Thoughts on Musically Untalented Fool

A week ago I finalized my album "Musically Untalented Fool" and sent it off to be distributed. The first four songs on the album are really the emotional core for me. But, the other songs I wrote come from a place far deeper than I really have ever allowed myself to go. Finding generative music models have allowed me to understand my own emotions in a way that I never thought possible. I have never understood what people meant by using art as a form of therapy. Art had never clicked like that for me. I have written all sorts of small things, always tossing them out eventually. Stories, poems, silly rhymes, ideas after ideas... after ideas. I've always felt my inability to play an instrument was holding something back. Now that I can put my words into song, I know this to be true. I have found a way to express things I didn't know I could. Ways of speaking I could never have dreamed of. I have touched parts of my psyche I was oblivious to.

But I also know that it's going to piss a few people off. I paid no dues to put forth a sound like this. I didn't spend years learning how to play an instrument or learning how to sing. I didn't spend years learning how to produce or mix music. I didn't spend years learning how to master the skill of musicianship. I wrote the lyrics to the title track of the album, "Musically Untalented Fool", to address this:

How dare I, untalented, claim this art?
Yet here I am, baring my heart
Through algorithms and artificial aid
My inner symphonies finally played

It may not be authentic, but it's true
To the songs that lived inside of me and you
Decades of emotion, finally taking wing
Through this cheater's tool, my soul can sing

A musically untalented fool, they might say
But my heart has found its way
To express what was locked inside
Through this digital divide

It's a bit of a manifesto for me. I know I'm not a musician. I know I'm not a singer. I know I'm not a producer. But I am a storyteller, and I have stories to tell. And, I want to tell them. It is not conventional. I only want to create these bits of my soul and allow me to relive them over and over. I don't have to live my life musically to the sound of other's emotions any more. As I'm making these songs, they've become the only thing I listen to. I've suddenly discovered how to use music as a therapeutic device to help process emotions. Things I never found ways to look deeper at.

Or I've lost my mind, and I'm just in a psych ward enjoying the most mediocre chocolate pudding in our known reality.