2022 in review

2022-12-31

Click here to go to YouTube and watch the video essay version of this article.

Last year, I made a "Year in Review" video to celebrate my students' progress, give them feedback and look toward their musical futures.

This year, I wanted to do something similar, but I figured it would be better to put myself on the spot, model the kind of self-examination I hope for from my students, then interview them and let them assess their own progress and their goals before offering them my own perspective as a teacher.

This is my 2022 in review—my own ups and downs as a teacher and an artist, and my ideas about the future.

Breakthroughs

Former students are doing exciting things

Two of my dearest students, Isabelle and Jadon, graduated high school this year and moved to the next chapter in their lives. Isabelle is a freshman at UC Berkeley, still making time to record improvisations in practice rooms, seeking out music history classes and sending me recordings or articles she finds in research for her class projects. Jadon is taking a gap year in LA to practice, work on his projects and make connections in the industry. He's currently working as an intern for my friend Ryan, a rising producer and songwriter who's worked with some major names and a generous and clear teacher. A friend of theirs and another former student, JP, messaged me intermittently this year to send me mixes of his third album(!), a summer project to fill the time between intensive engineering semesters.

I've been inspired by and enormously proud of each of these kids by many turns over the last few years and it's a privilege to stay in touch and see them diving into a stage of life that's as terrifying as it is exciting.

Publishing my first 25 lessons

Imperfect though they are, it's the most writing I've ever done, and the process of putting this year's ragtag collection of thoughts, theories, and practical exercises together (mostly over the summer) taught me a lot about myself as a teacher and a student of music. I hope to do much more in this vein in 2023.

"Slow burn" songwriting

Early this year, feeling overwhelmed and wanting to focus on developing myself as a teacher, I made a deal with myself: I'd work on only three songs until they were ready to record, and give myself permission to torture them as much as I wished and create all kinds of ridiculous stipulations for myself. I'd record them by the end of the year.

I was searching for a sound that felt fresh and had deep roots. I was also searching for a way to balance two vocations.

One answer to the latter problem would be to give one the spotlight for two or three years while still devoting meaningful time to the other and making sure it could grow. Given that, and given the former problem (searching for a sound), I wanted to experiment with a very small amount of material and see how deep I could dive.

There's also a hint of contrarianism here. The now-conventional wisdom about creative work is that churn is king: as a general rule, the more projects you finish, the more you'll learn and the better the quality of the work will be. It makes plenty of sense, and there's plenty of evidence in the volume of work cranked out by successful (by any metric) creative minds throughout history.

Still, some things are too important to take some TED speaker or nonfiction author's word for it. If I'm going to be useful to students later, it makes sense to test certain theories in my life now. So I thought this year was a good opportunity to ask myself: what if I DON'T try to finish twenty songs and hope that three are good and one is great? What if I just mine these three songs for all they're worth?

So that's what I did, and with a lot of help from my friend and guitar wizard Jacob Matheus, I've found myself with three songs that sound unlike anything I've written before, which challenge me to death, particularly in the relationship between the guitar parts and my voice. I managed to record one during the summer; I'm aiming to record the other two before the end of the year.

Pluses: this approach was a lot less stressful than constantly facing the blank page and trying to write new things. It also gave me an excellent idea about what to do creatively next year with music, and the confidence to do it knowing that I really don't have a better option (that I know of).

Minuses: I'm at the end of the year, and I only have three songs! (And just barely, at that.) At this rate, if I live to be eighty I'll only finish another 150 songs. Some artists manage that inside three to five years or less. I'm convinced this is not a path to my best work.

Creative students making strides

I've come to think that the best of us have detailed knowledge of what we know well, and assume otherwise that we know very little. Music is always changing, kids are always changing; if you're really convinced that you know exactly what you're doing, you're probably doing your students a disservice. I suspect that as long as I am a teacher, I will be wrestling with the tension between the uncertainty that I am teaching students what they need to know and whatever measure of earned (if fragile) confidence I have developed that I am offering them something of great worth. Musicians and teachers are both a bit like priests (serving the gods of beauty and curiosity, respectively) and any priest must rely to some degree on faith to practice their craft.

