Joy of Creating Popular Music

The saying says that the man who does what he loves for a living will never work a day in his life. For me I get the joy of creating music as my living. Which is meant to say that I don’t apparently work.

If I were to tell other musicians that I’ve played with or produced, that I don’t work, they’d call bullshit. More often than not the most common phrase I hear is that I work super hard and I expect the same from them.

Wasn’t Always Pop

I wasn’t always into pop music. Before I became a musician I actually avoided pop music like the plague. There was a terrible belief that it lacked authenticity and real talent. Both concepts couldn’t be further from the truth.

I can’t give you the exact date when I dropped that bullshit theory into the trash. However I can say it didn’t happen overnight. It took months. Possibly even a year or two.

New beginnings

The first song the really started going into a more pop route would be Falling In. One of the more popular songs from my release Practical Insanity. Though it’s not a pop song in the traditional sense. Not buried in synth sounds, which is a common falsehood.

There’s a simplicity to the underlying music that took me a long time to make sound super fluid. I have posted about the impetus behind how I created the song, but the hard part was making it sound fluid and dynamic. That took practice and to sing it at the same time – took even more.

Next steps

The next song in my catalog that really started me on the path of wanting to sound more accessible and popular was Hero Unexpected. This song went thru over nine re-writes before it settled into the finalized form it got recorded into.

I should specify that it was not the chorus that got that many re-writes. No, that pretty much was nailed in the first draft. It was the verses and some of the musical content that got all the tweaks. Got all the parts of the music tracked then worked with my buddy George Leger who played the producer for recording my vocals with me.

Tracking done, I spent a good deal of time working on the mix making sure it was delivering the song in a fashion that powered the song beyond anything I had created prior. Fortunately for me I had also recently befriended Gavin Lurssen who is a major mastering master. We had a good long chat about the goal of the song and its sonic destiny.

The fork in the road was complete. Once I released Hero Unexpected I was fully on the road I never that thought I’d find myself on.

As I continue making all kinds of music, I do find myself doing additional turns in the road but always keep coming back to the pop world as it seems to lack boundaries of what can be done sonically. That lack of boundaries is what allows me that joy to be creating popular sounding music.