“DIARY OF A MUSIC PRODUCER”

JULY 2026

Lovelies,

Monday, June 15th — Sixteen days until July. That means three weeks until I start production on the new David Hobbes album. I open the David Hobbes folder on my desktop.

Tuesday, June 16th — I play two songs a few times each. I listen for my mind to offer up ideas and nothing happens. I wonder how I'm going to fit ten big songs in my one little head.

Wednesday, June 17th — I print charts and look at them. They're very quiet. It's existential. 

Thursday, June 18th — I co-work in Pinole with my friend, Beth. Singing along to a metronome click on my phone I figure out what to do with three songs. 

Friday, June 19th — I sit at the piano with Heart Says Yes — because I consider it the troublemaker and I consider myself brave. My mind says "Hozier" and nothing else. I listen through two Hozier albums before I realize which song my mind means. I play Dave's chords on top of a practically tribal beat. Oh, this one is going to be very cool. 

Monday, June 22nd — I suggest to Dave that we get rid of two of his bridges. He says "Sure, no problem." I could have slept more last night. 

Tuesday, June 23rd — I wake up to two words: "Imagine" and "Dragons." "What?," I say to my mind. (I don't like Imagine Dragons.) Brushing my teeth I understand. The sea chantey that wants to be more. Three hours later I'm playing Vancouver (E minor, 6/8 time) on top of Radioactive (B dorian, 4/4 time). It is an offense to both. My boyfriend sits unfazed working on his laptop ten feet away. I'm concerned he isn't concerned.

Friday, June 26th — I realize this album has a second sea chantey: Don't Mind Being Alone. My life's work is turning sea chanteys into radio hits. My mind flips through its rolodex of references and lands on... Billy Joel's Piano Man. I promise no one in particular that I won't put another Piano Man into the world. Then Simon and Garfunkel's America. I've heard America two thousand times but now I listen as a producer. What's going on with the drums is actually insane. I decide to emulate as much of it as possible. 

Saturday, June 27th — I wake up to Dave's ballad, No Regrets, playing in my mind — with arpeggiated piano, fretless bass, and strings. It sounds terrible. "Thanks for nothing," I tell my mind.

Sunday, June 28th — I have no idea what to do with In Between.

Monday, June 29th — I work for three hours and figure out how to produce Miracles: edgy, live, the right amount of trashy.

Monday, June 29th (again) — I realize Miracles is playing in my head but now it's smooth and the quarter note subdivision has swapped for eighth note subdivision. It's better. "Ok fine, whatever," I say to no one. 

Tuesday, June 30th — I still have no idea what to do with In Between. I wonder if I could make it uptempo bluegrass. I go for a walk. "Stupid," I think.

Wednesday, July 1st — I still have no idea what to do with In Between. I wonder if I could make it uptempo bluegrass. "Oh my god, that's it!" I think.

Friday, July 3rd — I calculate if I have enough history with my band to faceplant and they'd still respect me. I decide yes. I'll try producing Vancouver like Radioactive. I press send. 

With love,

For the Muzi-curious, your Discipline Mission if you choose to accept it!

Responsive Discipline

Engage creative ideas the moment they occur to you.

A pianist wakes at dawn and goes straight to the piano.

A playwright sets a timer for three hours and doesn’t look up from her script until she hears the bell.

A painter sets a recurring meeting to paint every day at 2pm and come 2pm, paint he does.

This, we think, is discipline. And indeed it is. Powerful, enviable, get-things-done discipline.

Elbow grease deserves all the hype.

But in the realm of creativity, it’s not the whole discipline story. In the realm of creativity we rely just as much — or more — on another kind of discipline:

RESPONSIVE DISCIPLINE.

The truth is, we don’t know when our next great idea will strike. Perhaps it will happen at 2:10pm and there we will be, in front of our easel. But also chances are pretty good it will happen at 8am. Or 1:15pm. Or 11:42pm. And what happens then? Busy people that we are, we may be inclined to say, “Oh what a great idea! I’ll be sure to engage it when I have time tomorrow!”

But never is an idea so vividly available to us as the moment we think it. Tomorrow is one hundred creative years away. We may still have a memory of the idea. But it won’t carry the same clarity. It won't offer the same urgency.

