Welcome to Episode 93 of the Bandhive Podcast.

It is time for another episode of the Bandhive podcast. My name is James Cross. I'm here with Matt Hoos of Alive in Barcelona. For those of you listening to the podcast, it's been about a week probably since you listened to episode 92.

But for us it's been about 15 minutes since we finished recording that one. So matt, how have you been doing the last 15 minutes? You know, it's been a pretty stellar 15 minutes James. How about yourself? That is good to hear. I've had a good time working on the outline for this episode. I'm looking forward to it. It's something that I know I've struggled with over the years and it's something that a lot of artists I'm sure will relate to. Maybe if you don't realize you're doing it yet you will, after you hear this episode, it's gonna be a fun one.

What do you think that, you know, I think we just need to hurry up and get it done because well done is better than perfect, right, James. It is indeed. And that is the topic of today's episode. Thank you for bringing that up, man. I'm trying to think of a good example of this and it's tough because there are so many that I could think of and I'm just gonna toss one out there because you know done is better than perfect. I'm not going to find the right example, but years ago when I was first launching my studio, I spent hours on a website obsessing over every little detail being like, oh, you know, this image should move to pixels to the left and then like this thing should come down five pixels and dude, no one cares.

They're not going to look at your website. Like if your website looks good or it looks bad, they're going to notice that, but no one is going to look at and go, uh, this site sucks, This should have been moved to pixels to the left. I'm never listening to this band again. No, that does not happen. So done is better than perfect. And it applies to many other things, aside from websites, especially in the music world and as with all creatives, artists often focus on small details and that's a great thing in lots of cases, but in some cases it just leads to procrastination and delays in releasing your music or booking a tour, taking whatever next action you're trying to take.

I speak from experience here. I'm a perfectionist and I know matt, you're probably a perfectionist. I could see that. See I'm not a perfectionist, but it just depends on, on really what it is when I'm writing songs. I really like my lyrics to be epic. It's important for me for the lyrics to tie into the emotion to tie into the key of the song, you know, things like that, but at the same time there's times when it's like I'm going to obsess over finding a way to make this thing clever and in all actuality, sometimes it's better to just say what you're thinking.

You don't need to paint the world's greatest analogy in order for you to get your point across. Sometimes the best lyrics are ones that just say like I'm sad or this sucks, I'm miserable, I'm happy, I'm in love. Sometimes people want that blatant transparency and sometimes people want you to say like ah forlorn was my time betwixt, mine and mine love for the shores of North Friends were beautiful. You know, it's like, no, you don't need all that now, you can have it and I think the depth that you dive into there will probably determine how many commentaries are written on your work after you die.

But I think in the music industry, in the entertainment industry, especially done is a very good thing done is better than perfect because it will take you an eternity to get to a perfect product and more often than not there's a time frame in the music industry where things are trendy. So in order for you to actually put out a song that's perfect, You would have to be putting out a song That is using the trendy tones, the trendy samples the modern day production techniques right now.

Everything really likes a lot of base in music that was not the case like back in the 90s and 2000s. So like For you to write a song and if it takes you 10 years for you to get it out, you might record it in 2010 and then you go to release in 2020 and then people are like where is the base? So the idea of perfect is really, it's it's a subjective idea. There's no such thing as objective perfection. Even my favorite songs when I talked to the people that wrote them and I say like, oh this is my favorite song, this is my favorite album.

I remember telling Buddy Nielsen from census fail that let it unfold. You was one of my favorite albums ever written when I was like 18 years old and he just was like, oh yeah, I guess it's okay. Clearly he wasn't so in love with it. He thought his later work was better and I thought his later work was garbage. And so like this subjective perfection is just kind of for the birds, you need to finish the product so that you can start editing a product and in all honesty, the law of large numbers says put out as many products as you want and people will naturally flock towards the good ones and then you'll actually have a little bit of data to go off of.

I like done is better than perfect because done is really what's going to allow you to write as many pieces of material as possible and writing as many pieces of material as possible is what's going to lead you to writing your best songs. So if I write one song, I have one chance at that song being popular. If I write 100 songs, I have 100 chances. So don't miss the forest for the trees because business with no products is not a business that's a hobby. So make sure you get products out, then make sure you get critiques on those products and then make sure you listen to those critiques and apply them to your music and then from there, hopefully your business grows and if it doesn't grow then you know that you're doing something wrong and you need to work on either marketing or on writing, but either way you've pushed leaps and bounds forward and you can actually start to analyze where you need to work on your business rather than being like good music is undeniable and and that's true.

Good music is undeniable but you have to release it in order for it to be undeniable. So many people miss this. I've heard stories of people being like, oh I've been writing this song for five years. Cool, that's 4. 5 years too long. Van Halen was literally releasing a full length album every six months while they were on tour, literally recording in their tour bus, stopping at studios along the way, dropping a new full length album every six months. And that was while they were the biggest band like in the world, pretty much not to sound brash, but there are no excuses.

