Should I Finish It or Let It Brew?
Should I Finish It or Let It Brew?
When you write the seed of an idea, you are confronted with a choice: do you pursue it all the way, or do you let it brew?
It’s an age-old tension, and of course, it’s coloured by circumstances. For instance, last year, while writing my album, I squeezed the writing into corners of time.
I often had an idea and felt it was good, but I rarely finished the song in one sitting.
It irked me, because I was niggled by the question of what would happen if I could give the process more time.
Many of my favourite songwriters were extraordinarily zeroed in on the act of finishing.
Lennon and McCartney, in the early days, would write nose to nose daily for three-hour sessions — and generally they would come out with a song. Their raw talent was sharpened by:
The discipline of regular three-hour sessions
The pressure of their label demanding singles on a regular deadline
Rivalry with one another
The helpfulness of relying on each other to complete unfinished songs
All these factors contributed to shaping their extraordinary output.
When I started writing last year, I didn’t just feel rusty — I was also experiencing writer’s block.
Part of the decision to make the album was that I believed it was just that — writer’s block — and I wanted to confront it.
Within it, though, there was also the fear that I’d written my last song, that this part of my creative life had tied its own knot.
But how could I really know?
I knew there were causes — I was busy with work, and my creative interests had diversified into multiple channels.
From the outset, I knew two things:
First, I had to learn to say “no.”
There were a lot of opportunities before me, and it was hard to say no to things that were rich with real-life potential,
Sometimes that is the choice, though — to sacrifice external opportunity to go into the deeper potential calling.
The second — perhaps more importantly — I needed to know if I still had songs in me.
The resistance we feel before plunging into something that’s calling us is often based on fear of the ego. In my case, what if what I hoped to find simply wasn’t there?
I leaned hard into this question.
I realised its opposite would be much worse — regret.
And so I rolled up my sleeves and decided to start prioritising the process.
That sounds romantic, but what it meant in real terms was trudging down through the snow in early January last year and sitting within the writer’s block.
That’s the hardest thing about the uncertainty at the heart of creative life.
That emptiness and inspiration are radically linked.
Sometimes, getting to inspiration is about how durable you are through bouts of emptiness.
Through it all — getting back to love of the process itself, and making time for it — the writer’s block, the doubt, and the nagging emptiness started cracking off.
Little ideas started appearing.
One of them was called “Be As One” and will be the fourth song released from my new collection (here’s the pre-save).
I’m really proud of this song and so excited for you to hear it! It was a eureka moment when it came, a moment where I felt reconnected to the source where music comes from — and started to feel I was experiencing it in a new way. I will send the video out in a few days. As you know, I usually only send the newsletter once a week, so for those battling inboxes, sorry for the extra mail!
When song ideas finally began to surface again, it was a joyous, reinvigorating moment—especially the affirmation that something real had been behind the force needling me for so long.
After ideas, though, then what!?
I knew myself well enough to know that if the ideas started coming, then there very well may be an outpouring.
Tackling the emptiness was about chipping away at the dam.
They did start coming — but with it, the cursed challenge of completing things came too!
Even Lennon, after writing the verse of “A Day in the Life,” was baffled with what to do next, saying “well I’d done the easy bit” — and opted, under pressure of deadline, to ask Paul to write the next section: “woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head”...
I didn’t have a sparring partner, a producer, or a record label.
And with this, I entered the classic quandary of the independent artist in relation to finishing things.
Do I let the ideas brew?
Do I trust the process will lead to completion?
Do I force the agenda?
The easiest thing at this point is for excuses to come in — and though the excuses make us feel better when the outside world isn’t helping, at the end, they don’t help finish the damn things!
It was at this point that I started to think a lot about The Beatles' circumstances — and thought, playfully, if I could replicate them for myself in miniature.
Here’s how I approached it:
1/ An Imaginary Partner
After writing the first part of the song, I’d try to slip into my flip-side self.
How would I approach this problem if I were not me?
How could I discover the chorus sequence for this verse if I approached it from the opposite of how I’d expect to?
What would happen if I imagined I was the lead guitarist who could create the hook that takes the song in a whole new direction, or the pianist who stumbled on the impossible chord sequence that unlocks a new progression?
Could I be that person?
