We've all been there. You or somebody you know, are are about to play a new track, and then the Spell of Protection must be uttered: "it's not finished", "it's just an idea", "obviously the production is rubbish", "it's an old version" etc and so on forever whatever.

Damn me if I haven't been doing my best for not making up stupid excuses that I'm not a Michael Jackson or a Quincy Jones or a Mick Jagger on stage. Nowadays, I can pretty much shut up while I let the listener take it all in. But it takes some focus to do that. And if I'm not paying attention - "it's not mixed yet" and the BASSISMUDDYANDTHEREISTOOMUCHGOINGONAND jumps out of my mouth.

The obvious reason for this about setting weird expectations on yourself, and the equally obvious remedy is that you have to learn to fail. And be good at it.

This thought is, of course, nothing new. Books in the self-help genre have been exploring this to its fullest extent, as well as it's one of the key learnings in Buddhism. Too much of attachment does weird things with your mind.

This problem is deep rooted, and if I should allow my cynicism to get some air, I believe this attitude is well cemented in schools. Everybody are striving to get the best possible of scores, to perform optimal within a given norm. While this prepares us for the modern society, I cannot escape the feeling that it would be downright healthy to regularly spend time to explore all possible fuck-ups.

I know I'm getting into Edward de Bono-land, but he's not wrong, you know.

Everybody has experienced the feeling when a mistake turns out to be a stroke of total geniality. I don't know how many times I've by mistake sent a whole bus through the wrong effect channel and a whole realm of new interesting ideas appear in an instant.

One important step to free artistic development is to reduce the values we prematurely attach to ideas and projects, and to do so you can either do two things: be genuinely insane and experiment with literary everything that comes your way, or simply don't care.

My route thought the eye of that needle was with a band called Via Relativ. Although the musical ideas were good, we had the target on all sorts of wrong things and if you've seen the ending in the movie The Commitments you understand how the end looked like. A disaster. But - in all honesty - a well needed disaster.

After that a new, more concise idea formed in my head:

FUCK IT.

The process to mentally and truthfully stop giving a damn about what other people think, might think, might want to hear, might like etc ad astra, took about six months. Today I am involved with the two most exciting projects I've ever been in: Miami Porno Machine and Bloatfield.

It's still not easy not to say anything, but at least one thing have changed. If the person doesn't like it - well. Sorry for them. I know how damn good it is.