Want to make music full time? Then you have to work at it, the way you work at any other job, pouring in hours both wasted and fruitful.
Just ask Hayden Quinn, a beatsmith who records under the name Null. Though Quinn, a drum and bass practitioner who makes music suited for both introspective listening and dancefloor jamming, spent some time operating under the illusion he could write only when the muse came knocking at the door, now he has more of a workmanlike attitude towards his creative process. “Life has gotten to the point now where if I don’t specifically set aside scheduled hours to be in the studio then it just doesn’t happen,” he says.
“I used to be unrealistic about it. I’d be like, ‘Man the perfect idea just comes to you.’ But now I’m like, ‘Nah you’ve got to fucking write.’ Some days it’ll work and some days it won’t but you have to keep on doing it.”
The scattershot nature of his creative process means that quite often Quinn will find himself following ideas up dead ends, pursuing melodies and structures that have no real pay-off. “There was a rule I used to have that I’d finish every single track I started,” Quinn says. “I think in the last year and a half that has started falling apart though. I have written tracks that weren’t fully formed and I had to pull the plug on them.”
Even more frustratingly, sometimes Quinn will fully complete a song, only to retrospectively realise that it lacks focus, or doesn’t slot easily into any of the EPs or collected works he’s writing. “The way the writing process works with me is that I will spend say, two weeks on a song, and then I’ll get to the end of that two week cycle, that rollercoaster of emotions, and then I’ll go, ‘Okay, that’s finished,’ ” Quinn says. “I’ll look at it and sometimes it’ll be a song that doesn’t really fit into what I am doing. It’s just finished. It doesn’t go anywhere.”
Nonetheless, it’s not always the case that such orphaned tracks never see the light of day. Indeed Quinn’s newest project under the Null name, Archived Works Vol. 1 is all about collecting together these musical scraps, in the process creating a compilation album featuring all new material. Some of the songs on the record were written during the sessions that birthed Almost, his critically-acclaimed EP released last year, but others were written on their lonesome, produced after hours of studio work.
“Archived Works is a collection of stuff that I finished but didn’t put anywhere,” Quinn says. “Sometimes, I would be like, ‘Okay cool, I’ve made this song that I like,’ but when I looked back on it with more context I realised it’s not in line with what the rest of the project is all about. Sometimes other people had to point it out for me. They’d have to be like, ‘Yo, I like it, but this isn’t what I like about you.’ ”
There aren’t many artists that would be able to take that level of feedback on the chin. After all, when you’re making music, you often get so deeply tangled up in your works that it’s hard to distinguish where a song ends and you begin. But that’s just the thing: Quinn isn’t like most artists. Not these days, anyway. “I think most artists go through a period where when you get bad feedback it’s hard not to get offended,” he says. “But now I don’t care. My manager tries to tiptoe around it sometimes and be like, ‘Dude, this isn’t quite right.’ But I just take it. Because I’m at that point now where I’m always in the studio working, I’m never that invested in something that it can’t be replaced the next time I go in the studio.”
By Joseph Earp
