Self Doubt, Plateaus, and Beyond the Studio :: Paul Moak
If you’ve been in Nashville’s Recording Studio Scene for very long, then you’ve probably met Paul Moak. If you haven’t, well then you should go meet him.
It's pretty much when I wake up in the morning and I take a shower and get ready to take my kids to school and go to the studio that I've doubted my entire existence, like 15 times, not only music but as a father and you know. I think it's built-in to anyone that pursues an artistic, creative endeavor as a business. There's just self doubt built into that, and I don't hit the major, or I haven't hit the major existential thing since I had kids. It kind of becomes more of like okay, I've spent 20 years creating a life for myself in music, so how do you push past where you get set in your ways, whether it's anything as simple as a drum sound to the way you approach dealing with an artist or writing a song.
An example would be, and I've had this situation three times now, where the demo for a song on a record comes back to haunt us with the label being well we like this version more, and the artist likes the version that we've done in the studio more, and and I've had to deal with that three times and I've tried three different ways of like dealing with it and it's not been successful. It's like looking at things from the angle of okay, I'm older now, I'm a little bit wiser, when I feel creatively plateaued it's what's causing that am I writing with the same people too much, am I working with the same bands too much, or what do I need to change in the way that I approach what I'm doing.
A lot of times it can be as simple as like man, I need to get out of town and like get away from going into the studio every day, and just kind of zoom out and be able to say man, the 15 year old version of me would lose his mind over the fact that I get to even just do this for a living. That's been the biggest thing I think, it's just maybe more of a life balance. Sorry it took me all of that to get to this which is: I think living life outside of the studio, having a family, hobbies, a social network, you know. For a long time you just have to work hard and that has to be your focus. You have to stay up all night, you have to work on stuff that you don't like, and you have to just grind it out to get a name for yourself.
I'm kind of more at the point now where I'm trying to cultivate a catalogue of the records that I'm working on, and to stay creatively engaged means having a life outside of the studio. I actually really look forward to taking time off on the weekends now, I'm doing stuff that's unrelated to music. Then I find when I go back in, I'm not fried like I was Friday, I'm really jazzed and ready to attack whatever's there, so I think maybe that's just repurposing your life. A lot of that was just maybe bad patterns of when I was on the road, it was like you’re just gone all the time. So then I went from being gone all the time to being in the studio all the time. Now I think I just know how to gauge myself like, “man I need to get out here” you know.