Huh. Just stumbled on this thread.

Encouragement. Whenever I do something I think sounds great. That's encouragement. And my standards keep rising.

But ... from other people, yes, we do like people to enjoy our work as well. My wife is passively discouraging while verbally in a "that's nice that you like to do that, dear" encouraging. Actually her reflexive criticisms, while they hurt at the time, made me try harder. She wasn't wrong about a lot of it. She's the person I would like to like it the most, but ... I've resigned myself to the fact that's not gonna happen. She does say I've gotten a lot better. But I never get asked to play anything. Not even the one I wrote for her.

I get some encouragement from friends who see my videos I post links to on facebook, and over the years I have gotten some nice comments from random YouTube users. Oddly the video that's gotten FAR more hits than any other by a couple orders of magnitude is an old bad recording of me covering Bob Seeger's "Beautiful Loser". No idea why. I mean, it was the best I could do at the time, and I'm flattered, but it kind of baffles me. (Ok, I lied. "The Spirit is a Movin'", from the same era, has more).

Probably the most encouragement I've gotten was an old college friend who has been my biggest cheerleader from the start and continues to do it. One might say if not for her, I wouldn't be here on this forum, and "Alive" would never have happened.

She introduced me to Brad Fitch, through whom I met Bob Buford here, who introduced me to Band in a Box and pushed me into better production. He also pushed me into concentrating more on singing, which it turns out I like doing a lot more than I thought I would.

Which all means I can make more stuff I think sounds great.

Which is encouraging.

Last edited by Phil Leith; 09/06/18 09:42 AM.
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