A New Thing

So, yes. Finally I have a functioning website for Glass Door. I've screwed around and wasted so much of my life trying to build this damn site. First, several attempts at my own CMS in Perl, Ruby, HTML, whatever. Then, after admitting defeat, trying to munge Wordpress into this mold of being a musician's website; it had promise, but fell short on some things. Finally, thankfully, after several months' frustration with Wordpress, I had a serendipitous encounter with a beautiful stranger at a coffeeshop, and with a brief discussion, she convinced me to try Drupal. I later took a look, and realized that my path had been wrong the whole time.

Which describes most of my path with making music. I had my high-minded ideals, my top-down approach to creativity itself, and it stifled me. Trying to do things the right way. I would get uppity about using open source tools to craft my music, because they're free as in speech (and free as in beer), and free software would show us the way to liberation and enlightenment, and so on and so on. Really, though, I should've just grabbed whatever worked best, made the sounds come out of other people's speakers, and moved on with my life. [That's not to say open-source stuff isn't good; I'm using Drupal now, you know. But what I'm saying is that small open-sourced projects tend to be unpolished; they can be clunky also-rans that seek for lookalike/actsalike status with their commercial counterparts, but fall short of the goal. The UIs can be inefficient, and stability issues can overwhelm the typical one-man QA team. By the end, the quality is "good enough" for the programmer to use before calling it a release; as long as they can take the input and make it the expected output in 80% of their own cases, they're done. But for the rest of us who use it, quality of experience suffers. But I digress here.]

So nevermind my ideals; it's the sound that counts. It's the quality of the craft. It's the quantity of the tracks. I've spent so much of my time trying to do things the right way that I reach critical frustration and don't do anything at all, and that's the most damning consequence. When it comes to music, literally all that matters is that you evoke thoughts, bring tears, and shake asses; if I'm not doing any of that, then I'm doing it wrong and wasting my time.

Pragmatism, not idealism. Hopefully, I can move forward and make more, more, more.

Keep your ear up; I'll be posting some of my music soon.