That Coffee Shop Feeling

[Back on July 2, I decided I would challenge myself to compose every day for the rest of the year. I’ve been chronicling the journey on social media]

Day 30/182. What is it about coffee shops?

It's even the coffee shop I buy the beans from. The same coffee I drink at home each morning. It seems unlikely (and I have not done the research on this) that the amount of caffeine is higher at the shop than it is in my French Press.

Perhaps it is the novelty of being in a place that is distinctly not my house; and perhaps I have convinced myself that since I cannot feasibly take a trip to Europe at this very moment that this coffee shop is an equivalent adventure.

It's certainly not the presence of other humans. That thing where you sit alone at a table, and someone else sits alone at the table next to you but still facing you...it's the stuff of introvert nightmares. (I ended up moving to the other side of the table) And then of course, there is the social anxiety of going into a room and finding no chairs, going into another room and finding no chairs, and awkwardly going back to the first room to see if anyone has left.

But, maybe they brew the coffee better than me? I've got a Guatemalan medium roast today, grown at 800m altitude, I'm told. It's smooth, rich, and chocolatey. The coffee farmers have done some good work, and I'm thankful.

Maybe I'm just happy to be up and moving again. The early days of this week were plagued by sickness. I wrote exactly one treble clef before calling it quits on Monday.

Maybe my brain now has a strong enough association that when I am here, we do work. Whatever it is, I sat in my neighborhood coffee shop this morning working on a new album. I haven't released anything since 2021, and my writing efforts in the intervening years has been...shall we say, unsatisfactory.

And maybe it's just that coffee shop feeling, but it feels nice to be excited about composition project again. I know that once I get into the weeds of this project, it will be hard, and I won't feel like I do now. So, in this moment, I am going to do is appreciate the complex flavor profile of my coffee, and just write.

By the way, I talk a lot more about my composition process, as well as my work in music theory and musicology, in my weekly email newsletter:

What Photography Is Teaching Me About Writing Music

I don't claim to be a good photographer, but I enjoy it. Cincinnati is a great place to take photos.

But with digital cameras, I take a lot of photos and most of them aren't good.

Here recently, I've become less willing to commit a musical idea to paper - I don't know if the idea is "good enough."

I'm almost always glad to have taken the photo - I can go back later and see if I think it was one I like. I took probably 65 photos that day and you can see the few that I liked the most.

And it should be the same for composition - write down as many ideas as come to me, and I'll figure out later what I want to do with them. Writing down bad ideas isn't as painful as I've built it up in my head to be here recently.

So, enjoy these photos of Cincinnati - I'm going to write down some bad music, and maybe I'll find a few things I want to develop.