Someone makes a great movie. And then they start thinking, how can we do that again? What made that movie so great? Let’s do more of that this time. And then the sequel ends up being a letdown.

The trap is in thinking that you have a better conscious understanding of your own success than you really do.

From Vocal Tracking — Field Notes

I’ll be recording vocals for a song I’m working on. This is the part of the process I most dread—because I know myself. It’s really difficult to put your name on something as your best—and therefore final—take when you could always record just one more. It’s a hellish landscape for the perfectionist.

But every now and then I’ll sing something that I really like, and I get excited. Okay, now I just need to sing the whole song like I did that one line. I hit record. I think I know what I did to get that particular sound out of my voice. Now let me just focus a little more on that this time and we’ll be golden.

Except we’re not golden. This take is worse across the board. It’s choked, over-engineered, and above all uninspired. This is when I know to step away for a bit. It’s when I start to care more about how I did something amazing, than I care about doing the amazing thing itself.

It becomes more about the control, the “understanding” of what I’m doing instead of just doing it. It’s like I don’t trust myself to be able to do it again. I have to intervene, come up with some theory about how it works, and try to reverse-engineer what I fear may be a one-off success.

It’s like cracking an amazing joke with your friends and then immediately breaking away for analysis: okay, why exactly was that funny? If I can get to the bottom of that then I can be funny on command. Those are the insane musings of someone who doesn’t trust themselves to be themselves.

And while you’re in your head trying to take apart and replicate your own sense of humor, you miss out on dozens of opportunities to say something twice as funny, if only you were there to say it.

To You

Would you rather do something amazing and not know quite how you did it? Or spend twice the amount of time doing half the amazing things, but getting to cling to the illusion that you know why?

I’ve spent a lot of my time as an artist on the back half of that deal. And now, I’ll take the first offer almost any day of the week.

It’s alright to let go and let things be a little magical. You don’t always have to see under the hood. There’s a time and a place for that. But you can’t see under the hood while you’re driving.

So sometimes you’ve got to ask yourself: do you care more about watching the engine and making sure that it’s running? Or being in the driver seat while it is?

I like that.

And all the rest,

— David Kennedy

From Singing — Field Notes

I never understood the hype around “vowel shaping” or “resonance” in singing, beyond their aesthetic impact.

I had always thought of singing as this linear process whereby air is gently operated on step by step until the sound we want emerges on the other side. Each part of the vocal tract working to shape the sound, but more or less independently of the parts preceding it.

To me, things like the pitch you were singing, the texture of your voice, what kind of support you were using—these were all things that happened before the sound arrived at your tongue to be shaped into a vowel or placed into a particular resonance.

So, when trying to refine the texture of my voice, or expand my range, or work on using better support…it never made sense to examine how vowels and resonance might be affecting these things, because to me all of my problems lay upstream (or so I thought).

But today, I’m discovering that the entire vocal tract can rather be thought of as one shared, resonant space—from the diaphragm to the tip of the nose—and the shape of that space influences (top down) all the little “parts” of the process that I hitherto considered to be more or less separate from each other, and linear in fashion.

…something you think that 14 years of playing the clarinet might have clued me in on earlier.

On the clarinet, it’s not as though the reed just produces sound and then the tone-holes are used to shape its pitch and so on. If the tone-holes aren’t covered properly, the reed may not even speak at all (or produce instead a horrible squeal appreciated by only the most forgiving of musician’s parents worldwide).

Your embouchure, the reed, finger placement—even the humidity—they’re all part of one resounding whole; intimately connected in subtle and not so subtle ways. However convenient to do so, it’s too simplistic to flatten these relationships out into a one-dimensional chain of independent links.

…I’m finding that by shaping my vowels differently and playing with their resonance, I’m able to more fluidly move about my range and do so with a greater sense of power as well.

Who would have thought?

(thousands of vocal teachers around the world, for centuries, actually)

But I took the long way around.

(with a smile)

To You

In an age of such technology and engineering, we often implicitly assume that all things must operate like machines do, in the way that we conceptualize them. But more often than not the truth is far more interesting (and mysterious) than this view of the world will allow.

