It’s just over a year since I started writing a newsletter. The first writing I started doing was poetry about six months before. Keep in mind—I’m 44 years old. I am not a spring chicken.
The book of poetry is available here, by the way…
But, my readers say, Owen, you write a daily newsletter! Sometimes it’s more than one article in a day?! How are you not a writer till recently, one could ask?
I was a perfectionist. Or maybe an imperfectionist, but one painfully aware of that fact. I thought that was a disqualifying thing for writers. Typos! I generate so many! Dyslexia! It’s a known diagnosis for me!
My writing would be bad! Owen will offend someone! All other reasons too! If you want to create, the worst thing you can do is care if you screw it up. Anything that gets in the way of getting it out is a dagger in the heart of whatever you could have created.
There is a place for editing, do not get me wrong. I am a fan of the perfect and exquisite. I also needed to look at myself with the jaundiced eye of glaring reality: I will never do anything exquisite alone. I’m a team player. I like bands. I like partners. I have a terrible eye for little errors. If I will ever make a great anything—I will have help. I am a generative good-enough-ist, as a writer of words.
The big reveal today is that I’m no longer hiding a thing about myself as a creative.1
Today, dear readers, I’m coming out to you with a secret. This whole time, I’ve been…a songwriter and musician. That is what I was writing before I started writing this newsletter.
Here are the recordings I have made as a musician (and mostly an engineer):
Full Length, Solo:
Full Length, with a Band:
Abandon Your Protestations (Instrumentals)
EPs:
Singles:
Catastrophe (Rainer Maria cover)
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (Wilco cover)
I have also recorded a bunch of records for others…here are some highlights..starting with my sister, as a jazz singer, recorded in my mom’s living room way back when:
As well as this from college, for a band I adore:
And a bit more jazz, again in my mom’s living room:
And some rock to finish us out…there is quite a bit more of this recording works out in the world…it was a good living room!
I miss music. Having little kids and no studio got me to start writing words. It’s probably good that I did.
Thanks for reading and maybe listening (video from that session with The Pushovers)
300 articles down, and many more to go. My advice, such as it is, is to thine own self be true—but the particular thine own self that matters the most? It is probably the least perfect and most willing to get it not quite right. Face plant, often, and no one will remember which typo out of many. One typo is embarrassing. A million is part of the process of being a writer.
And I was…which is a longer story.