Building a music career with ADHD
Building a music career with ADHD
And listen to my new single, "Run"
Today, I want to share what it has been like learning to live and make music with ADHD after 31 years of unknowing.
Stream “Run” and watch the music video today.
First, of I want to share my new single, “Run,” alongside its accompanying music video with all of you. “Run” is available to stream everywhere. I’ll also embed the music video below. It would mean the world to me if you’d listen to the song or watch the video before you continue reading this post. Despite its status as a certified bummer jam this song is a celebration to my ears. I think you’ll understand by time you reach the end of this post.
Clarity
In December of 2023, almost two months to the day after my 31st birthday, I was diagnosed with ADHD. I cannot stress to you enough how, in an instant, so many frustrating aspects of my life were instantly contextualized in a way that finally made sense. The month that has since followed that diagnosis has felt nothing short of miraculous.
I am not unique in this regard. Diagnoses of ADHD have risen in adults for decades. The pandemic in particular created the perfect storm of conditions — namely unmonitored, self-managed, notification-heavy, work-from-home environments — that has resulted in so many previously undiagnosed, coping individuals to become aware of the fact that something was amiss. I am one of those individuals.
I am also certain that amongst the hundreds of you that subscribe to this newsletter I am not the only one with ADHD, diagnosed or undiagnosed. With that thought in mind, I wanted to devote this week’s newsletter to sharing my experiences as a full-time professional composer, music producer, and teaching artist who is learning to live and make music with ADHD.
I want to add some caveats/details before we continue. I am not a doctor or medical professional in any capacity. I’m also, frankly, just new to this overall. I am in the odd position of just now learning about this part of myself that I have carried with me for as long as I can remember. What I am doing here is only sharing my experience. I also want to share that I chose to go the medication route as the primary way of managing my symptoms. I am prescribed a non-stimulant medication called Atomoxitine. I think context matters and, also, I want to demystify and de-stigmatize any aspect of this that I can. I think another aspect of the rise in ADHD diagnosis is the fact that people have generally stopped being weirdos about mental health. We all got brains, let’s keep ‘em healthy.
An increased capacity for self-management
My entire life, career, and business(es) is self-managed and self-directed and it may not surprise anybody at all that having a disorder in which one of the chief symptoms is executive dysfunction resulted in a lot of friction in my creative and professional life. If that’s a new term for you, executive dysfunction is “a behavioral symptom that disrupts a person’s ability to mange their own thoughts, emotions, and actions.” In my case, it manifests itself primarily in the form of inattentiveness. Remaining focused, on task, and organized has always been an issue for me.
In fact, it’s something of a miracle to me now that I managed to get my career off the ground at all. I always understood that choosing a career in music was going to be difficult, time-consuming, labor-intensive, and not guaranteed. I cannot help but now wonder how much of the difficulty I faced at the beginning was actually because of the literal wiring in my brain? It’s a question that I have to let hang because before my diagnosis it all just seemed so normal but now it’s completely fucking obvious that I was doing my best to compensate for my ADHD.
Since beginning medication, my ability to self-manage and organize has skyrocketed. Did you know that you can take a larger goal, break it down into smaller tasks, and then schedule those tasks in such a manner that you will achieve your goal before your deadline? I swear to you that before this year, I though that was only the behavior of enlightened, self-actualized people (a state that I myself had yet to reach) as opposed to the everyday behavior of a standard functioning brain.
You might remember this Gantt chart I shared in my new year post. Yeah, that level of organization has only recently become a possibility for me. In my week-to-week, I have to manage existing projects, prepare for upcoming projects, network with potential leads, handle client work as it comes in, teach, and keep the day-to-day of the business up and running. While I am doing all of that well now, I would say I was doing it just ok before.
Ultimately, that was a huge source of anxiety for me. I was fully aware that I needed to get all of these things done but I struggled to pace and distribute the work. I ended up being completely deadline driven. The pressure of needing to get things turned in on time acted as a very powerful stimulant.
Now, I’m learning what an organized workflow looks like for me in this new reality. So far, it’s manifesting itself in two distinct ways. While I still have all the same recurring impulse to indulge distractions — google random things, pick up my phone, abandon a task for something more interesting, etc — I can now just let those urges pass without expending significant amounts of mental energy resisting them. Additionally, I can break down larger projects, estimate timetables, and schedule tasks in a way that just wasn’t possible before. This has changed the way I make music.
Making music is (logistically) much easier now
I no longer need to rely on deadlines exclusively to get things done. In no area is that fact more helpful than self-initiated projects. To create larger, more complex offerings like video courses or full albums requires me to successfully self-execute numerous small tasks and maintain that output over a longer period of time. These are two things I have always struggled with.
In many ways, producing just a single song can be a complex offering in and of itself. As a result, my personal work has historically suffered for the exact opposite reason as to why my client work has thrived: it has been entirely self-managed. I spent most of my 20s desperately wanting to release music while teeter tottering back and forth between a quiet bewilderment at my complete inability to do so and a deep sense of denial born of some sort of shame.
Mind you, this was happening at the same time I was completing grad school and so you can perhaps get a sense for my own inner turmoil at the time. “Why can I execute something as complex as a master’s thesis but can’t finish something as straight forward as one song?” Now, I understand that everything hinged on having those deadlines enforced by external factors. The release of Fever Dreams at Ruger Place last year was so significant for me because it was the first time I was able to successfully release my own music for myself, despite myself. Getting those five songs and one music video out into the world took a year, all the (unbeknownst to me) coping skills I had developed up to that point, and the immaculate mix and master done by Cecil over at mono no audio.
All of that has changed and it has been the single most exciting part of this whole experience for me so far. I was able to produce, mix, and master “Run” all in a two week time span, record the footage for the music video, and edit it all together in the week following that. That sort of timeline would have been laughably idealistic to me as recently as December 1st, 2023.
“Run” is the first fruit of my new reality
“Run” is a significant milestone for me. It exists as both the final outpouring of my pre-diagnosis frustration and the first fruit of my post-diagnosis reality. This song started life initially as a short improvisation for vocal and guitar that I recorded one afternoon in early December when I felt particularly at my wit’s end. I had by then finally realized what was going on with me and was grieving for lost time while also feeling anxious about just how long it might take to get diagnosed. (I am very lucky and privileged to have found a doctor who listened and took action to assess me right then and there.) I recorded that improvisation as primarily a therapeutic act and, afterwards, promptly tucked it away and forgot about it.
Once I was diagnosed and began settling into my medication, it was instinctually the first thing I reached for when I went to — for lack of a more apt metaphor — test drive myself. The guitar from the original improvisation became the granular chops heard from 0:27 onwards but the original vocal remains intact. I tried to re-record the vocals but I could not capture the same energy as that original performance. From there, I built up the rest of the production starting first with programming the drums and finally finishing two weeks later with the string quartet in the final chorus.
I’ll be sharing more about this song soon, including an extensive production breakdown on my YouTube channel. For now, I’ll leave it at this.
Until next time.
Quick Hits
Listen to my new single “Run.” It’s a song about frustration, realization, and release. Glitchy drums, a string quartet, and big vocals. Listen here.
I’m on YouTube now. Check out instrument design tutorials, production breakdowns, and music videos. Subscribe here.
I currently have capacity to take on two more music production students. I offer private one on one lessons over Zoom. You can sign up for lessons here.