Last week I released some new music, a six-​song EP called Waste Places. The title is a refer­ence to those neglected and unloved patches of land that have become over­grown and unus­able through their disuse¹ — perhaps some­what like those neglected and unloved patches of our selves. 

But while I’ve waited and prepared for release day over the past couple months, I’ve been equally preoc­cu­pied with another patch of land: my own. My home in Maryland sits on just an eighth of an acre, but our lot comprises part of a little pocket of woods that I’ve been slowly reha­bil­i­tat­ing: clear­ing it of inva­sive weeds and vines like garlic mustard, Asian bitter­sweet, and Japanese honey­suckle; plant­ing native shrubs and peren­ni­als to take back that ground; protect­ing young trees from over­abun­dant deer. (One of our trees, a strug­gling tulip poplar I recently freed from a stran­gling bitter­sweet vine, appears in extreme close-​up on the cover of Waste Places.)

Last month, as I checked to see whether any of the seeds I’d planted over the winter had begun to emerge from the soil, it occurred to me that wait­ing for spring feels a whole lot like wait­ing to release creative work. I finished record­ing the songs on Waste Places last fall; they were mixed and mastered in January; the next few months were spent design­ing artwork, coor­di­nat­ing vinyl produc­tion, plan­ning and execut­ing my modest promo­tional campaigns, and so on. By the time people heard the EP last week, its newest song was more than half a year old. (This is actu­ally a highly accel­er­ated time­line by music-​biz standards.) 

That in-​between time, when all the creative deci­sions have been made and it’s too late to do anything about them — when you can only wait to find out what will happen to all those seeds you pushed into the dirt — is a special kind of torment. In my garden, I call this feel­ing “forced patience.” You can’t make a plant grow any faster than it wants to, so you get to prac­tice being comfort­able with the pace of life not match­ing your desires.²  

Now that the music is out there, of course, a new prob­lem takes over: it belongs to the world now, but also to an earlier version of myself, who’s not the me who’ll make the next thing. Spring is the culmi­na­tion of last year’s seed­ing, but it also holds the promise of this year’s seeds. I watch for blooms on the wild gera­ni­ums and the golden ragwort, and I listen for the next song.

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1 The phrase “waste places” also, as I discov­ered long after choos­ing it, appears quite a few times in the Bible. I was recently delighted to discover the follow­ing music-​referencing verse, from Isaiah: “For the LORD shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilder­ness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the LORD; joy and glad­ness shall be found therein, thanks­giv­ing, and the voice of melody.”

2 Speaking of life not match­ing desires: I would be remiss not to acknowl­edge that I write this at a deeply concern­ing moment for my coun­try, as we watch soci­ety teeter on a precipice. I still believe, though, in the value of making and shar­ing art, and of each of us doing what we can to improve our own little corner of the world.