There is a very specific terror that exists in the first thirty seconds of opening a fresh session.
The project is untitled. The BPM defaults to 120. The timeline is an empty grey expanse stretching into an infinite, silent right-hand corner. In that exact moment, the song is still flawless because it doesn't exist yet. It hasn't been compromised by your clumsy hands, your vocal limitations, or the cheap preamp plugged into your USB port.
And then you press record.
You play the first four chords, and immediately the illusion collapses. It sounds small. It sounds thin. It sounds nothing like the roaring, cinematic cathedral of sound that was echoing against the inside of your skull five minutes earlier.
Most people think writer's block is a lack of ideas. It isn't. It’s an excess of judgment. It’s your taste suffocating your craft before the craft has even had a chance to breathe.
The Myth of the Sacred Routine
Whenever I read creative advice online, it always sounds like an aesthetic Pinterest board: “Wake up at 5:30 AM, drink warm matcha, journal for twenty minutes, and enter your flow state.”
If that works for you, wonderful. But that has never been my reality.
My reality is making beats with one headphone off so I can hear if someone is knocking on my door. It’s writing verses on the notes app while standing in line at the grocery store, muttering syllables under my breath like a lunatic. It’s abandoning a track for six weeks because I couldn't figure out the second verse, only to open it randomly on a Tuesday night at 2:15 AM and finish the entire arrangement before sunrise without saving once.
Art is not a corporate calendar invite. You don't summon it by lighting a scented candle. You get it by being willing to sit in the awkward silence of your own mediocrity until something catches fire.
Scrapping 40 Bars to Find 4
When I was writing for Squealer and the Aggressors of Peace, I wrote whole pages of lyrics that sounded like someone else. They sounded like what an angry, rebellious indie rapper was "supposed" to say. It was theatrical, performative, and hollow.
It took weeks of throwing away notebooks to realize that rage doesn't always scream; sometimes it whispers through clenched teeth.
Draft: 14 versions of the same verse.
Kept: The two lines muttered after I thought the recording had stopped.
You have to develop the stomach to murder your darlings. If you wrote a guitar riff that took three days to master, but it fights the vocal melody, it has to die. The song doesn't care how hard you worked on an element; the listener only feels the friction or the flow.
Living with the Incompletion
On Half Thoughts, I had to make peace with the fact that some of my most meaningful work was fundamentally fragmented.
I used to obsess over "finishing." I thought every demo had to become a four-minute single with full mixing stems, radio-ready masters, and a music video treatment. But holding onto ideas until they are "ready" is just another way of burying them alive.
Sometimes the four-bar loop you recorded onto your phone at an airport terminal is the record. It captures that fleeting, unrepeatable humidity of a moment in time. Once you polish it, you wash off the fingerprints.
If you are sitting on twenty hard drives full of unfinished projects right now, stop trying to make them perfect. Pick three. Let their flaws show. Push them out into the world and clear out the headspace for what comes next.
