In addition to creating music, I also like to cook. I especially like to making (or rather, attempting to make) sauces.
A few years ago I set out to make the perfect salsa. It took me a few tries, but pretty quickly I came up with a recipe that embodied what I think salsa should taste like. All my friends love it too. I usually make it a little thinner and milder than I would personally prefer, but I'm still happy with the flavor, and I feel like it has something unique about it; a little bit of myself expressed in a sauce.
This year I decided that my previous recipe was too complicated, so I set out to create a new recipe with half the ingredients. I nailed it on my first try, and honestly I think the simpler recipe tastes better (though a couple of my friends would argue with me).
However, I've also been trying to come up with a barbecue sauce recipe that embodies all I love about barbecue for a few years now, and after dozens of tries, I'm about ready to give up. Everything I make sucks, and while a couple of my friends are nice enough to eat my experiments, I know it's never very good.
I think there are several reasons for the difference in success rates, but perhaps the most important is this: I have an exact idea of the way I think salsa should taste, and I'm familiar enough with the ingredients to make that happen pretty much every time I make it (a few flops excepted). But when it comes to barbecue sauce, I've tasted so many different influential sauces that I loved, from thin and vinegary to thick and sweet, spicy, brassy, smokey, tart, etc. that it's nearly impossible for me to envision a sauce that captures my favorite things about each. Furthermore, there are so many possibilities for different ingredients that I'm just not as familiar with, that when I taste a half-finished sauce and think "hmm... it needs a little of that sweet flavor from Sharon's house sauce," I'm left guessing at how to make that happen.
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All of that to say, I look at a lot of you guys (and groups like The Books, Sigur Ros, etc.), and it at least appears that your efforts at making music flow the way salsa-making does for me. You know exactly what you're going for, and you stick with it. Even when it takes a surprising turn, it still turns out great. And I've watched with envy as several of you have sold-off gear and simplified your sets (stripped out half of the ingredients) and come up with a new recipe that's even more profound and satisfying that what you did at first.
But lately, making music has felt like trying to make the perfect barbecue sauce to me. I have so many diverse influences and sounds in my head that I want to combine, and I have all this technology at my fingertips that I'm just not as familiar with as I would like to be, that I feel overwhelmed by the endeavor. And everything I have come up with so far is just not satisfying to me.
And I'd like at least a few people to think it's good too, but right now the artists I'm hearing who come closest (check out
http://www.myspace.com/sonlux for one example) are too much of a stretch for even my most musically inclined friends.
Has anyone else been here, or am I even making sense? Any words of wisdom?
--Josh
