Just Do Stuff

We are not living in an honest time. This is hardly to condemn people; I love people. It is more to say that we are often punished for saying what we mean (acting on it is even worse). People are incentivized to manically maintain a pristine public image that can be blown over like the house of cards it is when someone who views them as competition just makes something up.

Tomorrow, Overwhelmingly Positive, my first full-length record of actual songs that are not jokes (mostly… there’s some chuckles), hits streaming services. A video for the song “From a Mile Away” comes out as well.

This is an odd time to put out a record. As music pundits all have a collective hissy fit about AI-generated bands like The Velvet Sundown, my project That Darn Racket happily embraces AI for video creation. Which means it will most certainly be called “AI music,” which it is not.

My brother, Patrick Coffin, produced Overwhelmingly Positive. He is the musician behind Appalachian Anarchy, a Billboard-charting bluegrass/metal act that has been in video game trailers, experienced an intense harassment campaign labelling his music AI (and him a liar) because he used AI album art. This campaign continued until he posted a walkthrough video of his multitracks with footage of himself and other musicians playing the music.

I certainly have experience with similar things. I have a long list of controversies, many of them existing purely because someone made something up (or claiming that I did). But if there is something I have learned: the people who have to do those things are not playing the same game I am.

My work, whether it be documentaries, books, comedy skits, or music, is something I do because I want to express things. I first started writing and recording “serious” music to tell a single person who means a great deal to me what I was feeling, and it evolved into an outlet for a lot of related feelings. I am someone who works things out in a fairly non-linear way and writing an album certainly was part of it. A lot of these songs are just me working through various contradiction that the lyrics aren’t straightforwardly representative of.

Obviously, expressing thoughts in any medium implies I would like for someone to hear and respond. I do this stuff to communicate. In fact, it is through various forms of art that I believe I am able to express myself best.

It is for that reason I thought to write this (that and to say I’m going to do an album “listening party” on YouTube in a little while.

I just am not doing stuff I don’t care about anymore. I have work to keep a roof over my family’s head and food in their stomachs. If people think personal thoughts of mine expressed as music are AI… fine. Who cares? It’s not, so why does it matter. If they hate a well-researched thesis of a book or documentary I make, fine. If I do something and it causes someone to call me a grifter… fine.

I’m not fandom building. I like when people listen to me and engage (literal definition, not social metrics) with what I have to say, and I wouldn’t mind if it made me a bunch of money, but it probably won’t.

We need to just be honest with ourselves. What do we want and need in this world? Who do we want to spend our time with? Why? What is fun? What means something to us?

Why does it matter what other people say if something matters to us?

Thanks for reading this, and thanks for the support.

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