I don't care what your excuses. I myself make excuses and I have to sit there and tell myself, I don't care what your excuses are. The excuses are that you're a procrastinator and you don't want to do it and you are paralyzed. There's a fancy term called paralysis by analysis, which is great. And really, that's just over thinking, there's so many ways that you can overthink something. It can be like, oh yeah, this one notes not right or this one emotions not right or there's this fine line between preparation and procrastination and the difference is progress.

You can pontificate and think about things all you like, but until you actually have put pen to paper, until you've actually written a court structure that fits with the emotion of your song, you are nowhere, there's a billion different reason that you can get this paralysis by analysis, it might be that you're worried about how people are going to hear your song and what they're going to think of it. You have this like requirement that's hinging upon how people view you and esteem problem. Really this is why I always say I write music for myself and I hope that my fans like it because it's not about their self esteem, it's about me creating art, that's an introspective battle.

I have to start with that. I have to say I have to get over my own fear of people not liking it. Then there is the business aspect of it. Maybe this song will be a failure. Maybe it won't be what people like, Maybe the business side of things will be like, oh yeah, like now the production quality is good. Some fans like it, the band likes it but it's just not, it's not ready already. That's a fear of failure. Fear of failure should never stop you from doing something.

Failure is not a bad thing thomas. Edison tried to make the incandescent light bulb so many times. I can't remember the exact number. Hundreds, absolutely. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. And when asked about it, they said, oh how do you feel about failing this many times And he said I did not fail. I learned X number of times how not to make a light bulb. What he did is he found the silver lining? He said this is knowledge, this is growth and hopefully its growth. Hopefully you're learning from your mistakes and you are applying them to your life.

You're saying all right, this is what I need to refine if I have a hypothesis and I test this hypothesis. Nobody says that's a bad thing. What if the hypothesis has an outcome that I did not anticipate? Well then that would be quote unquote failure. But no scientist would look at that and say that's failure. That is the acquisition of more knowledge. The acquisition of more knowledge gives you more tools and resources so that you can move forward. So get out of your own head the confidence that you need to exude when writing music is for yourself.

If you're worried about what other people are gonna think of your music, then maybe you're not writing music for the right reason. Maybe you should be focusing on telling your stories and finding a moral lesson in there describing your hardships rather than saying like maybe these people are gonna like it. It's like no, just make yourself transparent, Put yourself out on a limb and you will naturally attract the people that fall in love with that music. My favorite bands, I fall in love with concepts. I fall in love with ideas.

I fall in love with emotions when you can listen to an artist. That is a really, really good job of putting those emotions and those thoughts and feelings on paper. And then you can listen to that and you can relate to that that guy or girl or whatever they didn't set out to say, I am going to make matt life better. No, they said I'm going to write a story about something that was emotionally tough for me or emotionally uplifting for me and people are going to relate to that.

In my opinion. One of the most rhetorically effective songs ever written is today by smashing pumpkins, Billy Corgan was actually contemplating suicide and he's such a planned person, such a businessman, such a person who used checklists and planned everything to a t He couldn't find joy in life anymore. So he planned to kill himself. And he was so schedule oriented that he scheduled it, he wrote in a day on his calendar that he planned to kill himself. And then he woke up that day and he didn't want to kill himself.

And he said, you know what if I don't want to kill myself today, then it's probably that I really just don't want to kill myself and if I don't want to kill myself, then I might have something worth living for. And then that day he wrote today and the lyrics to that song or today is the greatest day I have ever known and I can't wait for tomorrow. And this is from a grunge band, from a singer on the precipice of death facing his own greatest struggle in the face.

He didn't write that song for anybody else. He wrote that for himself. He wrote that as a mantra for him to say, you know what, maybe this is a struggle that I can overcome. Couple days later, he wrote like the other two singles off of that song and all of the singles that came off of that record were all written as like a single sit down. He started he wrote the emotions down on paper and he finished the song same day it was done. Now. I'm sure that somebody like Billy Corgan who was very scheduled planned, coordinated could have said it's not perfect, it's not perfect, it's not done exactly the right way.

But you know what his listeners thought it was. That whole album is incredible. I mean really and everybody should go and listen to the smashing pumpkins in general, but like a killer in me today. Like, I mean there's so many introspective, He's very clearly not talking about anybody but himself or about his own lives in his own struggles, his own tribulations and he has all of that wrapped up nicely in a song with simple four chords stuff through some awesome samples over the top and you just have a masterpiece.

