This guest essay comes from Jonah Kraut, a Nashville-based composer, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist trained in classical and jazz.
After more than 20 years of recording, from home demos and side projects to full albums, he argues that what lasts is the feeling. Knowledge fades, but the feeling stays, and because our feelings are rarely reduced to good or bad, we should not apply that rubric to the art we make.
The space between idea and finished song
Music, he writes, is not purely your own. It reflects everything you believe, a worldview shaped by an enormous web of influences from small gatherings to a global industry of middlemen. His focus is neither live performance nor the finished recording, but the stretch between inception and completion, where every decision is made, large or small, conscious or not.
When judgment stays out of the way there, more work can be done. Suspending it while evaluating your own work, like a stoic meditation practice, can help reveal your voice and vision.
He grew up on classical music, tried to recreate sounds he heard, studied jazz in music school and explored every medium he could find. That taught him to treat listening as a portal to dynamic worlds, where you move from remote observer to active participant.
Good enough, and the Ramones
He recalls the well-known story of Johnny Ramone telling Paul Simonon of The Clash something like “we’re terrible…we can’t play our instruments.” Whether it was modesty or not, it became part of punk’s identity, and the music thrived beyond ideas of good and bad.
In Nashville, where he has lived since 2009, he came to see that success does not require being good, only good enough, in a town where “If you’re not on the top you’re on the bottom.”
Six epiphanies in the studio
1. The music should set the approach. On his first Boston band album he fell for the studio and wanted to learn every button. For the second record, with different personnel, the engineer’s creed was that if you have 12 hours to mix a track, you take 12 hours. That suits very detailed mixes, but the band’s music was loose, recorded live with few overdubs, so fussing over details changed little. He concluded the music should dictate how it is mixed, and that a mismatch is not automatically good or bad.
2. Better than good is done. Producer David Ferguson has a long list of credits but plays in a very relaxed way. As the story goes, someone asked him whether a session went well. “Was it good?” His answer: “Better than good, it’s done!” The author reads that as the voice of a craftsperson who knows what done means: possibilities were exhausted, decisions were made or left alone and an identity emerged.
3. Recognizing yourself. One demo had vocals that were comped, cut and pasted from small pieces, so heavily that he no longer recognized his own musical choices. The take did not sound bad, just not like him. Knowing your voice, instruments, sound and style gives better guidance than any aesthetic standard.
4. You cannot fake the groove. Recording the second Boston record was less smooth, and he felt pressure to spark things up, which still shows in the edits and overdubs. He tried to fix a song’s groove by re-recording the bass himself, imitating the regular bassist. Listening back, all he hears is the attempt. He tried the same trick on another record, with debatable results. The lesson is about how parts fit together, not about inherent goodness.
5. Alone in Evanston. Using his family’s house as a studio, he followed a daily routine of writing, improvising, recording and editing, and gave away handmade CDs. Feedback ranged from positive to acceptable to “difficult to listen to,” but it mattered little. He learned that even complex layering rests on simple changes in chords, texture and structure. By the end he also craved playing with another person, and the idea of hearing several layers of only himself no longer satisfies him. He wants real sounds from real people, reacting in real time.
6. Embrace the unknown. No matter how carefully you plan, a session holds something unknown until everyone is in the room and someone says go. On his latest project, Strange Passages, intended as a demo with more parts to add, limited time led him to let sound and empty space coexist and to center the performance. The process was a struggle, but he accepted the result because he suspended aesthetic judgment. Good and bad, he says, must wait in the wings while decisions are being made.
Guilty pleasures and the point of it all
We tend to admire art whose value exceeds its intent, the guilty pleasure, and we give such songs and ourselves a pass when we enjoy them outside reason. Children show that human expression can simply exist without any rubric or skill. What is popular keeps changing as people and the world change.
His conclusion is that artists should pursue their own identity rather than aesthetics, listen to inner voices, drop imagined social anchors of good and bad, and explore more widely. Understanding and the ability to communicate follow. “Don’t hurry if it’s good, don’t worry if it’s bad. It’s all the same if it hasn’t got a name.”