Of course, you're still yourself—but these strategies unlock parts of you you didn’t know existed.
It helped every time I hit a blockade.
My takeaway? When stuck, try doing something you would simply never do. Even by realising you don’t want to do it after all — you nudge something!
2/ Booking the Studio in Advance
The next decision I made was to become my own label — and so I booked studio time every two months throughout the year.
It gave me enough time that I could allow ideas to brew — but not enough time that I could get distracted and move onto other things.
Because I wasn’t writing a lot of songs, I was essentially forcing my own hand. I’ve been in the arts long enough to know that days can turn to months, and months to years.
We all have our Albatross Projects — those projects we never complete but never move on from.
This would not turn into one of mine!
I was afraid of losing my sense of urgency — but more positively, I was determined to see what would happen if I really made the effort to get the songs over the line within the actual window of their inception.
The studio time acted as a regular hard stop. It brought an intensity to my process that would have been missing otherwise.
It also had another effect; I was consistently clearing the desk. Rather than being weighted down by a growing abomination of new ideas, I was finishing whatever ideas were coming through.
What I loved about this process is that it meant I could stay up to date with myself emotionally — and I think when the album is finally released, that will be one of its strengths: a broad arc of thoughts, feelings, emotions and observations — but all written under the same umbrella of time.
3/ Rivalry With Something Unexpected
The final aspect I brought into my process was a sense of rivalry. I don’t feel rivalry with other musicians — the arts have never been something competitive to me.
But I wanted the songs to sit in the room.
By that, I mean to sit in the room with the songs I love — and not feel out of place.
It was my metaphorical measure of quality control.
When we are working on something in private or in isolation — as is so often the case with our projects — we need something to measure ourselves by.
It’s hard to get right.
Judge ourselves too quickly, or too harshly, and it can send us into retreat from the very thing we set out to create.
Go too easy on yourself, and you lose the quality control needed to do good work.
And so, into my little room entered a little hearty and healthy rivalry. Not like Lennon had with McCartney — or George with the other two, for that matter!
But a playfulness to coax something unexpected, or to redo something until it surprised me.
With my new work, I wanted to express where I am now — not where I’ve been.
But the strange thing is, even when you try to stay true to the present, you’re often pulled into the unknown — a threshold of yourself you’ve yet to meet.
It’s not a comfortable experience — and it’s not supposed to be.
Shedding old skins never is.
It’s only once you’ve passed through the threshold, or shed the skin that no longer fits, that you see what you were inkling all along.
Damn, there really was something in you that was latent and as of then unformed.
Of course it was bugging you. Of course it made you restless!
It’s only after the fact that what fragmented you before starts making sense. Something was wresting you open.
It was making space for what you most needed to enter.
We crave peace as human beings, but often fall into the trap of thinking it’s permanent once found.
In my experience, inner peace is the outcome of a process. You climb, you reach the plateau—and my God, that rest is beautiful.
But in time, it becomes just that: a plateau.
A sense of stasis can set in.
That growing sense of restlessness, easy to ignore at first, is a new version of life calling — as if life itself longs to be met from new vantage points.
The falsified peace is a hard danger to determine.
Or maybe it is just part of living to burn for something.
What is that flash in the firefly?
What is the colour of the breath as it meets the crisp chill of dawn?
What is the buzz in the belly as the sun breaks across the mountain’s blue?
Our ideas, our dreams, our callings — they are there for a reason. But they also come with their own challenge:
To bring an idea to completion is to answer life’s gauntlet.
That gauntlet is always asking the same question.
Who are you, really?
For me, finishing a song—writing, recording, and releasing it—is a small way of giving form to the transformation between two selves.
An emanation, frozen for a moment in time…
I think this new project called to me because I was wrong about a place I thought I'd already arrived at.
I wasn’t ready to settle for that version of me.
It wasn’t yet fixed; it was still unfolding.
I was still unfolding.
I write this to remind:
Keep moving your little dreams forward.
Keep nurturing those little ideas.
Keep having the courage to take the tiniest step before you.
In a world where everyone is too clever and knowing to believe in life; be the fool who does so.
It’s in these things — these tiny things — that life happens.
Part of that journey is reaching the joyous plateau, before discovering you still have some distance to go.
With love,
Jim
