Breaking down success and burning down pep boys!

(DISCLAIMER: I was listening to Outro by M83 while writing this so excuse the epic preachyness)

I hope all of you had a great New Year, mine was alright despite some set backs. I hate to even mention it because it's becoming such a tired story line so I'll sum it up in one sentence. My car is an unreliable piece of worthlessness and I had to be physically escorted from pep boys. I digress, my EP comes out in a month and a half, I'm getting anxious as i feel I'm running out of time, ideas and morale.I haven't slept in a bed in 22 days and I've been exercising so my body hates me. It's been getting so cold right at 5:30 I"m forced to get up and get moving until the sun comes up.

Lately I've been struggling with the notion I've been told a million times that in the music business you are powerless. Your fate is in the palm of the people's hands, a twig in the ocean, a slave to subjectivity, part of me has always known this to be true but also a part of me just cant accept that. Ever since I was a kid I've had that unrealistic notion that I control my fate, the thought that I have power over the outcome of my life and that I govern myself. Although when you give yourself to something so fully you have to adhere to the rules that govern the path, in my case, I'm at the mercy of listeners and they could easily just not care about the EP.

Despite all my passion,drive,commitment and diligence, my music has always been met with an "eh" sort of feeling. I can't let it happen again, How to I give more? how can i become more? Maybe I am letting my feelings of my music be dictated too strongly by how it's received by others. It is hard sometimes to feel what you are doing matters, I mean really matters in the grand scheme of things. I always have to suppress these sort of thoughts when i start working a monkey job to keep myself from just walking out. I think to myself what am i accomplishing by being here  other than being handed pieces of green paper or handed a number on a white piece of paper.Reality cannot be avoided though we all have to make money.

I starting realizing just this morning though that I've been generalizing and missing the most important question, what does success mean to me? There can never be one uniform definition of success as it should differ and vary from person to person. You look past money, job advancement, possessions and get to the root of what success really means to you. At first I thought to myself what a simple question but as I delved deeper all the things I thought about felt so superficial. All of my thoughts seemed to equate to either possessions or getting certain places to look good in the eyes of others. If my EP sells zero copies and it fizzles into nothing (very likely) but I love it and am proud of it, should the EP be considered a failure? Or was writing it, funding it and pouring everything I had into it a success in itself.

Maybe I've already won and the outcome doesn't really matter. Just because what you are doing isn't widely cared about by others doesn't mean that it doesn't matter. Birds sing in empty forests, stars continue to burn in empty voids of the galaxy, flowers grow on mountains which will never been seen. So what's my conclusion, what is success to me? For me the answer has been with me all along, for me success is to never give up or stop believing that what I'm doing matters. After all the grief I've given myself and how hard I've been on myself I now see the epiphany. No matter how broke I am, no matter how hopeless things get I"m still fucking doing it. I'm waking up every morning with my same childish hope and clocking into my dream. With that being said I don't feel i have achieved my idea of success just yet. I want the EP to do as well as it can and I want to support myself off of music but like I said the outcome will not change my feelings on what I think of it. To me this is success but I encourage you to take money and possessions out of the picture and ask yourself the same, What is success to you? I'm excited for 2016 I need this to be a good year but no one is going to hand that to me, January is a key building block for the EP. Press release coming this Tuesday with Maelstrom PR!

P.S My final words in pep boys before being physically escorted out were "I would rather light my car on fire than to ever bring it back to this dog shit establishment" I refuse to even capitalize their name.