Ozzy The Painter

Good afternoon! Hope everyone is drinking water and watching their stocks. 

After the really heady stuff the past few weeks, I wanna take this update post to share some (drumroll) ...updates. Here's what I've been doing lately!

New Chase Vibe EP 

My main project right now is Chase's forthcoming EP. He came to me with the concept about a year ago, over a phone call, when I was in LA visiting family. COVID shut the world down shortly thereafter, and kept us from getting to work on it right away, but we were able to track some demos to begin with, and allow us to develop the tracks slowly during quarantine. 

The stages of our process are usually like this: Chase will come to me with a verse/hook structure, and usually a rough demo over a placeholder beat. We'll talk a bit about the vision for the song, and I'll cook up something bespoke in my own style, with the original tempo and structure of the song to begin with. Sometimes I'll use elements of the placeholder beat as inspiration, but I'm careful not to pay the original beat too much attention, and just treat it as a springboard to build something unique. (for example, I got the idea to sample a flute from one of these beats) 

The pandemic has obviously been a roadblock to us finishing this record earlier, but another factor of what makes this take time is that I'm wearing a lot of hats: Production, arrangement, recording, mixing & mastering. That's a lot of technical & creative energy, and the words "technical" & "creative" can sometimes be opposites. (turns out it's pretty hard to make art spontaneously and with childlike glee while also analyzing it like a fuckin stats professor)

This isn't typically how I like to work, considering that it's hard to form an unbiased opinion – when you hear a song in a certain state for long enough, you start hearing it differently, more intimately, in a way that complicates what might be obvious decisions about the sound. That's why you would typically hope (even pray for) the producer, mixing engineer, and mastering engineer to be three different people. But I'm thankful for having the chance to try on all those roles for this project to see which fit me best, and learning what I'm most comfortable with. And while all these roles are essential, they're also really expensive to fill with professionals.

Right now for this project, we're at the end of the mixing stage. Since it's been just me and Chase's opinions forming the sound so far, I have some friends listening over the mixes to give their feedback as well, including André Mariette, who has an acoustically treated studio. The house I live in is noisy and poorly isolated from the noises of the street, and isn't worth the investment of full acoustic treatment, so it's good to get an opinion from someone with more experience, better gear, and a more "neutral" room than my hundred-year-old house can offer. Oh well. 

Soon we'll be on to mastering and getting this record out the door for you! I'm sorry for being so vague and four dimensional about this, there will be more to share soon. Both of us have pushed a lot of boundaries and ventured into new territory on this record, and the result is (imo) our best work yet, as a duo and individually.

New Ozzy project 

I'll be honest, I'm glad the Chase project is coming along well – working for a Capricorn sure keeps you moving – because the next Ozzy project is not materializing as quickly. I knew this next record was gonna be hard to write, but fuck me. I've been in therapy for long enough to know that you can't fast-track trauma processing. And it's gonna take some time to distill the past year into something as concise as music and lyrics. 

Here's a little glimpse into my head right now: I'm torn often between my need for "important" art and my need for entertaining art. There's art that forces you to reflect, makes you uncomfortable, reframes current events to tell a story or share a perspective.... but importantly, some art is there to make you feel good, and to entertain you and make you feel a kinetic kind of joy. Both kinds are very sorely needed right now, and I'm still feeling out what the balance of the two is in my creative energy right now. I wanna make people uncomfortable, but I wanna make people comfortable too. Music is just as much about the release as it is about the tension; it's just tough to remember that when I'm all tension.

But I'm still writing, and still making beats. I've also been in therapy (and making music) for long enough to know that you shouldn't stop trying to make progress when things are frustrating or hard to wrap your head around. I've been doing a lot of rumination, observing, theorizing, grieving; release is the goal right now, no pun intended. Letting all that built up energy out, and leaving it on tape for y'all. Thanks for sticking with me while I figure out how to do that.

Housekeeping 

There are a lot of infrastructural changes happening at Ozzy Central. Working on business plans, website changes, new approaches to career and creative kickstarting. Despite what Rise & Grind Twitter will tell you, owning an LLC doesn't automatically make you money, and it will definitely cost more than your stimulus check to keep running (especially if that stimulus check is $0). I've also been conferring with friends and other business owners about routines and work structures, and I'm looking into some potential creative coaching as well. It's all pretty boring, business-y stuff, but it's going to help build a foundation for me to do my thing easier and more often. 

I've struggled with a combination of PTSD, anxiety, and ADHD-like tendencies (undiagnosed) for my entire adult life. Running a business and streamlining my biggest passion into that business puts me at odds with my mental health often. I know in my head that this most things in this life are a marathon, but I treat them like a sprint, surging from one task to the next with reckless aplomb, until I tire myself out and need a week to rest and restart the cycle. 

So a huge part of this process is learning to work alongside those parts of myself, instead of against them. And that's a task more gory and complicated than I want to get into on a blog post, especially because I'm in the middle of it, and still learning. But I want to be honest about it, because there is a lot of social messaging to the entire working class that we need to just "get it together" and ignore the care that we obviously need. I want to believe that a happy, "productive" life is not that simple, but still absolutely possible and attainable. And I want to be living proof of that. 

Damn, so much for not being heady this week. 

That's all for now yall. Stay warm, and fuck Wall Street. 

Ozzy