The upshot is that you're never one hundred percent certain (and especially not in your first few years) that what you're asking of your students is going to move them towards the long term goal of developing a meaningful and creative relationship with music. No matter how much one learns about pedagogy from study or experience, there's an infinite amount of minutia and circumstances beyond your control, and each student is their own story and their own journey. It's part of what keeps teachers teaching; it's impossible to be bored because every single person presents novel variations on the general themes we all wrestle with as artists.

This can lead to a lot of confrontations with anxiety that you might be failing students in the long run. The only real antidote to this anxiety is seeing students you've had for a while making strides, and my two longest-standing students both made great strides this year.

David, a guitarist, has become a far more independent learner, tracking down tabs and tutorials for songs he's interested in and showing up to lessons with these songs already learned, allowing us to spend lessons fine-tuning or analyzing the songs. He's become a more competent self-recorder, recently turning in a well-recorded take on the guitar parts for "Time in A Bottle" to me, and at my urging he's begun organizing jam sessions with other young musicians in his neighborhood who play. He's also developed a better command of theoretical terms, readily answering questions about basic chord structures or relationships between tones, allowing us to discuss technical aspects of the music more easily and opening the door to deeper analysis in the future. At 13, David is in an excellent position to become a monster guitarist in high school if he puts in the time.

For her part, David's sister Maddie (yes, I've had a brother-sister pair of students for four years, other teachers know this as a huge blessing) has recorded multiple improvised solo EPs since this summer, finished a handful of her own compositions and begun hosting occasional listening parties. She's offered perceptive critiques of her composing and begun to develop a repeatable process she can use to approach composing, a crucial step in every composer's creative development. Her tastes in music have also landed in an aesthetic neighborhood that overlaps mine a great deal, which means I can afford to be quite liberal in making listening recommendations and offering her aesthetic critiques of her pieces without worrying too much about underemphasizing her particular interests and ideas.

I've been working with these two for four years, and its encouraging to see their minds and hearts still growing. It has as much to do with their own work and will as with anything I'm doing, but they're picking up what I'm laying down and seem to be profiting from it, which is the best encouragement a teacher can get. Hopefully we can keep things fresh and evolving for at least a couple more years before they get sick of me or I turn them loose on the world myself.

Pleasant surprises: adult students and a new album

Since I moved to Canada, I've been teaching remotely for a friend's US-based school, Eclectic Music. The Eclectic team are all extremely cool people who care very deeply about making good matches between students and teachers, and among the students they've sent my way are a handful of adults who are a joy to teach (not that kids aren't fun too, I just tend not to focus on adult students and hadn't had many opportunities to work with them).

Adults differ from most kids in that their lessons are not an obligation they fulfill—they're a pleasure they voluntarily seek out, an investment that they choose to make because of their personal desire to learn. Not only are they often more motivated to make the most of their lessons, people in their 20s (or 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond) are also more patient with themselves. They've often been through the process of learning a complex skill once already, so they understand the dynamics of learning better than young adults or children, who are sometimes frustrated by plateaus or beat themselves up when they feel overwhelmed.

My adult students have been a blessing this year, in that they've given me people who I can rediscover music with as a grown person; people who, outside of the studio, are peers, friends, mentors or elders. It's a lot of fun to guide their explorations and to think about my younger students with the perspective afforded by hearing the stories of people my age and older who either gave up on their music or never learned much to begin with.

On the music front, a good friend messaged me just a couple weeks ago asking me to listen to an album he'd been preparing for a couple years, back to front, to check the masters and song transitions. LOSTGEN is a lovely little record that comes in at 24 minutes and includes two songs I worked on: "Crown" (writing) and "Lost Cause" (writing, production, vocals). Aside from the primary artist, a friend of his who rapped on "Wallace Stevens in the Forest," and Lilliana Villines, a dear friend who sang the vocals on "Crown," I've never met anyone else on the record. It was a fallow year for me musically, so being on a record alongside people who feel like kin in spite of rarely (or ever) meeting them was a little ray of light for me and a very nice surprise.

