A Letter From The Creative Director
Betsy Podsiadlo | 8/1/2023
Dear Reader,
This past month I released my very first songwriting EP. This project began in August of 2022 and took residence in the nooks and crannies of my days during my last year in New York City. When I began this project, I set out to determine what my limits were as an artist and to learn more about audio engineering and sound production in the cheapest way possible. With almost no deadlines, rules, or budget, I began to chip away at what is now known on streaming services as To Be Loved By You.
What follows is a bit of what I learned, what I’m still learning, and what my hopes are for my next project.
Being bad at something new is how everyone starts out.
The constraints of my funds and stubbornness to make this damn record on my own were significant contributing factors to my decision not to hire any engineers for this project. However, I would be lying if I didn’t mention another factor in that choice: the exhaustion I feel towards being talked down to.
I believed that at 24 years old, it had become too late for me to learn about any of this stuff by asking someone or by taking a lesson. I didn’t grow up playing in a rock band. I never did much of anything with amplification, other than theatre productions in high school. So I felt shame for not realizing that I actually do want to make music with electronic and amplified elements. I felt shame for attempting to take up any space in a new territory of this art form that hadn’t come naturally to me.
This leads me to the first major lesson I learned. Recognizing that the process of learning to work with electronic elements on my own, sweating it out with trial and error, reading up on new techniques, and watching tutorial videos helped me learn more about the equipment and tools I was using. But it also allowed me to gradually feel more confident in my ability to accurately communicate my vision to an engineer on future projects.
The pressure to measure up to other people’s expectations of one’s own potential is perhaps the biggest waste of time in a young artist’s life. The songs I wrote for my EP are very tender, vulnerable, and romantic. They use chords that are less than creative, played on an instrument that is quite literally made out of trash (the mandolele used on a number of tracks throughout the EP is custom-built by a friend of mine who lives in West Virginia and builds instruments out of old cigar boxes).
Sometimes when I was writing a song or even when I got to laying down tracks, I’d find myself being interrupted by a voice in my head that didn’t belong to me. My mind would start to wander to all sorts of places; to my college days when people mercilessly mocked one another for their side projects; to times when older folks condemned my writing for being “too sad;” to moments when I’d bare my creative soul to someone that would bruise it with their reaction. This doubt, this attention to the opinions of others, and this crushing weight of trying to live up to what other people thought I was capable of kept me from attempting a project like this for years.
So how do we learn to not do this? How do we unlearn these horrid patterns that are so often encouraged in the arts? I still struggle with this issue. We all want to make good things but we inevitably make bad things too, though I believe that’s what makes artists interesting. I’m working hard to make other people’s opinions none of my business. I think that practice will last as long as I live. I hope I can make enough good and bad art that’s interesting. That drive pervades my sense of self when it comes to making things, and I can only hope it remains loud enough to drown out the doubtful voices in my head.
Something that feels like a real accomplishment with this EP is finding a sound and aesthetic that’s challenging but still feels like me. The tracks begin in such a folky place, I showed up with pretty typical folk harmonizations with slightly more modern lyrics. As the album progressed I began experimenting more and more with processing my voice in various ways to act as a backing track. This experimentation consumed me for a few months. I was determined to figure out how to utilize vocalism in the accompaniment without turning my EP into an episode of Glee.
This intense period of examining the use of my own voice as underpinnings for my songwriting led me to the final song on the EP, Ladies of the Canyon. It is by far my favorite song on the record and it’s one that didn’t exist until the project was almost complete. The arduous process of working through recording and re-recording and arranging and rearranging my previous songs created space and honed the skills I needed to tell the story I wanted to tell. I don’t know if that song would exist without the exploratory work I had done on the earlier songs.
Taking my time on this project was an act of artistic self-care. I afforded myself the luxury of working without a deadline and spending my time trying to understand myself as an artist and learning new technical skills. I truly feel that my next project will be the best showing of what I learned from this one, and I’m comfortable with that!
As I move forward with recording projects I think I can safely say that it is totally worth the money to include an engineer. There’s so much I still don’t understand about sound engineering and recording. I barely scratched the surface. I think this also highlights a fear that I have surrounding my artistic practices. “If I don’t do it by myself it won’t be as impressive.” I’m hoping to release myself from the self-inflicted pressure to impress anyone with my art and to replace those feelings with gratitude for my own personal artistic community. After all, art is truly better when done in collaboration.