The Mind Factory
New music release in this edition
The end of summer can be a bit overwhelming and joyful at the same time. Yesterday I was driving around and I realized that my mind was not on the road but stuck in between a million thoughts.
Like a woman training to give birth or an astronaut going up in space, I had to reconnect with my breath by saying, “In, I am breathing in… Out, I am breathing out”.
Life is what happens in between all the planning that goes on in our minds. If you miss it, it’s gone forever.
In this edition, I am happy to share my newest track with you. This is my first piece of music to go up since February, so it took more grit than other pieces to finish. But I’m happy it’s up and available for you to listen to.
Three Lessons About Making Music That Anyone Can Appreciate
1. The thought of finishing a piece of music can be 100 times heavier than actually sitting down to finish it.
2. Do your best1: Take things to 80% satisfaction and be willing to let it go from there. The listener will either enjoy it or not care for it, but either way the sun will still rise tomorrow and bears will continue to shit in the woods.
3. Find the intrinsic motivation in everything you do, what I call your Joe vs. The Volcano2 moment in life. While there is no shortage of music out there, and streaming reduces the payout to astronomical lows, we do this work for our own personal growth and if there is an external reward as a result, then great.
New Track: Between Tomorrow
To name this track I wanted something that references the world of sleep. So I borrowed a phrase from my dear friend Claudia Dawson’s dream imagery which was a vision that she had about The Land Between Tomorrows.
I was given a tour of a realm called The Land Between Tomorrows. This is where we build time like structures. Where our days are configured into beautiful sculptures that defy gravity. A day can be a lifetime or a lifetime could feel like a day. I don’t ever expect to fully grasp how time and space works, but these dream glimpses make my mind malleable and my soul smarter.
From Many-Worlds Visions by
One way that I think of this place is the factory that’s at work when we sleep. It’s taking all the information that happened during waking life and it’s processing it - either storing it away for the future or discarding it completely. Or you could think of The Land Between Tomorrow as something completely different, where an alternate storyline and life is happening.
The track itself works with deep piano chords and mixes them with washes of pedal steel and electric guitar. I call it a cinematic sound and those guitars are reminiscent of Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti western soundtracks. Yet this is not a stagnant piece as there’s a bedrock of lo-fi beats underneath.
Apple Music | YouTube | Share on IG
Paid supporters of the Sunday Bagel were sent an mp3 copy of this a few weeks before it went up on streaming.
Check out these award winning images from the microscopic world
See you next week, and enjoy a bagel, hopefully in macro quantities.
Elliott
Do Your Best is one of the Four Agreements in the short but effective book by Don Miguel Ruiz
This is that movie with Tom Hanks. I barely remember what happens in it but I just picture a situation where the hero is under the gun to perform and make things happen.