Setbacks

Low output

In both the educational and artistic arenas, I think I fell way short of any reasonable publishing goal this year.

On the music side, nothing came out under my name this year; that would be fine if I was sitting on ten or twenty songs but I've only finished three. I gave myself permission to go this slow on the music side of things this year and re-evaluate at this point, and I can say now that I know for sure this isn't the way to go for next year. Even if I want to devote long stretches of time to torturing one or two songs and trying out every possibility, I still need to keep my churn rate reasonably high to grow as an artist and have any hope of finishing the projects I want to do on a reasonable timeline. Plus, it's selfish to be absent.

As for teaching, I could probably live with this year's output if it was more polished or slightly higher (30+ lessons or blogs/vlogs) but as it stands, it feels like a shortfall.

Maddening lack of structure

In spite of a decision I detailed above that simplified my actual musical goal this year and made it easily manageable, both my teaching and musical life felt scattered and diaphanous this year. I was reaching for something to grab onto and finding nothing but sand and smoke.

I often felt as if I was working frantically but achieving very little of any importance. It wasn't as bad as it has been in prior years, but I feel I have a lot of work to do next year in choosing the right few projects and making sure they get done while fielding the slew of random opportunities and crises that are sure to arise.

Aural atrophy

I hardly heard any music this year that made my ears perk up, and I hardly gave my undivided attention to any music either. I found myself always trying to listen and cook, listen and read, listen and walk or drive, I probably found two hours the entire year to just sit down and listen to music.

The result: I found myself bored. Not bored with working on music or teaching it, but terminally bored with almost everything I heard.

Isolation and poor leadership

Probably the biggest way I fell short this year was as a leader. In previous years I was very effective at organizing small and medium sized gatherings of students or peers (or a mix of both), often informal and quite frequently, to talk and advise one another about our music and lives. The first two years of the pandemic saw us averaging one workshop, intensive, performance or informal gathering every six weeks or so. In the before-times, I was having rehearsals with groups of students multiple times a week, interspersed with informal house concerts, hours-long informal gatherings at family homes or bubble tea shops (ah, California), school competitions or events and various other opportunities to socialize and strengthen community ties.

This year found me isolated and increasingly reluctant to try and organize those types of events, as people seemed less excited about them than in past years. If I was to fix one thing as a teacher in 2023, it would probably be this. Art and culture tend to thrive in community and falter in isolation (barring rare freaks like me who WILL just sit alone in a room with a guitar for no reason other than that we seem to need it somehow). This year I let myself be contained too easily by the edges of my monitor, I gave in too often to the urge to retreat, and I feel that my students and I suffered for it.

Underlying causes and possible solutions

On my failures as a leader

1. For most of this year, I was waiting for Canadian permanent residence, which meant I could ONLY work online. With a weak online presence that I was undercommitted to improving, that meant the community pool I pulled from was relatively small, so it was harder to hit the critical mass necessary for an event to feel like... an event.

Solutions

One option: give up on online and go back to focusing on in-person entirely. Not a great option; I like teaching online and want to do well for the students I meet through the screen. The other: expand the pool. Cultivate a strong online presence. Meet a lot of people. Consistency is the only thing you can guarantee, beyond that you have to be perceptive and lucky.

Another solution, and a corollary to the previous: pick a place, a time, and a frequency. Be there, and just keep showing up, no matter what. It's impossible to connect with people if you're absent.

A third solution: Place a focus on group classes. This emphasizes the communal aspect of music making from the very start. Private lessons are enormously helpful for some students, but we make music together, so groups are the only sensible priority.

I spoke with other teachers and school owners and they too had found that there had been a brief dip in engagement with their online offerings as people re-engaged with their local worlds. Online learning is here to stay, but as we slowly ramp back to something resembling normal (knock on wood), it'll take time for people to figure out their priorities and what the best ways to engage their interests are.