If you’re trying to get better at something and seem to keep coming up against an invisible wall of sorts, try looking for a fingerprint of linearity in your conception of things.

There’s usually more than one.

All the best,

—David Kennedy

From Mixing & Mastering — Field Notes

When producing a song, sometimes you want the vocals to feel upfront and present, or the bass to feel massive and punchy, or the cellos to feel dark and lush…and you’re right. That’s how you want them to feel. But that’s not how they have to be in order to feel that way.

A vocal that’s given a little more top end will feel more “in your face” without having to physically be louder. Combine this with a little compression and you might actually be able to bring the volume down considerably without the vocal feeling any quieter, because its level is more consistent.

Make sure no other instrument is fighting the bass for space in the low end. Clarity down here is what gives it size and energy, not volume. Shape the transient so it pops a bit more. Add some harmonics via saturation, distortion, to give the bass some presence in the mids. It’ll cut through better on smaller speakers now (like headphones) without having to physically be louder.

The cellos aren’t playing by themselves. They’re supporting the lead vocal. Use a dynamic EQ to thin out the cellos in the frequency ranges where they overlap with the voice. Pan them around a bit so they’re out of the way now too. Roll off a little top end. If they’re too bright and sparkly, they won’t sit back in the mix and let the vocal shine. Compress and saturate on the cellos bus so they feel more like one sound instead of 6 instruments. The cellos are actually thinner, less detailed, and altogether less impressive on their own, but alongside the vocal they feel like this dark, warm, and lush texture just wrapping itself around the voice.

The listener doesn’t care that these are all supposedly “illusions.” It matters very little what’s “technically” happening. How does the music feel? Even if that’s an illusion, it’s the only thing that’s real.

To You

The young artist lacks nuance and thinks of everything too literally. But so much of the magic in art is in its ability to offer us such vast landscapes of beauty through such limited means and mediums provided by the artist.

How can a painter capture the warmth of the breeze during a summer sunset using only the interplay of color on a canvas?

How can a musician tell the entire story of your life with just 12 notes in the octave?

Art requires the imagination. Great art leaves the canvas. It transcends the instrument. It creates a world for us beyond the paper and the strings.

It’s metaphor—as all things are.

Great art feels the way it does in spite of what it may or may not “actually” be.

So let go a bit and allow the medium to be the medium. And let it gesture at something more without having to be that something more.

That’s art.

The rest is all yours,

— David Kennedy

I notice a tendency for my writing to drift towards these heavier, micro-essay style letters by the time I’ve fleshed out an idea and built a cohesive narrative around it.

I’ll admit that sometimes this desire to be thorough stems in part from an understanding that one day my writing may be forced to hold up under the scrutiny of my peers, or betray me altogether.

But this kind of writing sort of betrays the spirit of wayfinding altogether. It becomes more about convincing the reader of something or offering up and defending some idea—both of which have their own time and place—but at the expense of my initial inspiration for writing at all: to help someone on their own adventure by sharing bits of mine.

I want to get back to that initial spirit in my writing. Rather than write to defend myself against critics that don’t yet exist, I want to write for the few people that I genuinely can help and reach, with what little words I can offer.

Because the truth is, there are plenty of people that my writing will never reach even if they are to read it. And it’s of little use to anyone to write with only those people in mind.

The New Year

With the start of the new year, I’d like to try something new and something old. A fresh take on an old idea I’ve had. I want Wayfinding to feel more like a loose collection of field notes rather than a self-aggrandizing series of micro-essays disguised as letters with the reader in mind.

Like something closer to a diary really. A place to share little insights and observations from my own life, in the moments after their conception—rather than wait for these to accrete into much larger thoughtforms.

In the past, I’ve tried to strip these insights of any ties to the initial context in which they arose for me. Meaning, if I gained an insight about life while writing a song, I’ve tried to share that insight without any specific reference to songwriting or music, in hopes of generalizing that insight and not putting off anyone who lacks interest in songwriting.

But I think this is rather impoverished and withholding now. On the one hand, I’m claiming to only be sharing lessons and insights from my own life, without any specific imperative in yours. And at the same time, I’m sure trying an awful lot to make sure these lessons and insights feel general enough to be relevant in yours.

