Heidi Sabertooth finished her 100 day multi-media performance art challenge to create 100 songs in 100 days,
100milkteeth, on June 8, 2012...
What are the biggest lessons/skills you learned from doing your project? I think the biggest lesson I learned was to create ways to fail regularly! What is that saying I've heard before? Creativity is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Haha - well, prior to the song-a-day-project, on those days when I would enter my music studio and not really progress with any great ideas for the first hour or two, I would say 'oh, gee, I'm having an off day.' And then turn everything off and walk away. I would end up feeling kinda bad about myself...sometimes I would really dwell on that failure and would be gone from the studio for weeks, reinforcing that deep fear that I think many artists have – that perhaps I am just not that inspired or talented enough..'who am I kidding? am I really an artist!??'
So setting up a goal where I had to FINISH something every day and I had to release it into the world for others to hear, meant I had to push through that urge to walk away. It allowed me to build a whole collection of methods and experiences of breaking through that barrier and get more comfortable with the fact that there are degrees of failure in every creation, because nothing can be perfect -- but that should not mean that I stop creating!! During the making of each and EVERY one of my 100 songs, I experienced a dark sobering moment, something of impending doom -- and here is pretty much the exact dialog that went along with it -- "OMG. I'm gonna fail. This song is crazy terrible, just complete crap....wait a second, girl...hold on now...you went through this just yesterday...you started down the course just fine, were excited about an initial song idea...things were going well....but then something went wrong and the lens went out of focus and you started losing your way. And then came the panic and the sweat. And you let that fear start talking -- saying you are an awful musician and have no good ideas. But, you shook that voice off!! Remember? You forgot about it and just kept coming up with ideas and tightened things up and focused back in...and hey, pretty soon you were having fun again, in the zone, and a pretty cool little idea came through in the end!! -- so, don't give up!! try something new -- it will come to you!" Ha! :) Sometimes I even found myself saying these things out loud -- it was a pretty intense project to create a song a day :) So, even though perhaps some of these songs might be a little rough around the edges, are any of them failures? no...and YES! all of them are a beautiful mix of both failure and inspiration that taught me how to move through my fears and as they say, CALM DOWN and CARRY ON...and do so regularly!!
In what ways did the project change your life? Well, the above life lesson has certainly changed me... and I find its pretty indescribable how life changing it was to release all of those ideas into the world. I think I am still getting a handle on it. Im not really sure if there are words - its more a feeling. I am sure most creatives can understand that feeling. It's why we create.
Now what? Well, I am currently playing the milkteeth LIVE show -- a solo show featuring songs and video from the project - it's a fun process to develop a live show because I have had to figure out new ways of playing these songs – I can't bring my whole studio out, so I had to reconfigure songs – I also like to perform a seamless set, meaning no break between songs – so I added some good beats and ambient sounds and samples to the mix. So basically I think I have a leg up on the remix album!! But no kidding, there will be some remixes coming up down the road - and of course, I do plan to release a milkteeth EP in the near future, which will likely feature milkteeth mixed with some of these new ideas. I have also been commissioned to do some video work for a record label – which I am super excited about. I am blessed, I have a good life and good people around me - so I just plan to keep on enjoying it and do the best I can.
Read Heidi's original 365 interview
HERE.
See & hear all of Heidi's milkteeth
HERE.
