Success = vices

I don’t consider myself a typical artist. The stereotype, I mean. The ones that avoid sunlight and the outdoors and other people, the ones that are moody and broody, the ones that hate everything. The ones that are basically vampires. I’m not one of those.

And I was totally fine with that. Until a number of friends and colleagues started saying I wasn’t a real artist either. The fact that I don’t drink, or smoke, or act depressed all the time seemed to make me ineligible.  “You’ll never be a success,” they said. “You don’t have enough vices.”

They explained that real artists are burdened by the world. By their gift. Real artists have vices.

I didn't want to buy into the idea. Not all artists are sad, mysterious drug addicts, right? It’s statistically improbable, for one thing. But the question still intrigued me. What was my vice?

I wracked my brains. I must have a vice. Something that obsessed me. That I found myself addicted to without warning. That changed my day, my week, my month if I let it take hold. For years I've come back to the question and not found an answer. Junk food and sleeping and cartoons and video games don’t count. I could stop those whenever I wanted, probably. I needed something properly detrimental. I needed to suffer for my art.

Fast forward to a few days ago. I’d been struggling with this week’s blog rant, three half-rants already on my desktop. My problem wasn't finding something to talk about. To anybody who knows me, that’s ridiculous. But ten minutes into every post I would be itching to get back to what I had already spent the whole day on. A musical project. Because I write songs sometimes. And this one was really kicking my arse.

The idea had been floating around in my head for maybe a month already. I had a mumbled chorus and a vague melody recorded in my voice memos. Last week I landed on the bass line. Then, boom, the lyrics fall out of me in one breath and suddenly I'm finessing the drum section of the middle eight at three in the morning. I pull myself away from the computer, acknowledge it's time to go to bed, and sit back down to save my work. I decide I better check back through the track to see how that cool electro-funk piano thing was working with the new drums, and suddenly it's 5:30am.

I went on like this for three days. I ate at my computer, left plates on my keyboard, and started getting sore ears from my iPhone buds. I went into work a day early and almost forgot about the haircut I’d planned to get at the beginning of the week despite sideburns that felt like moustaches. I went in to work again and did an 11 hour day on three hours sleep. I skipped meals, I stopped drawing, I had trouble writing, and I spent all my time locked in my room with my keyboard and laptop. One night at 2am my computer froze and I spent a frantic thirty seconds pacing the room while I waited for the laptop to tell me I hadn't saved my last hour of work... only to restart and find the music program I use has a ‘would you like to recover your unsaved work’ function.

All this and I didn’t even have a deadline. This song wasn’t even for anything. It was a pet project. Like knitting a tea cosy.  I was doing it for fun. The hyperbolic optimism of the muse was pulling me through hours and hours of hunger and restlessness and sleep deprivation.  And it was driving me mental.

But today I came to the crest of the hill. I recorded the last group of vocals and my extended mishmash of sounds solidified into a cohesive thing, and I began the slow finicky process of ‘mixing’. But the hard work was over. I had made the thing that I wanted to make. My brain could be used for other things now. And I realised I had an answer to an old question. I had my vice.

It’s not as hardcore as drinking or dropping an E (that’s what they say, right?) and I haven’t destroyed any property or tried to do a tattoo on my own face. But I was addicted to something. And it was a detriment to my health and well-being and I needed to stop.

And all I have to show for it is four and a half minutes of something that might not really be much of anything. Just a bit of art. Except that it isn't. It’s also my vice. 

So maybe my friends were right. Maybe you do need vices to be a successful artist. But maybe I was also right - maybe I don't fit the artist stereotype. Yet I have something that makes me stupid and addicted and moody and broody. Something that makes me suffer. Something that will probably definitely lead to lots and lots of enormous artistic success in the future.

Art itself. And it doesn't get much more rock and roll than that.  

And least I assume so, I’m still not sure what a real artist is. 

But I’m thinking I should get a beret.