Moving forward, I’d like to pick a lane. I am now writing for a younger me. Maybe for my kids someday. What was dad up to when he was your age? See for yourself. Here’s what I was thinking about, here’s what I was doing. Here’s what I was noticing, here’s what I was learning.

This is what it felt like to be me, all those years ago.

It was long and arduous, messy and unpaved. But it was an adventure. It was my life.

I want Wayfinding to be in memory and celebration of that life. Little breadcrumbs left over from a life well lived. A field guide. For someone much younger and smarter, braver and wiser, with all their years ahead of them to pick up where I left off and chase horizons I couldn’t see.

I think my hope is for someone else to be able to live all the life I couldn’t live in my time—and for me to be able to help them do that, by leaving behind all the notes I can on my own adventure. In the way that a parent does want their child to go on and do better than them, be better than them: I want that for you, whoever my readers are.

In that spirit, look forward to some fresh ideas hitting your inbox—lighter, closer to the moment, and dressed for the new year. A fresh take on an old idea.

Here’s to something new.

And to something old.

Cheers,

— David Kennedy

That single word sums up about a decade of my life in the way one might look back on a ridiculous fashion trend from years prior.

It’s an interesting effect that only time can reveal. Consider for a moment that 40 years ago, most everyone certainly felt like their own flavor of original, but we just look back at the 80s and think: hair.

A trend is something that sort of comes into focus in the aftermath, upon analysis. It really exists in retrospect more than anything else. But in the moment, things aren’t always so clear.

A decade of “optimization”. I look back and smile.

“Life is like a video game”

“How can I achieve this in the fastest way possible?”

“What are the actionable steps here?”

“What’s the single, highest leverage activity I could be doing to achieve this goal?”

If any of these sound like you, I invite you to tune in a bit. Because these certainly sounded like me.

Lessons From Lemon Pepper

For a moment, I want you to imagine that you are making a dish. And after tasting it, you conclude that it could use a little pepper. Now imagine that you had unknowingly reached for the lemon pepper instead.

All the while you thought you were giving the dish just what it needed—and you were—you were also giving the dish a fair amount of something it probably never needed.

Now, the obvious lesson here is to be more careful about which seasoning you’re pulling from the pantry. But that aside, there’s really a much broader theme on offer here with applications far outside the kitchen.

Black Box

In the case of the kitchen, it’s quite straightforward to keep a close eye on whatever ingredient happens to be in your hand. So, you can be fairly sure that whatever you are trying to add to a dish is in fact what you are adding to it. And any failure here is merely a failure to pay attention.

But life has a way of being slightly more complicated than the average kitchen adventure.

In life, we often have ideas and intuitions about how we might improve it. We often spend our entire day contemplating this project, in one form or another. And never mind the fact that we are only ever something like 4 minutes away from the perfect for-you page that will endlessly confirm our latest self-help theory or delusion.

From projects we should tackle and skills we should develop, to traits we should foster and habits we should form, there is truly no end to the list of ideas and theories one might have about how to accomplish any of this.

But the changes we are trying to make in life are rarely ever the only changes we are making in the process. And this isn’t due to a mere failure to pay close enough attention—as in the case of the lemon pepper. It’s more to do with the shrouded and complicated nature of the world that stretches out before us.

The problem with “optimization” being the primary lens by which we navigate the world, is that our eyes simply aren’t as good as we think. Nor could they be.

We don’t always know what all we’re optimizing, when we are.

We can’t always see the lemon in the pepper. And in most cases, there’s probably more lemon than pepper to begin with—and lemon might just be the beginning.

Put differently, most of the time we’re just plain wrong about why something is working, or why it isn’t. We overestimate our ability to correlate the right factors with the right outcomes, or to even know what those outcomes and factors are. We overprescribe medicine to ourselves for diseases we don’t even have.

The point isn’t that optimization would be a bad strategy in life, but that it isn’t a real strategy, in the way we tend to think of it. Optimization itself exists in theory.