There's not much I can do about this except to offer the best I can in whichever world(s) I want to be working in. How we learn is important, but not a hill worth dying on, it's what we learn that matters. Struggling toward meaningful music-making online would be better than optimizing aesthetic indoctrination in a classroom setting. I have the sense that the ideal scenario combines online and in-person resources anyway, and the materials from one world transfer fairly readily to the other, so I'll commit to being more present in both this year and see how it goes.

On low output and not listening to enough music

These can both be tied to a lack of structure. Over the last couple years, I've been trying to figure out how to finish enough meaningful projects in a given year to keep making progress in the two worlds I want to be in (making music and teaching music). I've come to believe that the only alternative to developing a system for doing that is to do way, WAY less than I'd like to or to become an insane workaholic (and probably still do less than I'd like to).

Gradually I'm starting to develop a system that works for me. The better the system gets, the more I'm able to do, or the less stressful doing a given amount of work becomes. Already this year I published a decent handful of teaching materials, which I hadn't been able to even approach without going insane before, which is a sign things are improving. But there's still a long way to go.

I think the biggest problem is still how I conceive of and organize projects. I often feel like there's too much to do and too little time, and I think that's a sign that I'm trying to do too much and not giving myself enough time to do it. Shocking, I know.

Solution

There's not a single simple solution for this, but in brief I'm probably going to do something like the following (some of which I already do):

- Pick a project I think I could do in a month. Make it important.

- Give myself six weeks to do it.

- Break the six weeks into two week chunks.

- Schedule all the work for those two weeks.

- Track any EXTRA work that I do.

- Every two weeks, review my progress, adjust my schedule, and save all the work I did in a folder to be sorted later.

- If the deadline approaches and I'm somehow behind, do whatever it takes to finish. If that sucks, do it anyway and use that as motivation to plan or work better on the next one.

- Put it in the world, review the process, identify whatever screwed me up and tweak the system to protect against that.

- Repeat.

- Don't worry about anything else. Stick to your chosen project. If you have another idea and want to do something about it, write it down and look into it at the end of this project. Or, see if you can atomize it into a little routine or habit you can tinker with.

Obviously "project" is an amorphous term, but in a month I'd imagine I could create a set of two to three lessons or write around three songs, for example.

The biggest problem I've suffered from in my 20s has been trying to do too much; having too many ideas and underperforming on most of them because my attention is spread too thin. I suspect I need to double down on being judicious about what I try to do, and then commit to whatever that is totally. In other words, I need to learn a lesson from myself at 22, when all that really mattered was putting in my four hours of practice each day and then going to the gym. The difference was that at that time, I thrived on pouring tons of time into something. Now it has a tendency to hit diminishing returns and burn me out.

Aside from being terrible at project management, there's another common circumstance that tends to reduce peoples' effectiveness in their work, which I didn't really recognize was affecting me until I moved to Montreal last month. The process of moving, which disrupted all the useless busyness I've distracted myself with, gave me space to reflect and realize something: I've been pretty depressed this year.

For much of the year, I found myself not only lacking in motivation, but lacking any impetus to do a lot of the things I wanted to do. Some days all I could manage was to show up for my lessons; the rest of the day was just wasted.

Since the move, I've gradually found my energy and focus expanding, but this year made me appreciate how fragile those things can be and resolve to take better care of myself mentally, physically and emotionally. Self-care is something I've actually been reasonably good at for much of my adult life, but I pushed my luck this year and fell in a ditch without even realizing it until recently. 2023 will need to start with a re-investment in the simple stuff that's kept me alive and awake up to this point (for me it's exercise, quiet time alone, quality time with people I love, and making music for its own sake).

Plateaus

Plateaus are natural in any skill progression, but we don't usually talk about them. Whether you're comfortable on a plateau or not depends on your goals. It's normal and sometimes necessary to remain on certain plateaus for a period of time—after all, you can't work on everything all the time. At the same time, it's worth being aware of which plateaus you're on, how ok you are with being on them, and how you might break them when the time comes.

The two main plateaus I've noticed myself hitting this year, in one word each:

As a teacher? Pedagogy.

As an artist? Repertoire.