It won’t tell us the precise coordinates of our project's next step.

To wait until tomorrow is to send our idea back where it came from.

In RESPONSIVE DISCIPLINE you will practice the most important creative hygiene: tending to a creative idea the moment it occurs to you.

If you’re reading a book, put it down and grab a pen. If you're driving, pull over and record a voice memo. If you're in a meeting, jot notes in your notebook margins.

Or better yet, launch into a bona fide creative work session. This will almost certainly mean adjusting your plans. Don’t worry, that’s the point! In order to honor our ideas, we must be willing to bend for them.

Use this Mission to build camaraderie with your ideas: "I honor you with my attention! I meet you where you are!"

Explore exactly how far a first wave of inspiration can take you.

If it makes you late to an appointment, tell them Muzi made you do it.

To explore this and other Missions download Muzi for free in the Apple App Store

“GLASSES”

JUNE 2026

Lovelies,

Last month I collected every last bit of Muzi content into a single document for copyrighting.

(Sixteen months after going live is a good time to copyright something, right?)

I expected tedium — but also a welcome break from my thought-heavy work of March and April. 

But downloading, organizing, I couldn't help but read.

And reading, I couldn't help but notice: Everything was wrong.

Exercises lost their center. Paragraphs sat stale. Introductions created false expectations. 

This will never not fascinate me: You set out to make something great. You labor until it's perfect. A year later you see a hundred errors.

Like time is glasses. 

So I promptly rewrote the methodology. Or I should say, I essentialized it. The foundation is still there. My conviction that creativity is our natural state. My belief that creativity thrives when we resource ourselves for it — with inspiration, courage, discipline, rest, and connection. But every Mission got a soul search. Every Reflection got a haircut. 

My favorite project was "First Aid": tools for key moments of the creative process. I revised Start a New Project and Heal a Disappointment. Then I tried something new, Integrate Feedback. I went on an evening walk and thought about the 11pm text messages from artists devastated by a friend's response to a poem. I ate my lunch and remembered the eight rules I instituted to keep people safe during song workshopping.

I lay in bed and recalled reviews of my albums, advice from producers, vetoes from co-writers, compliments from listeners.

I decided, as I have decided many times before, that feedback is a crisis.

It's a disorientation. It's a dislocation. 

Even if it's positive. 

(Sometimes especially if it's positive.) 

Feedback splits our creative trajectory. It can knock us all the way over or it can send us with momentum toward our sparkling creative futures. What makes the difference is us: our ability to sort, process, and land, ultimately, on our own feedback for ourselves. 

With love,

For the Muzi-curious, your Rest Mission if you choose to accept it!

Make Soup

Balance the wildness of creativity.

Remi owns a one-man business making soup in Oakland, CA.

Every Thursday he sets up shop at the Berkeley Farmer’s Market: cloth draped over a folding table, mason jars stacked with bisques, creamy split peas, chunky leafy green stews.

At any given moment there are six people gathered at his stand. A few to buy soup. But the majority just to be near him. His presence of calm and openness is utterly magnetic.

This is a man who was born to make soup.

So you’d be surprised to discover Remi’s passion is not soup making at all. Remi’s passion is music.

“I make soup for the music,” he tells me in a rare quiet moment. “Music isn’t grounding. Music is… woo-weeee!!” He whistles and gestures towards the clouds. “But I get a couple root vegetables in my hands, I chop chop chop. It brings me down to earth and after a while I can go up there and write songs again.”

Creativity, bless its heart, is not a grounding activity. It is electric. It is ethereal. It’s a sort of wild, unbridled, expansive energy that unfolds only into more of itself. It’s never going to suggest we dial it back. It's never going to suggest a slow, deep breath.

Creativity will smile coyly and lure us ever further into its dreamy chaos.

It is more than tempting to ride higher and higher. It can be actually addictive. You see evidence of this in how happy yet depleted many artists find themselves to be.

So it’s on us: Every time we create, we must know the power of the forces we deal. We must acknowledge the other-worldly creatures we are when we pick up our paintbrushes and autoharps.

And then we must make a point to keep a foot in the physical world.

We do this for our very survival. However creative we are, we must balance it with the embodied. The nurtured. The reposed. We must give strong and consistent shout-outs to this adorable earthly form of our bodies.