Most of the time, we think we’re operating with a kind of surgical precision in our lives, but fail to see that nothing in life is ever truly separate from anything else. It’s naïve to assume that any one thing can be optimized in isolation.

Take a moment to consider these questions:

“By trying to get more of this, what else am I also getting more of?”

“By trying to get good at this, what else am I also getting good at?”

“By throwing this away, what else am I doing away with?”

“By measuring something in this way, what aspects am I choosing to ignore?”

These kinds of questions can help illustrate the virtual impossibility of compartmentalizing our lives. And if this is true of things we know and are simply ignoring, imagine how muddy the water gets when we introduce an ocean of unknown unknowns.

That is the world you live in.

A Delicate Dance

You are constantly doing 99 other things alongside the 1 thing you think you’re doing. And I don’t mean to imply a kind of “multitasking” here. I mean to say that the “1” thing you think you’re doing would really be understood as a symphony of 100 different things that are intimately working together, if only you had the eyes to see the orchestra.

But we can’t see the orchestra, and it must be this way. Because if every single thing was simultaneously in the spotlight of our conscious attention, then nothing would be. There would be no more “spotlight” at all. The stage would just be brighter.

It’s absolutely necessary that this contrast between foreground and background be maintained. That is what gives our world depth. But it’s also crucial to recognize that most of the world persists therefore, outside of our gaze.

We talk about tunnel vision as though it’s a kind of “hyper-focus” in one direction. But it isn’t that at all, really. It’s more like a loss of perspective. It’s the inability to see anything beyond that narrow scope of our directed attention and the utter lack of any recognition that it’s even there to be seen.

It’s not a brighter spotlight. It’s fooling oneself into thinking that there is no stage beyond what is illuminated by the spotlight.

The point isn’t so much that optimization should be abandoned altogether (it clearly shouldn’t) but to recognize that these kinds of forces are always at play in our every attempt to bring it to bear.

We are hardly in a position to claim omniscience over everything that we do and everything that we are, and that is to say very little of the world that is most certainly beyond us.

We don’t always know what all we’re optimizing. And when we do, we’re fooling ourselves. And the world, it turns out, is not so easily fooled.

We are eventually up against the true nature of things.

Moving Forward, Or at All

If conscious optimization is something like an illusion in the first place, then what are we to do with our lives? How are we to move forward towards anything?

In my own life and practice, I am learning to rely less on explicit, declarative reasoning as my default modus operandi.

I’m learning to recognize my own capacity to fool myself to no end, and to pursue certainty with less zeal altogether. Whether it be a goal, a task, a feeling, or a process, optimization on its own isn’t the devil to be cast out. It’s the all too precarious relationship between optimization and certainty that gets us into trouble.

In our efforts to optimize something, we tend to adopt a view of the world that favors things that can be measured, made explicit, and articulated thoroughly; we like to deal in certain terms. This can greatly “simplify” the task of optimizing something. But the problem is that this tends to also breed a growing hunger for certainty in situations where there may be none on offer.

In an investigation where police are under significant pressure to produce a suspect, this hunger for certainty too early on can render something closer to a witch hunt than an honest investigation of the truth in service of the good.

If we must be so certain about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, how it’s working, and why it’s working…then we will be forced to produce answers where we may in fact have none. And equally devastating is the fact that over time, we will begin to favor only the things in life for which we can more easily produce these answers, and ignore the rest.

…

I’m finding that by loosening my grip on the world and in my life, a greater breadth (and depth) of things are suddenly available to me—to try, to experience, and to marvel at.

A Brighter Sky

By breaking free from the illusion that I know exactly what is best for me—and let alone how to get it—I am free to move forward in life more open-endedly and towards better goals that I didn’t even know were there to be desired.

All of this was essentially off the table for a young man who thought he was much smarter than he was. And that’s every young man, really. The key being to realize that you are always younger than you will be: we’re all that young man.

And as we should be.

I’m finding that life is increasingly mysterious if we so let it. And consequentially beautiful when we gain the ability to see and appreciate that which we cannot understand. There is always more to the world than meets the eye.

There is always more to you than meets the eye.

