Have you ever noticed that as some bands get deep into their careers they become less and less interesting? I think a lot of this has to do with the pressure to deliver constantly–to put out albums every year to two years, being on a schedule. That first album is always great, exciting. The band took years developing songs, casting out the duds, and crafting an album of prime material. The second and third albums are usually okay as well–they’ve got that fire still in their belly. But then things have to become sustainable and a schedule is made: album, tour, album, tour, album, tour, etc.
In my opinion, the pressure to deliver and to constantly have to put our material on a regular basis is a sure fire way to destroy a musicians integrity.
I was thinking about this last night. For some reason I was thinking back to when I first got the bug and the passion for writing stories.
I remembered that back in the 5th grade I had this English class at Northside Elementary School. Back then all the students had to learn vocabulary words and spelling. Every week, a new set of words to learn with a test that followed. We were given two options each time we received a new set of words: either write a sentence five times with each word, or write a short tory that contained all the words and then read the story in front of the class.
I opted for writing a short story every single time.
Each week I came up with a new story that featured this new list of words. And each week I read that story to the class. To be honest, at first, my stories were a big hit. I made my stories funny and with lots of detail. I remember that this was the first time I ever performed before an audience. Even though it was just in front of the class it was the first time I could tell a story, have an audience listen to my ideas, and then immediately get the response I was looking for: laughter.
It was great. I was hooked.
My stories were a big hit with the students and even the teacher. So much so that I started to get a couple of imitators that wanted a bit of what I was getting. I remember this one kid stood up to read his story. He was attempting to be funny but it just fell short. I 
remember his story was about how some space aliens hit him with some ray gun, causing him to fly up into the sky. So, in the story, he stuck his finger down his throat, making himself throw up, and then fell back to Earth. It would’ve been fine if he had some confidence in it. He got a goose egg, a big fat zero from the crowd. That was the last time he ever stood up to read his story. However, there was this other kid, Josh, that was actually pretty good. He gave me a run for the money. He and I pretty much had a story to read in front of the class every single week.
It was competition. The game was on, pal.
Now, this was fine when things first started. I had a ton of ideas and I loved writing and crafting these new stories every week. But as the semester went on I found myself struggling to come up with things that I hadn’t said before. I didn’t want to repeat myself. After all, it was the same audience every single time. They’d know if I started rehashing the same old story. Things had to be fresh, original.
This was starting to get to me. My material started to suffer. And it wasn’t just my material. Josh was starting to have some problems, too. There were a couple of times that we’d read our story aloud and get little response, nary a laugh. It wasn’t that the crowd was tough, it was our material that was getting bad.
Then the day of the big Field Trip came up. It was a Friday and we were all going to go to the North Park. With all the slides and merry-go-rounds and creepy people looking at us through the chainlink fence. I’m not sure why we were going to the park. I mean, we had a playground at school…why go to another playground?
Whatever, we were going to the park and before we went and hit the buses I wanted to deliver a new and exciting story to the class. There was just a one problem: I waited till the night before to write it and I was out of ideas.
So I plagiarized.
At the time I didn’t really know what plagiarism was. I just knew that I was going to lift someone else’s material and pass it off as my own. Now, I wasn’t going to blatantly rip anyone off. I somehow knew that that was wrong and dishonest. I was just going to lift some ideas and a story out of a magazine.
See, I was a big fan of Mad Magazine and Cracked Magazine as a kid. I think it was Mad Magazine that had the movie parodies in it.
At the time, the movie Alien had just come out. So I decided to take the funny parts that were parodied in Mad Magazine and sculpt my story around that.
Holy shit, did this bomb. It was a real stink-a-roo, folks.
I wrote this horrendous and completely nonsensical story of an Alien invasion that desperately needed visual aids to help convey it. I got a big fat zero from the audience. Not a laugh in the bunch. Even the teacher was confused. It was bad. And I knew it was bad when I started reading it. But I plowed through
It was so bad that some kid came up to me on the field trip and said, “your story today wasn’t as good as it usually is.”
Fucking humiliating.
So I told her, “Yeah, I got the idea from Mad Magazine.”
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is when I decided that plagiarism isn’t the way to go to get ahead in the story-telling or music world. If you’ve cultivated your own voice then you can’t lift the voice of someone else as your own.
But it was that pressure to constantly deliver on a regular basis no matter if I was in a creative mood or not that did me in. And I think that’s what’s happening to so many bands these days. They’re just burned out of ideas and inspiration. They’ve been doing the same thing over and over. They have this Catch-22 that if they release the same album twice the fans will get bored with the repetition, but if they experiment a bit and go off their center then the fans might say they’re changing their style too much.
Do I have a solution for this? Sure I do. I say call it a day when things aren’t fun anymore. Call it quits when you know you’re repeating yourself and you’re out of ideas. Screw this nonsense about having to put out an album every single year. If I ever get to the point where I have nothing to write about, then I’ll just not write any more.
Kinda like right now.
