I Asked AI to Summarize the Blog So Far
What is happening here? I asked AI to take as long as it needed and sift thru my 300 some odd blog posts, most of which I have posted every day since early November. I really do feel like this is a proper use of the thing. So in this narrative, "I" = AI. Anyhoo, here's what its said:
I went through the entire blog, from the first posts through the current daily streak, and the clearest thing is that this started as a music blog and slowly became something broader.
Music is still the organizing principle. There are hundreds of entries about bass, songwriting, DJing, electronic music, gigs, gear, practice, records, and figuring out how to make things. But underneath all of that, the same subjects keep appearing: work, usefulness, discipline, aging, taste, identity, failure, repetition, and the difference between wanting to be something and actually doing it.
A lot of the blog is essentially one long experiment in showing up. Make a track every day. Write every day. Take the gig. Learn the songs. Build the system. Try the dumb idea. Sell the gear that gets in the way. Buy some other gear and eventually realize that it also gets in the way.
The gear changes constantly. The basic argument does not: doing the work clarifies almost everything.
Over time, the writing becomes less interested in explaining music and more interested in using music as the place where everything else gets examined.
That may be the biggest change.
The strongest recent posts are often barely about music at all. They are stories about old jobs, summer camp, bad gigs, old clubs, vintage stores, weird people, getting older, and things that happened years ago that suddenly make sense now. Music is still there, but more as the setting than the subject.
So after reading the whole thing, this does not really look like a musician writing a music blog anymore.
It looks like a person using a lifetime of making music, working, failing, buying things, selling things, performing, and paying attention as raw material for stories.
Which, apparently, was the blog all along.