at an “insult” ringing in my ears. “Failed Rockstar”.

Now, I don’t have this barb stuck under my skin because I thought I was a rockstar, or even because I aspire to be one, I don’t. My buddies R and L are rockstars and deservedly so. They have worked incredibly hard and have developed particular essential skill sets that I just haven’t worked on to anywhere near the level they have.

No, the reason I still think about it is because our society is so failure-phobic and that’s not, in my humble opinion, healthy. Labelling someone a “failure” is dehumanising, like “bum”, “drunk”, “junkie” etc. and, like those terms, implies some kind of moral infirmity or weakness of spirit, rather than simply life deals some people better hands than others. We might like to think we are better than those labels, but the reality is many of us are a couple of pay checks away from being homeless ourselves.

Here’s the important bit though, failing is important. Through failure we learn and develop. Through failing, at least we know we tried. We should never have any regrets about failing, but we will always regret not trying.

My biggest and most important lesson in life came through failing. From about the age of 14, all I wanted to be was a professional musician, but I “knew” that “wasn’t a real job” and I would ultimately “fail”. Instead, at 18, I started my university education as a civil engineer - something that would get me a proper job and achieve “success” - despite not being sufficiently prepared in the areas of maths and science. For three years, I grafted hard and missed out on all the fun my friends who were studying the arts and humanities were having. I hated every minute of my time as a civil engineer, but I just couldn’t admit to failure and drop out. Ultimately though, I realised that if I worked as hard as I had as a student engineer in an area that I loved, surely I would stand some chance of “success”.

Common sense lost out and I set off on my journey to become a musician after conducting this thought experiment.

On my deathbed, what am I going to regret more, shooting my shot at becoming a musician and failing, or never even trying to follow that dream.

Anyway, somehow the gamble and hard work paid off and I even managed to pick up a PhD in music composition along the way.

Here are some truisms I’ve learnt about failure on my journey:

Becoming an expert is failing spectacularly for many years.

Giving up something that isn’t satisfying isn’t failure.

Just because something ends doesn’t mean it’s a failure (relationships, jobs etc) it just means you’ve lived long enough to outgrow it.

Failure is liberating. If you accept failure as part of growing in life, you feel very free. Even is our dream of a residential recording studio in France ultimately fails, we will have had a hell of a ride along the way.

Success or failure is time based. Failure is just something ending before you die. Accepting that makes past experiences easier to bare. That relationship that ended wasn’t a failure if, no matter how painful the breakup was, you had some good times on the way.

Ultimately, everyone fails. One day, our heart stops beating and blood stops pumping to our brains and our body ultimately “fails”. Did we have fun along the way? Did we live our life bravely, or did we stop ourselves from chasing our dreams through fear of “failure”?

I think the music business used to be more tolerant of “failure” and was willing to invest money and time into musicians who were failing to sell. You can learn more about this in Joe Boyd’s book White Bicycles. Joe Boyd, if you don’t know, was the producer for Nick Drake, an artist who famously never sold well in his lifetime and languished in obscurity until folks like Robert Smith of The Cure started name-checking him in the ‘80s. Drake is now considered a legendary singer songwriter and his albums critical successes.

Black-Eyed Dog was one of the songs written for Drake’s fourth album that was never completed. Nick Drake died on 25 November 1974. It’s believed his death was caused by an overdose of antidepressants. I can only describe this song as gut wrenchingly beautiful.

Anyhoo, to wrap up, I’m the guy parents don’t want giving their kids career advice. Follow your bliss, have no regrets and fail gloriously.

Until next week! Keep on failing!

Steve