Public Practice

Have you ever practiced in public? Taken your instrument or whatever you’re working on and just sat in a park somewhere surrounded by strangers and started practicing in plain view? It’s intimidating at first, but it’s a good way to get comfortable with yourself.

That’s kinda what this whole year has felt like so far. Sharing all this music and all the silly bits we put on social media… I try to look at it as public practice. We’re trying out all our ideas and refining our skills, but instead of holding onto everything until it’s perfect, we’re letting everyone watch and hear what we’re working on it as we do it. I sway back and forth between feeling like everything needs to be way better and feeling like it doesn’t matter at all, as long as we do something. I think there’s probably merit to both sides of the argument to be honest. The speed at which society moves lends itself to the idea that you need to share constantly, but most of the artists I admire do the opposite, and that leaves me feeling conflicted.

The conflict usually ends in me considering everything we’ve done to this point as failure, especially when you consider the weight numbers hold these days, but when I think about it, we haven’t failed at all. In reality this is the most successful we’ve ever been. Our numbers might not be earth shattering right now, but I have to constantly remind myself that this the beginning of this journey, and we’ve maintained a steady output of material and a presence on the internet where we can be found, if people choose to seek us out. That’s all we can do. Keep practicing in public, and trust that the whole will be greater than the sum of our parts.

New music next week from The New Hippies, and from Roe’s Garden the week after that.

-J.P.