As it happens, these are both plateaus I'd like to break next year.

Possible solutions in brief:

Lessons learned (and relearned)

- It always takes longer than you think it will.

- Underestimate yourself to take the pressure off, then get annoyed that it's too easy and pour in 10x as much energy as you originally planned to. Much better than overestimating yourself and being demoralized because things are harder than you thought they'd be. Giving feels good. Getting taken from feels bad.

- People can learn to do things that seem overwhelming and impossible, as long as we break it down the right way and put the pieces in the right order.

- Take care of yourself.

Looking forward

2022 was, to be perfectly honest, a pretty awful year. I managed, just barely, to show up and put in the work for my students, but I want to do much more and much better next year.

There is a lot to be excited about, though, and good reason to believe that if I make my adjustments well, 2023 will be a year to celebrate.

I moved to Montreal about a month ago, and this city feels far more alive and full of possibility for me than Toronto, where I spent the past year. Culture is thriving here, the people I've met have been extraordinarily kind and cool, and I'm suddenly a stone's throw from some of my closest friends and collaborators—Boston is only a five hour drive away, New York is around six and a half. I'm looking forward to many more opportunities to visit, host and work with people who inspire me and make me better.

When I gave this assignment to my students, I gave them a set of short questions to answer in the final section. I don't have a more graceful way of framing them at hand so I'll answer those to close things out:

What would you like to do by the beginning of spring?

That's about twelve weeks away, so I'd like to have two projects done and out in the world. I'm still thinking about what to lead off with, but I know I want one of them to be a set of lessons or a workshop.

What are you concerned about this year? What can you do about that?

Getting drawn and quartered by my divergent interests and ideas; I don't want to be the donkey who couldn't decide between eating and drinking and died of exhaustion between the haystack and the watering hole.

Put the first thing first and keep the main thing the main thing.

It's aggravating how simple this sounds, but being clear about priorities and sticking to them isn't complicated. It's just difficult. It takes mental and emotional energy.

Which reminds me of the other thing: take better care of myself this year than I did last year.

What are you going to double down on this year?

Putting things in the world.

What's your motto for 2023?

I wrote this one because of a running gag from Calvin &Hobbes.

"What's your point?"

That's my motto.

Why do you make music right now?

Because I've been doing it my whole life and I find it very difficult to stop.

One of the things that keeps me coming back is the feeling of connection that comes from resonance.

A couple weeks ago, I was sitting at an out of tune upright piano in a café in a town I'd just moved to, where I know nobody, and I was playing "True Love Waits," which I haven't played or practiced in years. Magically, it came out of my fingers and out of my voice without any trouble, which is already nice enough—the way that a piece of music can stay alive in our bodies for years, waiting for its moment, is a small miracle to me. When I started, one of the people who was finishing their shift downstairs shouted "I LOVE THIS SONG!" up the stairs, and when I reached the chorus (the simple, devastating plea: "Just don't leave," classic Thom Yorke) I heard her voice singing along.

When you understand the music, and when the music understands you, you can sense that you aren't alone, even if you're just playing for an empty room. When the music moves through you, bounces off someone else who understands, and then comes back as another voice singing in tune with yours, or as a piece of pumpkin bread someone left at your table for you while you were playing, you can feel certain that you're not alone, at least for a moment.

I've played for the empty room, for no one but me, since I was four. I never needed an audience—until I was in my twenties, I resented the audience. But I've learned how it feels to play for someone and have it mean something, to have it resonate. By nature, those experiences are fewer and farther between than the daily moments of connection I experience while practicing or writing or listening, but every single moment like that thrills me and teaches me something important about music that I don't think there's any other way to learn.

How could I ever get tired of that?

Year End Playlist

Favorites I discovered or rediscovered this year, in no particular order, with friends' top picks thrown in for good measure. Pick and choose as you like, or go to the full playlist on YouTube. Prepare for genre whiplash.