So let yourself take roads that you wouldn’t take. Because that’s how you make roads that no one else could make.

And I’ll see you around,

— David Kennedy

“One must give up his potential in order to live up to his potential.”

This is the kind of quote you hear for the first time and aren’t entirely sure whether it’s true or not. On the surface you’re met with what feel like its obvious contradictions. And at the same time, you’re left also with this feeling that there’s something deeper to be appreciated, only eluding your gaze.

Well, as it goes, the deeper things are often to be found hiding underneath the surface. There’s nowhere else to hide.

“Living Up to One’s Potential”

This is the kind of phrase that comes to mean less and less the more we try to define it. We all know what it means. Mostly in contrast to what we spend our time doing.

But to give up one’s potential...this might be worth a moment of reflection. “Giving something up” doesn’t quite feel like something you do so much as something you stop doing. It tends to feel more like the end of an action, rather than an action in and of itself.

There’s this illusion that giving something up is purely a negative or subtractive act, rather than something creative or generative. But this is where I want to plant the shovel today and see what we can uncover.

On one hand, we can give something up like a hobby or an interest, or a bad habit. But one’s potential doesn’t quite feel like it exists in this same way. It’s not as though “potential” is something you’re up to lately but might soon abandon, provided something marginally more interesting were to catch your eye.

Giving up potential feels closer to the way one might give up an opportunity, or a chance, or a possibility. It’s not the loss of what is. It’s the loss of what could be. It’s the loss of what could have been, if only it were.

And at the surface, even talking about this kind of loss feels rather deflating. Or sort of like the antithesis to a project of self-actualization. Wouldn’t we want to expand the landscape of possibility available to us? Wouldn’t we want to be capable of more rather than less?

But perhaps more important than answering these questions is noticing the sleight of hand that’s happening when you ask them.

If we can agree that potential is valuable, we might ask why. At some level potential is entirely cash-in value, meaning the chips don’t do anything for you if you leave the casino with them in your pocket. Potential is valuable only under the supposition that one intends to actualize that potential, or cash-in, so to speak.

It’s only worth something now because it’s worth something later, and eventually you’re going to get that something by trading it in. We hold onto potential to make use of it later. But this isn’t usually where we stop.

Most of us hoard potential under the comforting make-believe that we might cash it in later.

It’s sort of like that uncle who has no plans to ever go skiing, but won’t sell his skis in the off chance that he’ll need them when he does. So, they clutter up the basement alongside dozens of other “just-in-cases” awaiting a day that will never come.

And the irony is that over time the basement ceases to be used for anything else but the storage of these tokens from lives unlived and plans unmade. Anything could happen. And nothing does.

A Billion Stars

We’re tempted to believe that the combination of infinite possibility and zero probability is somehow favorable to just limited possibility.

But notice how the whole enterprise of possibility hinges on this precious moment that infinite potential collapses into singular reality.

It’s the moment that something becomes anything and gives up everything that it might otherwise have been…when the first brushstroke falls upon the canvas, and a mountain begins to take shape. Not a teacup. Not an abstract rendition of what it feels like to be anxious. But a mountain. We mourn the loss of potential without realizing that everything we’ve ever had exists at the expense of everything it could have been.

The cradle of every great work of art rests in the graveyard of a million empty canvases, under the starlight of a billion other works it will never be, because it is.

Nothing is ever truly separate from anything else. And in this way, a thing is only the way it is in contrast to everything that it is not. To be at all, is to not be something else, and at some level everything else.

In other words, if you have the potential to be anything then you are nothing. And if you are unwilling to sacrifice any of that potential then that’s all you’ll ever be.

Some people spend their whole lives staring at a blank canvas, dreaming of the many perfect paintings their life could be. But all of those lives live on the other side of that first brushstroke they won’t dare to make. Because every brushstroke we make is the death of a thousand possibilities that now won’t ever be. But that’s what makes anything, anything at all.

The death of possibility is what makes anything possible.

One must give up his potential in order to live up to his potential.

Go and be something. Not a “could-be” something. Dare to be.

Because what you dare to be is all you’ll ever be.

— David Kennedy