He would say that was done and some of us would say it was perfect because perfection is literally where you are at that time and what you need perfection and music, perfection and art is subjective. There's no saying where your listeners are emotionally, where they're at mentally and they hear this music and it just invigorates them. That is a feeling that is irreplaceable and I'm not talking about from the writing side I'm talking about from the consumer listening to music when you sit down and you listen to lyrics that punch you in the soul and you just are just like, I don't know if I want to cry tears of happiness or tears of sadness or if I need to spend some time meditating and think about my life.

But that's the beauty of it. These guys, most of these like great hits that you hear about that really affect a lot of people's lives. The story behind them is like, oh yeah, I sat down and then like 20 minutes later this song was written and then you have other songs where it's like, this song took me six months Anthony Kiedis from the red hot chili peppers. He and john Frusciante sat down to write under the bridge and can't remember who's under the bridge of californication, Anthony was like, oh yeah, done is good, done is good.

And john Frusciante literally went out and purchased a $30,000 Gretsch white falcon guitar for the purpose of recording that because the tone had to be perfect. So for them, it took him a long time to get those songs recorded and luckily he had the funds to be able to go out and blow money on something like that. But had he not had that money, he would have been searching forever for this idea of what the perfect song was and we never would have gotten that song perfect is the enemy of good really.

They fight against each other and you can say that something is perfect all you like but perfect is always going to be subjective. It's not objective, there's no such thing as objective perfection when it comes to art so get things done man, don't worry about the bells and whistles. The bells and whistles can come afterwards. That is totally okay. Yeah absolutely. That is so important just being able to put yourself out there and you know like you said matt music is subjective if you're worried about people judging you when you put music out that's going to happen anyway.

Not everyone likes the style of music you make. So somebody's going to say I don't really like that and that is okay if you're trying to make music that everyone will like no one's going to like it. Like I see artists who say oh we do a fusion of blues rock with techno and hardcore punk and a little bit of country. It's like dude that's like taking a bowl of spaghetti and mixing it with your salad with some ranch dressing and then adding in creme brulee to the mix and having like spaghetti mixed with salad and creme brulee, nobody would want to eat that.

Who in their right mind would eat that. So why would somebody want to listen to a rock band that has country and E. D. M. And blues and folk and all kinds of other things like you're just mixing things up. There's no point to that. But to get kind of back to the topic of not procrastinating and saying done is better than perfect. I want to throw an example out there. You have to artists Artist a rights one song and works on it for a whole year, perfecting it, recording it, tweaking it, changing the production in the arrangement and all that kind of stuff for a full year.

An artist be releases one song every single month for that same year. And let's say They are equals when they start their talent, their skill. All of that is exactly the same after that year. Who is going to be the better artist. Who is going to have a better product. It's going to be the person that released 12 songs because you know what maybe the first 3 to 5 songs they released aren't going to be as good as the one. The other artists spent a year working on for that single song.

But once you get to like songs 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. They have so much more experience and practice when it comes to songwriting and arrangement and production. They are going to be better artists and they will no longer be equal because that artist who just went out there and said done is better than perfect. I'm putting out a song a month for the rest of the year. Boom, That is the artist who's going to make it because they have said to themselves, I'm doing this, I don't care what other people think.

I'm going to put out a song every month. And now their skills are that much more advanced because they weren't afraid to put themselves out there. They didn't have that low self esteem, la la la la la la. However, it goes from the offspring I had to, they didn't have that fear of failure. I deal with fear of failure and fear of judgment. I think pretty much everyone does, But sometimes you just got to say, hey, we're going to do this and you got to put yourself out there because if you don't ask, the answer is always no, our parents weren't wrong when they told us to just jump in the deep end of a pool to learn how to swim.

It's more than just getting your foot wet. It's about jumping in the deep end. This is really with all parts of the music industry, whether it's songwriting, whether it's booking a tour, whether it's even just playing your first live show. I've heard about artists who worked so long to write music that they didn't play their first show until like after they have been playing together for years and years and years thinking that just like they weren't good enough. The bottom line is the thing that's going to refine you is you're going to be in that situation doing it.

The best way to do anything is to practice it and practice it as closely as possible to the real life simulation as you can. Well, what's closer to the real life simulation than the real life simulation? Nothing. So get out, do it, you're gonna spend like 80% of your time focusing on 10-20% of your details. That's just the nature of things. You know, like anybody can write four chords, you can look up any four chord structure that you want in the world, you can look up any variation of any four chord structure and then, you know, you can look up what's a, how do I learn leads?

You can get on Youtube and learn tips and tricks from all these different people. And then if you don't actually sit down and take that like that information that you're learning and applying it in your real world setting, where you actually want to be in your venues on your tours, then you're never, ever, ever going to be a musician, what you're going to be is an actor, You're saying, oh yeah, like I'm in a band so that you can, you know, pick up girls or whatever or, or maybe maybe that's just something cool that you wanted to be able to tell people for a while or maybe it's a hobby and that's cool too.