We must MAKE SOUP.

Or yes, you can make an omelette. Or a cake. But seriously, make soup. Choose some vegetables, the rootier the better. Hold them in your hands. Smell them. Chop them. Lose yourself in the rhythms. The textures. The smells. The utter sensuality.

Don’t distract yourself with anything as you cook. Just this once, turn off the podcast, put down the phone. Just be with the all-five-senses smash of a show taking place right before you.

Use this Mission to bring yourself back to earth.

And then enjoy your bowl of soup as a thanksgiving for your body — that beautiful vessel for the creativity that will course through you again soon.

To do this and more Missions download Muzi for free in the Apple App Store

“PERFECT”

MAY 2026

Lovelies,

"Make yourself perfect, then write naturally."

Bruce looked around the table at a bunch of wide-eyed teenagers on the first day of Harvard Summer School, Creative Writing: Poetry.

"Alternately," he narrowed his eyes, "you could do what the rest of us do and just begin."

Even as we giggled I savored his words like sugar on my tongue: This attempt to disarm us. This invitation to consider ourselves poets, too.

This permission to be imperfect on the page.

But really I'd let myself be imperfect on the page for quite some time.

This week I'm back in my southern Maine hometown, going through deep bins of old possessions. Well it turns out everything in a bin is a piece of paper covered in words. Poems and short stories and creative nonfiction and first drafts of expository essays edited in red pen. Thirty journals that somehow missed my initial purging of hundreds of journals. Literally a thousand letters from various friends and teachers, implying I sent a thousand letters prior and another thousand after.

Most of all pages upon pages of loose leaf paper covered to the millimeter in my barely legible script — free writing too free even for binding.

Actually how have I had time to do anything in my life except write?

I'm not reading much of it. A letter, here. A paragraph of a story there. It's naive. It's a fever-pitch of drama. It's self-deprecating to the point of self-eliminating. It's in love with everything. But what enchants me is how messy it all is. Sentences trailing to nowhere. Three options for adjectives left hanging in a sentence, as if to let the paper, itself, decide.

Childhood: In every interaction I was eminently composed. In my writing I was chaos.

Which isn't to say I wasn't reaching for something. Every time I write, I'm an asymptote — ever closer.

But what I approach is not perfection. If I had to sum it up I'd call it meaning.

And at the end of this messy week in Maine I've come to suspect meaning is the messiest thing of all.

With all my love,

For my Muzis and the Muzi-curious! Please enjoy this newly revised Inspiration Mission!
 

Unsent Letter

Get creative ideas from the things you don't say.

So many things get left unsaid. We sense someone doesn’t want to hear us. Or we’re afraid to change how someone thinks of us. Or we recognize our feelings are irrational.

So our thoughts remain our own. Stowed in our cave of secret longings.

And oftentimes we are wise to stay quiet. Not every statement is constructive. Not every situation is safe for expression. Not every conversation we rehearse in the shower should actually happen.

But our unsaid words don’t just disappear. They remain, if only peripherally, in our awareness. They affect our self-perception and even the course of our lives.

And they have the power to play a huge role in our creativity.

Scan your past. Scan your present. Where have you turned the other cheek? Where have you stifled a scream? Where have you hidden an affection?

What aren't you saying?

Imagine each time you bit your tongue is an unsent letter. 

And then look at the fascinating trail of unsent letters that extends behind you. Is it not a straight line to your most fascinating content? Your most honest content? Your most compelling, relatable, incisive content?

Is it not immediate access to your heart? A clue to the mystery of what really matters to you? A brief history of what has truly affected you?

Is it not the eau de you?

What we’ve said is interesting. What we haven't said is intriguing.

In UNSENT LETTER you will harness the creative power of the unexpressed.

Write everything you thought, everything you felt. Pick words that are hot in your chest. Emotions you've tapered in service of another. Thoughts you've buried for the greater good. Statements too frayed for public consumption.

Be unabashed. Be outlandish. Stray from the facts if that’s what you feel. Be true only to what clamors up and out of you.

Use this Mission to discover a new source of creative fodder.

And delight in each bit of human truth just waiting to be alchemized with creativity.

To do this and more Missions download Muzi for free in the Apple App Store