Wasting time for composer/musicians

Composing music is not easy. There is even a scale to measure how hard it is. That’s why I offer this time-tested strategy for TASK AVOIDANCE to my fellow composers: when you’re stuck at stages 4–6 on the Scale of Compositional Agony, stop what you’re doing and design an album cover for it.

[N.B.: If you’re stuck at stage 7, designing an album cover will not help. You should just switch to designing album covers.]

I cannot honestly say that I’ve used this strategy at any point in the past two years, since I haven’t composed. No, I was working on prepping dinner and had Pandora playing something in the background when I chanced to look up and see this album cover:

This is Bing & Ruth’s album Tomorrow was the golden age. (The track I was listening to was “Postcard from brilliant orange.”) I was immediately struck by the STEAL FROM THE BEST possibilities here: tactile trash art, perhaps a graphite rubbing of corrugated cardboard, plus digital enhancements in the two rectilinear superimpositions.

As album covers go, this one is fairly dadaistic, and that’s key for your time-wasting: pick interesting images and slam them together until they cohere and jump and you have an album cover.

For example, here’s one I made probably a decade ago when I was floundering with a piece for a small string orchestra:

I mean to say, what? I don’t even remember the impulses that led to any decisions about this art. I never finished the piece itself; I had prepped about five different ideas for this particular orchestra, and they chose Resignation instead.

Here’s one more, the cover for Five Easier Pieces (a companion to, and a partial apology for, Six Preludes (no fugues), which has its own cover, naturally.

Note to pianists out there: I said they were easier, not necessarily easy. Go try Six Preludes; you’ll see.

So get out your crayons and glue; open up your graphics program. Go explore bandcamp.com and see what all the cool kids are doing. And then, when Ten Little Waltzes or [title redacted because I’m not ready to think about it] or your grunge/ambient/EDM album stalls out, go ahead and create the album cover that your as-yet-uncomposed music deserves.