To Damien and His fans: RE - New Album [Very long... don't read if you don't wanna]

[Glockypaws]

Okay, so I've been surfing around youtube and reading some of the posts here so I thought I'd post about my own opinion and give y'all a few of my cents (I don't have many to spare, so you can each only have two! )

I don't know if Damien ever sees the things posted here, but if he does I hope that I am not off-base here and/or have not insulted or been offensive to anything.

[This is long, and might make little sense as I am tired and have been working on some production stuff all day.

Skip all the way to the bottom paragraphs to get /right straight dead on/ to the point.

Also, feel free to click back... this is mostly just a very long rant that I need to get out of my brain. Though I do hope to help some people understand a bit more about "why the album is taking so long". If you care to, I would love to be humored." ]

I have only a very tiny glimpse of what being a musician is like, I am basically a baby to this scene and have only been (although furiously and obsessively) practicing, studying, performing, and recording my stuff for about a year now. Iis safe to say I know little to nothing about the big pictures of "musician" or "songwriter" apart from what little I've learned through auto-didactic experience... and it may very well stay this way forever. I don't mind if it does. It keeps life fun and offers the possibility of infinite learning, which I feel is key to creative satisfaction.

"It's not hard to grow when you know that you just don't know"

When Damien released O, he has said he felt it was a very "selfish" record, that he only wanted to make it so that he could say he did it and he may not have made another one after he got that out of his system. I feel that he refers to the same thing as I did earlier about truly needing to get those emotions and feelings out of you as songs. This is, in my opinion, the difference between a /musician/ and a guitar player, or a singer, or even so much as a "band". It's the inexplicable /need/ to express yourself through the near-ethereal beauty that is music as opposed to the /desire/ to "be in a band", "get famous", "be rich", etc.

After O was released and the tour was coming to a close... Damien was under a great deal of pressure [I do not know all of this for sure, I am just speculating from what I've heard and read from interviews and such] to release "the second album" that he at one point was unsure if he would ever even do. He was rising in the spotlight and the pressure from the band, his fans, and of course, the record companies.

He has started that he was so rushed to release 9 that he put a number of songs on it that he wouldn't otherwise have released. Don't get me wrong, I love 9 and every song on it... but a creative mind being /forced/ to release (en masse, mind you) a number of works that they themselves are dissatisfied with is almost guaranteed to cause a good deal of anxiety. Think of a world class painter being forced to have his discarded rough sketches hung in a museum.

Even the most brilliant of creative minds (damien amongst them, in my book) are most likely in constant turmoil with their own abilities. I by no means claim to be any sort of awe-inspiring or even /good/ songwriter, but I know that I am my worst critic and the first one to say that something sucks or to have judgements on things that a lot of people don't even notice.

So, what I'm getting at... is that the more damien's fans [albeit him having many] constantly question the album's release date, beg, push, get frustrated and "give up" on Damien... the more likely he is to take longer to actually put something out, simply cause he has more to think about. I would love to see another album from my favorite musician as much as anybody, but at the same time I would not want it to be anything but the best that the artist feels he is capable of producing.

If Damien is the type where criticism doesn't bother him anymore (which, with how popular he is I'm sure he has to be) then throwing in opinions about the side-projects and other musical things he has done lately be them good or bad wouldn't effect this... and may perhaps change the direction of the music to come. However, I feel that the best way to get a new album, and even better, a /great/ new album, is to simply be patient and not constantly ask when it'll be here. It's a choice between speed and quality, and I choose quality by a long mile.

Damien is much older and more experienced than I, and I am sure he is not hard pressed for cash. Thusly, he has /no/ reason to rush and try to put something together just to satisfy a rent payment or to buy dinner at night. Moreover, one of the only reasons he /would/ have to rush would be the incessant pleas of his fans for a new album. I'm not talking about the eskimos here in particular... youtube search for any of his videos and you'll find that almost every Damo vid has at least one "RAWR I CAN HAS WANT NEW ALBUM NOWWW!" comment on it. This has bothered me enough that I felt like making this post... if it was annoying or gratuitous, I apologize in advance.

-whew- ... So... in all honesty the point of that whole superfluously long rant was nothing more than to say "Be quiet and wait and when the new album comes it'll be a lot more amazing than it may have been if the artist were constantly questioning himself due to fans getting pissed off at him."

And to encourage others to do the same.

So as they push and beg for grace
Ignore unknowing and hold your place
Let melody flow straight from your heart
That's where it began, so fly back to the start