The story behind the album. Or, well, at least the inspiration.
I read on NPR’s All Songs Considered Blog about something called the RPM Challenge. I was intrigued and thought at the very least this could be a small nudge from the universe to quit whining and do some god-damned music.
According to the RPM Challenge, the rules are as follows:
That’s 10 songs or 35 minutes of original material recorded during the month of February. Go ahead… put it to tape.
It’s a little like National Novel Writing Month, (NaNoWriMo.org) where writers challenge each other to write 1,700 words a day for 30 days, or the great folks over at February Album Writing Month (fawm.org), who encourage artists to write 14 new songs in February. Maybe they don’t have “Grapes of Wrath” or “Abbey Road” at the end of the month, or maybe they do—but that’s not the point. The point is they get busy and stop waiting around for the muse to appear. Get the gears moving. Do something. You can’t write 1,700 words a day and not get better.
Don’t wait for inspiration - taking action puts you in a position to get inspired. You’ll stumble across ideas you would have never come up with otherwise, and maybe only because you were trying to meet a day’s quota of (song)writing. Show up and get something done, and invest in yourself and each other.
So I joined the challenge on January 31 and waited for the hourly countdown to signal when I could begin. Much to my surprise, I sat down at my broke-down midi controller and wrote a simple little piano line. I’d not written anything in a few years and suddenly I just had an idea— on an instrument I’d never written on. I took that as some motivation and just went with it.
I made the decision with this album that I wouldn’t stand in the way of myself. I’d let all ideas flow. I’d get them down as quickly as possible in order to meet the deadline, and let myself go back and fix anything IF and ONLY IF I had time at the end to do so. Therefore, this work contains a lot of errors, almost-correct notes and weird transitions. I am going to leave it this way to convey the honesty of the approach.
“Nectar from the Milk Lion” was a title I’d been thinking of using for a while now. It would be the ‘next album’ I was gonna write at some point sometime in the future. When I took on the challenge, it just made sense to use that one.
Its meaning comes from a desire for me to find the ‘creative habit’ and latch onto it. When people say something like, “squeeze blood from a turnip,” they’re referring to the inability to force something, pull something from some unlikely place, or simply are just drained. Music has felt like that for me for a while. Some mysterious thing I’m driven to find, yet remains terribly difficult or impossible to uncover. I couldn’t force it. The ‘nectar’ means finding and tapping into that creative habit.
The RPM Challenge helped me find it.
Please enjoy the free download of music from my site. Leave comments if you wish!
Also, please visit the official Tella RPM Jukebox and while you’re there, check out some of the other artists that participated. There were over 3000!
