The Flower in the Desert
The introvert me.
There is an old, slightly cruel joke that the introvert is a flower that grew in the desert, alone, unphotographed, unbothered by the crowd, and yet somehow expected to apologize for not blooming in a field of a thousand others screaming for the bees' attention. It is funny, in the way the truest things are funny. It is also, on certain nights, lonely. I will not pretend otherwise.
I have spent a long time in a business that rewards noise. Everyone is shouting "work with me, work with me", and there is nothing wrong with that, it is simply the weather of the industry, like wind is the weather of the desert. But I learned early that I do not shout well. So for years I assumed this was a defect to be corrected, like a frequency that needed cutting. If I could just turn the introvert down, fade it out, replace it with something louder and more conventionally useful, surely I would get where I was going faster.
Here is the strange thing time taught me, and it is very much the kind of strange thing that takes its time arriving: the introversion was never the obstacle. It was the instrument.
There is something I keep coming back to: the person who tries hardest to relax is the most tense person in the room. Grasping for a thing is often the very motion that pushes it away. I find this true in the smallest, most unglamorous corner of my work. I will know, sometimes, that an artist already works with another engineer. There is a voice, quiet, but persistent, that says tell them anyway, make your case, this is how it's done. And I don't. Not because I lack ambition, but because I can feel, almost physically, that the relationship between those two people may matter more than the outcome of any single record. Who am I to walk into that and insist I know better? The respect isn't a strategy. It's just what's there when I stop performing confidence I don't feel.
This is, by every conventional measure, bad business. The desert does not reward the flower that waits to be noticed. But I have come to suspect that what looks like inaction from the outside is, from the inside, a kind of listening, the same listening that happens when you sit with a track for the third or fourth pass and resist the urge to fix what doesn't actually need fixing. Dub techno taught me this before I had language for it: the space between the hits is not empty. It is doing something. My quiet is not empty either.
None of this makes the loneliness disappear. The flower in the desert is still, some days, just a flower in the desert. But I no longer think the answer is to transplant myself into a field I was never built for.
The honesty that comes from not performing, from not chasing every artist, every opportunity, every loud thing, is its own low end. You don't always hear it directly. But take it out, and something underneath the whole mix goes missing.