There's no wrong answer about what you do with your music. The only wrong answer is not doing it. You have to start and you have to finish. I can tell you that right now I have probably have 100 songs on my phone that are unfinished because I started them and I got to a point where I was like, man, this just isn't as perfect as I wanted it to be and you know what they ended up getting back Bernard and I'll never go back to them. Most songs that you start, you won't finish and so just be brave.

It's hard, be courageous finish the songs, write some stupid lyrics and before you realize that you're like, hey, maybe like these lyrics that I thought were stupid. Maybe that's just not my subjective taste. Maybe that's how I write and other people subjectively really like that and it really speaks to them. You're not going to know until you actually put yourself out there and start releasing stuff. Your own worst enemy is yourself. So conquer that barrier. Get over the hurdle of things needing to be perfect and just get to where they're done because when they're done that's step one. Absolutely.

That is some very, extremely lit advice. As soon as you said my own worst enemy, I was like, oh no, this is happening, you okay, served you right up. Yeah, that was just a tough one. Yeah, that was like the soft pitch that I just hit out of the park, little t ball for you James Anyway, I fully agree and that really is a great point and it made me think of something else. If you're working on a song and you've been working on a single song for, let's say 3-6 months and it's not going anywhere.

Say you know what, I'm going to start a new one, I'm not going to dig my heels in and force this song, that doesn't feel right to work and put it out a bunch of episodes ago, like 20 episodes ago he talked about quality versus quantity and we said, you always want quality for what you release, but that means you have to have quantity on the back end when you're writing, when you're demoing you need that quantity. So if you've been spending six months on a song and it's just not doing what you needed to do, it's probably time to work on other songs and like you said, matt, put that on the back burner, there's no other way around it to piggyback off of what you said about jumping into the deep end.

Yeah, I see so many artists who say, oh well we're not ready to play a show and it takes them years. There was one listener who shared a story about her band, it took them a decade and they played one show in that decade because they kept saying, well, no, we gotta rehearse more, we got to do this, we got to do that now, I don't do that, say, hey, we're going to play a show as soon as we have enough material to fill that set, we're going to go play a show and then you can see how that show goes and tweak your set from there.

If it goes well, awesome book more shows keep improving. If it doesn't go so well figure out what happened and go back to the drawing board at that point. But don't spend your entire time focusing on what might happen before it happens. You have to put yourself out there and like you said, matt, just jump into the deep end. And really the main point is as long as you're able to create your moving in the right direction, the details, yes, they matter. But don't get so focused on 10% of the project that you ignore everything else and it takes you away too long.

There's something called the 80 20 principle which basically says that 80% of your problems come from 20% of the people you deal with, or 80% of your income comes from 20% of your work. It's just a general rule of thumb that, you know, maybe it's not 80 20 maybe it's 70 30 or 85 15. It varies, but there's typically a ratio somewhere around 80 20 where either all your value comes from that small portion of things or all your problems come from that small portion of things. So if you're working on the last 20% of a song and it's just not working, it's time to 8020 that song.

And instead of spending 80% of your time on that last 20% of that song, that's not working, Spending 80% of your time on a song that is going to do much better in the long run and you want to be sure that when you're creating your not hitting these roadblocks, that trip you up and really just get you trapped into an area where you're so headstrong that you think this one song is gonna make it and you're struggling. No, don't struggle. Do what feels right, do what feels natural and start another song, then you'll be able to take on anywhere.

Mhm Yeah, mm that does it for another episode of the Bandhive podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in and listening. It's really appreciated and I hope that this episode inspires you to go out there and just do the things that you have been holding back on because they're not quite perfect, do the best you can, but don't push yourself so hard and say, I gotta make this perfect before anyone else sees it because ultimately that is going to hurt you in the long run. It's much better to put your work out there and see the reaction then adapt for your future releases than it is to hold on to something for months or years and that's just not healthy.

Ultimately, I know people who have been working on one album for over five years and that's not helpful if you've been working on an album for five years, there's a ton of emotional baggage connected to that or not even an album, one song, there are probably people who've been working on one song for five years. You've got to let go of that emotional baggage and just start with a blank slate. So again, I hope you take this advice and just put yourself out there creatively, whether it's writing songs or releasing songs playing live shows or anything else in your life, just remember done is better than perfect.

If you want to talk with us about this matt and I both offer coaching, you can learn more about that and sign up for your first session by going to ban Hive dot rocks slash coaching. Again, that's band, I've got rocks slash coaching. If you'd like to talk to matt or myself about your music career, we'll be back with another new episode next Tuesday at six a.m. Eastern time in your favorite podcast app. Until then, I hope you have an awesome week, Stay Safe and of course, as always, keep rock and