AriKoinuma.com

After being immersed in a project for a while, there comes a point where I feel that nothing sounds good.

And that is the point at which I need to let go — to abandon it.

Now, “abandon” sounds bad, doesn’t it? It sounds like I’m throwing away a project before it’s finished.

But yet, in my experience, every production needs to be abandoned before it’s completely “finished.” In the other words, you don’t work on it until you reach perfection. You just work on it while you’re still making useful contributions to it, and then stop when you no longer can.

And that has to be good enough.

I am not a perfectionist, not by a long shot. But I do have a standard of when things are “good enough.” On the other hand, “good enough” is also a moving target — it often takes time for unacceptable flaws and adorable imperfections to sort and reveal themselves.

But still, when the time comes where I am so inundated with the music that I can no longer judge whether I’m doing anything good to it or not, then I just have to accept it as good enough at that point and move on.

Now, I don’t mean to say that I am never satisfied with my own work. In fact, quite the opposite — I nearly always do reach a point where I feel that what I have done is good enough or more. That’s a fact I feel proud of, myself.

But at the point of letting go, it always feels like I’m leaving tons of stuff that can be fixed or improved. It always takes time for me to reach a point that what I’ve done is good enough.

I’m at that point with Marc Gunn’s album, Happy Songs of Death. It will be delivered this week.