I've always been a terrible procrastinator, a person who has never functioned well without deadlines. It's part of why journalism was a suitable career, in fact. Most journalists I know only function well several minutes before they have to turn something in. Procrastination is not inherently a bad thing, mind you – for some, it takes that pressure to actually focus. Give me two hours and it will be done and near perfect. Give me two weeks and I'll make some token effort at first, lose interest, promptly blow it off for 13 days and 22 hours and do it in two hours, anyway. Juste un peu d'amour has dragged on since July, which is when I first started writing it, and if I don't give myself a target date to aspire to, the thing won't get written. Once I get this done, I have some other ideas that I am promptly ready to unleash.
Anyway, I'm also drinking some scotch right now and I think I could use some music. Track 06 on the Lose Tunes is a song called Aurora Gone from the Texas band Midlake, a cerebral sextet who write beautifully lush and thought-provoking songs. Their newest record was an interesting (mis)adventure in the creative process – they spent two years working on a record and found themselves going nowhere, at which point the lead singer/songwriter left the band, and the rest of the members then junked what they were working on and started anew, writing and recording a new record in six months. This reminds me of my own processes – I spent 10 YEARS developing the ideas and characters for a novel and then junked it and started writing this one instead. After 10 years, I was sick of the characters. And the story was too heavy – it was sort of like going to dinner and ordering a 5-course prix fixe when all you really wanted was a caesar salad and an iced tea.
This is a nice version, scaled back and recorded live at KEXP in Seattle. And yeah, this bit of indie prog rock is a bit of a change-up from the funked out Track 05. But I like contrasts and conflicts. Without contrast and conflict, nothing is fundamentally interesting to me. It's why I am so interested in losing, after all – the emotions when one fails are much more complicated than when one succeeds.
