Yeah, I see both sides of it. I like to write solo material and put a lot of thought into it. Tweak every little part, layer things, really work on the tones and the performances until they're just right. In those cases, I usually get about a song done every 6 months to a year, for real. It's the reason why none of the bands I've drafted in concept in my head every come to fruition. Then I will sort of fall into doing a band on a lark and get a lot done and have a ton of chemistry with it. The bands I do where we write and record the whole demo over a weekend tend to get more done than ones that have a lot of planning and thought put into them. Less talking about, more doing. I hope I can get better at doing that by myself, I need to work on it. Then maybe I can find a balance between putting some more intricacies and subtlety into the music and getting more done.
I can really identify with that. In the late 90s I was discovering most of the underground music I love now, thanks to a mixture of independent record stores and internet message boards. I've had a lot of personal connections with music through punk and hardcore, because there was more of a semi-local music scene to interact with. I never even knew CM were local to me until I talked to a local record store owner who knew them, because I made him a bunch of band pins when I used to do that as a side business. I had their CD before that. I didn't actually connect with them until 2010 and at that point they all pretty said "Where have you been the last 10 years?! You're a good musician and actually know a lot of about doom metal!". I told them I had been trying to start a doom metal band since 2000 or so, but no one ever knew what the music was and I could never find enough people to make a band (tried to swindle or coerce plenty into it!), there was just no infrastructure to connect through locally. The town they played in is also only 40 minutes away, but somehow completely culturally segregated from my town for music. Bands from there don't want to play here and vice versa (or LET bands from here play, in the past at least, kinda snooty). I might have run into them on Hellride or something, but I wHIould never post because there were so many people arguing about what TRUE DOOM METAL was...and I was pretty new to it, so I laid low and posted on doom-metal.com and stonerrock.com.
