MAKING MUSIC WITHOUT THE MACHINE

There was a time when making a record required an entire machine.

You needed access to a studio. Engineers. Expensive equipment. Distribution. Marketing. And, if you actually wanted people to hear it, probably a record label somewhere in the middle of all of it.

That world still exists, but you don't necessarily need it anymore.

Prophets of the Cosmic Darkness is proof of that, at least for me.

I make the music. I record it. I work on the artwork. I make the videos. I maintain the website. I release the songs.

Most of it happens at home.

Sometimes I'm working on a song late at night. Sometimes an idea shows up while I'm doing something completely unrelated and I have to stop what I'm doing to record it before I forget it.

There's no team waiting for the next deliverable.

There's no label deciding whether a song is marketable.

There's nobody telling me that the chorus needs to happen ten seconds earlier because people might skip the track.

It's just me making something and deciding when it's finished.

That freedom has become one of my favorite parts of doing this.

I DON'T WANT TO MAKE MUSIC FOR AN ALGORITHM

There's obviously a business surrounding music. There always has been.

And I don't think there's anything wrong with making money from art. Artists should be paid for their work.

What bothers me is how easily the process can get reversed.

Instead of making something and then figuring out how to find people who might like it, we're increasingly encouraged to think about what people—or an algorithm—might like before we make anything at all.

What genre is performing well?

How long should the intro be?

What's trending?

What's going to work on TikTok?

What part can become a Reel?

How often should I post?

What should the hook be?

At some point I have to stop and ask myself what any of that has to do with writing a song.

I don't want to make music that way.

That doesn't mean I'm going to ignore promotion or pretend I don't care whether anyone listens. Of course I want people to hear what I make.

I just don't want the process of finding an audience to determine what I create for them.

THE PEOPLE ON THE OTHER SIDE

The more I do this, the more I've realized that numbers aren't particularly motivating to me anyway.

A thousand streams is a number.

Ten thousand streams is a bigger number.

That's nice. I can look at a graph and watch the line move.

But finding out that an actual person connected with something I made feels completely different.

That's the part I care about.

Music has always had this strange ability to attach itself to our lives. You hear a song years later and suddenly you're somewhere else.

You're driving somewhere you haven't been in twenty years.

You're thinking about someone you haven't talked to in a decade.

You're remembering a relationship.

A summer.

A terrible night.

A really good one.

The song didn't change. You did.

And somehow this little collection of sounds became attached to part of your life.

I think that's incredible.

It's also what I hope can happen with something I make.

Not with millions of people.

Just with someone.

THAT'S ENOUGH

I'm not trying to build Prophets of the Cosmic Darkness into some enormous operation.

I don't need a committee.

I don't need someone deciding which parts of it are commercially viable.

And I don't particularly want to spend my life chasing whatever the internet has decided musicians are supposed to chase this week.

I want to keep making things.

I want to get better at making them.

I want to try things that might not work.

And when I finish something, I want to put it out into the world and hopefully find some people who understand what I was trying to do—or find something in it that I never intended at all.

Maybe one of these songs ends up attached to someone's memory.

Maybe another musician hears something and decides to go make something themselves.

Maybe somebody just puts one on while they're driving and turns it up.

That's enough for me.

Because ultimately, I don't think art needs an industry to justify its existence.

It needs someone willing to make it.

And, if you're lucky, someone on the other side who cares.