But more often than not, those are the people who don’t make a cent via creative means. If you want to earn a living from putting work out into the world, you have to approach it as you would a nine-to-five, gruelling away at drafts for hours and sometimes wasting time to follow through on ideas that won’t amount to anything.
Eric Prydz has such a working routine down to a fine art. Perhaps that’s why the acclaimed Swedish DJ and producer has been able to make such a name for himself over the years – as long as he’s not touring, he heads over to his studio from Monday to Friday, pouring hours into the creation of the dance and house-based tunes he’s forged his reputation on.
He even fields his call from Beat from the confines of the LA-based studio he calls his own, and we catch him just as he’s tinkering around with a new toy. “I just got a smoke machine, so I’ve been playing with that,” he chuckles. “It’s my daily routine. I get in here at eight in the morning and hop out at five in the afternoon.”
Not that he works the whole nine hours uninterrupted. He finds it important to treat his muse with respect, and he never pushes something if it seems like it won’t come. “I’ll sometimes do other stuff while I’m here. Watch movies, or hang out. But I want to be there should the mood strike.”
Such an answer might go some way to explaining why Prydz has only released his debut album – a glistening collection of bangers titled, in slightly braggadocio style, Opus – last year, despite spending more than a decade in the recording industry. He works hard constantly, but without rushing, and for him it’s all about haste rather than speed.
“With Opus I didn’t know what it was going to sound like when I sat down. The album took a lot of years. It was more a question of me having a big body of music and then pinpointing which tracks I was going to use. It wasn’t written one track after the other and then presented as an album. It was more of a long, ongoing process.”
A lot of the difficulties associated with Opus therefore came from the editing down of the album, rather than its writing. “Obviously because it’s my music, it’s very hard to decide which tracks to include,” Prydz says. “If I could choose I would probably put 50 tracks on there. It was hard. It was like, ‘I love this track but it doesn’t really fit.’ I had to then put it aside, narrowing it down and then narrowing it down again.”
Indeed, it’s the writing itself that really sustains Prydz. He takes to it with gusto, and prides himself on the freeform, unrestricted manner in which he allows his songs to take shape. He relishes heading out into uncharted territory when an idea comes flittering into his head, and a track like the thumping Breathe was created without the aid of a blueprint.
“I don’t have a set way of making music, not like some people who start with some beats and build from there,” he says. “It could be anything – I could start with a melody or a bassline or whatever. Sometimes I get a full idea in my head and I sit down and make it.”
Though some producers find it lonely working without the aid of a band or other musicians to bounce off, Prydz doesn’t miss having others around him while he creates. He has a whole management team to help him with that kind of thing, along with the friends who give him direction when he needs it most.
“I’m always getting feedback,” he says. “People say what they think and what they like. A lot of the time you are so close to the music that you are making, it’s really nice to have someone come in and give you perspective and tell you what it looks like from the outside.”
Of course, Prydz also has his audiences to help him shape the music. His Australian fans will greet him at the Electric Gardens festivals in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth this year, and it’s these audiences who ultimately keep him going.
“When I started out making electronic dance music, I was always imagining me performing the music I was making in front of a crowd that would dance,” he says. “Still to this day, the music I make is for the clubs and the dancefloors. I make it because it’s music that I want to play in my sets. I make the music that’s missing from my record box.”
By Joseph Earp