- The 1975 - Looking for Somebody to Love

- Karen Dalton - It Hurts Me Too and Katie Cruel

- Ensemble Gille Binchois - Lune tres belle

- Bill Wurtz - i'm a huge gamer most of the time and at the corner store

- Yung Men - The Ghost

- John Lee Hooker - Driftin' Blues

- Blind Lemon Jefferson - Black Snake Moan

- Evangelina Mascardi - J.S. Bach Partita in C moll BWV997

- Ensemble Project Ars Nova - Rose, liz (Guillaume de Machaut)

- Ensemble Project Ars Nova - Puisque je suis fumeux (Symonis) and Fumeux par fumee (Solage)

- Caroline Polachek - So Hot You're Hurting My Feelings and Insomnia

- FKA twigs - Pendulum

- Leonard Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra - Mahler Symphony no. 6

- Jack DeJohnette's Special Edition - Tin Can Alley

- Anthony Braxton - Composition no. 131

- 100 gecs - mememe

- Chuck Sutton - Chess Bling

- black midi - Sugar/Tzu

- 유라 (youra) - 어떤 우울이 우리를 흔들겠어요 (Best regards)

- Carlos Niño & Friends - Calimayan

- Datassette - Running Away

- Vegyn & Tn_490 - Smiley Smile Smiley (107.029 BPM)

- Machine Girl - Glass Ocean (Neon White OST )

- Cassandra Jenkins - Michelangelo

- Julianna Barwick - Nod ft. Nosaj Thing

- Downhill2k01 - Black & Decker

- aNTOJE - Dripper

- Tiffany Day - SAN FRANCISCO SIDEWALK

- sajou no hana - 「グレイ」(gray)

- JIJI - For Patty

- Frou Frou - A New Kind of Love

- DJ Travella - Mr. Mixondo

- Amenra - Live II

- PinkPantheress - Boy's a liar

- Mabe Fratti - Pies Sobre la Tierra

- Adrianne Lenker - ingydar

- Snail Mail - Headlock

- Juana Molina - Sin Guia No

- Big Thief - The Only Place

Music my friends released this year:

Max Sink has been putting out videos of his Digitone explorations on his YouTube channel. "Cool Ghost" is my personal pick of the bunch so far, but it's just cool to watch someone I know well learn a new tool one song at a time, so whatever my opinions of a given song I'm just excited to watch this project unfold.

Joshoo (Josh Shpak) put out Blank Space Kills, his first EP after last year's run of singles. Josh has poured hundreds of hours into his production chops over the last couple years, and it shows, but for me, it's his lyricism that shines the brightest. "What About Us" is a highlight.

Logan Kane released Laser Cars. Logan's projects are always different, but there's one thing tying them together: insanity. He's one of the boldest artists I know, who treats solo projects as spaces to totally deconstruct and reconstruct aspects of his psyche.

Myles Martin put out You Hear Me!? with Yung Men, his production and rapping project with his roommates. I'm a big fan of the beat and one particular bar on "The Ghost," same goes for "Parking Lot" and "OUT THE GATES." There's a world coming together here that I want to hear more of.

Katie McBride released her debut record, As Real As Anything Else. My repeat listen here was "Strip of Beach," probably because I'm obsessed with melodies and I think it's the standout melody in this collection. Other highlights are "Bloodbath," (the heaviest beat) and "Be A Friend to All" (a well-crafted soundscape will always get my blessing).

And as I mentioned in the video, a dear friend shared a record called LOSTGEN under the name Orpheus Rising this fall. I was part of this record, and feel very lucky to know the primary artist and some of my neighbors in this soundscape, in particular Lilliana Villines, who sings on "Crown." My contributions (and much of the rest of the record) were put together in 2020, during periods of significant personal upheaval for all three of us, and the record's appearance in the world is something like a ripple from a dropped stone hitting the shore of a pond. Two years ago we were in the water, riding that wave, and now it feels like we're looking at the ripple as it moves across the surface. I'm grateful for this one, I didn't know I needed to hear it but I did.

Listening to music that people I know are making is one of the most exciting and inspiring pastimes for me in a given year. It helps keep music and its possibilities real and alive for me.

Keep it up, and I'll see you next year.

That's all for now.