I thought I lost it. Like Austin Powers.
That thing. The spark. The engine. The reason I sit there for hours chasing a sound no one else will ever hear the same way I do. My mojo.
I went to Europe for a month. Came back to Australia. And somewhere between the flight home and opening my DAW… it was gone.
Or at least that’s what I told myself.
Because before the trip, I was deep in it. I had a track, “Free Spirits Rising”, basically done. Ninety percent finished. The hard work already behind me.
And then it took me months to finish the last ten percent.
That’s not a workflow problem. That’s something else.
Now I’m staring at the next one, “Doomsday Clock Part 7: Darkness Falls”. Everything’s there. The track is built. The structure is solid.
All that’s left is the vocal.
And I’ve been putting it off for three months.
Three.
Not because I don’t have time. Not because I don’t care. But because every time I get close to hitting record, something in me pulls back.
So I started asking the real question.
Not “how do I get motivated?”
But “what actually changed?”
And here’s the uncomfortable answer.
It wasn’t my mojo that disappeared.
It was my context.
Europe does something to you. You step out of your routine, your identity, your usual constraints. You’re not “the guy finishing songs.” You’re just a person moving through history, through chaos, through energy that’s older and bigger than anything you’ve made.
You’re absorbing instead of producing.
And then you come back… and the session file is still there. Frozen in time. Waiting for a version of you that no longer exists.
That’s the friction.
I’m not the same person who started those tracks. But the tracks haven’t caught up to me yet.
So every time I try to finish them, it feels like forcing a past version of myself to say something I’m not sure I still believe.
That’s why the lyrics still come.
Because lyrics are immediate. No barrier. No performance. No judgment. Just thought straight to page. It’s therapy. It’s honest. It’s alive.
Recording vocals is different.
That’s where it becomes real.
That’s where you decide: this is what I sound like now. This is what represents me. This is what gets locked in.
And that’s where the resistance shows up.
Not laziness. Not procrastination.
Exposure.
Because finishing a song isn’t technical. It’s existential.
You’re committing to a version of yourself.
And maybe—just maybe—I’ve been avoiding that decision.
There’s also another truth here that’s harder to admit.
I might not even be that excited about “Darkness Falls” anymore.
Not because it’s bad. But because I’ve moved.
And we don’t talk about that enough. Not every song is meant to be finished at the level you imagined when you started it. Some songs are bridges. Some are experiments. Some are ghosts of who you were when you began.
But if you leave them sitting there, half-alive, they drain you. They become psychological debt.
So here’s where I’ve landed.
I don’t need to “get my mojo back.”
I need to change the rules.
Stop treating these tracks like final statements and start treating them like documents. Snapshots. Proof of where I am right now, not some polished, perfect version of who I think I should be.
Lower the stakes.
Record the vocal in one take. No stopping. No fixing. No chasing perfection.
Just capture it.
I also need to break the pattern. Same room, same setup, same habits, that’s where the resistance lives now. So change it. Different time. Different environment. Disrupt the loop.
And maybe the biggest shift…
Stop forcing myself through the front door.
If a song won’t move, start another one. Not as avoidance, but as momentum. Creativity doesn’t respond to pressure, it responds to motion.
The irony is, I haven’t stopped creating.
I’m still writing lyrics. I still feel it. That part never left.
So maybe this isn’t a loss.
Maybe it’s a transition.
Maybe I’m moving from “finishing songs” to something else, something more fluid, more conceptual, more honest.
Less product.
More expression.
I didn’t lose the spark.
I just outgrew the box I was trying to put it in.
And the only way forward now… is to stop pretending I’m still the same artist who started those tracks.
Free Spirits Rising 