How much of your own music can you stand?

I love all the shit I've done, more or less, for the past three years. Everything before that is so-so with a few bright and shining exceptions. In the past year or so I made a habit of finishing up a loop or track and then putting it on repeat while pounding down three or four more beers, which made it seem TOTALLY AWESOME.

The bar for 'releasability' (assuming I ever release anything again) is whether I want to sit down and dig it in a relatively sober state for ten or fifteen minutes straight, after letting it collect dust for a month or two.

Stuff I'd have done a few years back I'd listen to once every few months. With more recent material, I could get overly-precious about it to the point where the length of pauses between tracks I put onto CD can drive me insane and cause my brain to explode.

I often listen to my stuff to try to get a new perspective, and I try it on different speakers (like in the car) to see if it works. Sometimes when I listen to stuff from 5 or 6 years ago I like "Whoa, I made that, it's soo cool." Why I have it on my computer and I haven't offically finished it yet I listen to it often, but when I put it on cd and archive it I don't.

I always love it at first, then go straight to loathing. A few years later, I will listen to something and say, "Hey, that's not nearly as bad as I remember."

Call me a vain old bastard but I've got tracks ranging from tracker mods from over 10 years ago to my latest bells'n'whistles multi-tracked compositions and I love them all. I will be overly concious of any flaws for the first year or so, but after that it's all good.

Jordan is OTM, very much so. Normally by the time the record in question has been released, I'm so damn sick of the songs I'd much rather listen to someone else's music..

Oh, and digging out old shit just because I have my DAT hooked up for some reason and discovering that I have owned this fantastic sample library the whole time and didn't even know it = TOTAL CLASSIC.

yesterday I listened to all the House I'd done in the past few months and made notes about what sucked.

By the time I've finished mixing tracks, I've heard them several dozen times too many. Some distance works wonders for me. I just listened to the Poconos 7" for the first time in two years, and actually didn't hate it.

POCONOS!!! Dammit, I've been trying to figure out why the name Mike Applestein sounded familiar to me...and now I know.

I can't stand anything I did pre 2001 (due to a massive stylistic change). Everything since I listen to when it comes on random play on Winamp and gives me variable levels of revulsion and amusement. The stuff I did last year that I really slaved over I actually killed by spending too much time mixing it. It still don't sound too great anyways. Listening too much to your own stuff will either make you lose interest in it or make you seem like a navel gazing twat. Leave it alone.

The only stuff I really have are choral arrangements (which by and large still work for me, especially the 10-part "Scarborough Fair" arrangement) and countless Rebirth tracks, of which I think 12 are actually finished and maybe 5 are actually successful. (One in particular is an incarnation of a song that's been in my head since 1991 that I seem to adore more than everyone else I've played it for.)

Cheers Paul.

What I REALLY can't stand is listening to live tapes of myself. Inevitably, I'm about half an octave out of tune.

I don't like listening to anything I've written. The flaws just jump out. Covers of other songs are ok to listen to, because they aren't really my songs, just my interpretations.

Depends on the exposure level. I can stand to listen to a song quite a bit, perhaps almost obsessively while it's being written.

But once you've listened to a song a dozen times (or more) while writing it, two dozen times while demo-ing it, three dozen times rehearsing it, four dozen times playing it live, five dozen times recording it, twenty dozen times mixing it, twenty-one dozen times while mastering it, twenty-two dozen times while promoting the album and playing it on tour...

You can understand why I never want to hear a lot of my songs Ever. Again.

Generally, I'm not a big fan of my own material. There's maybe 3 or 4 songs I've ever written that I'm proud enough of that I would voluntarialy go and seek out to listen to. And of course, NONE of them are the ones that other people and fans of my band actually like.

I can't stand any of Momus's music. Oh shoot, wrong question. Sorry.

Sometimes I dig it, other times it really pisses me off, especially some of my 4-track meanderings...I think "god, what was I thinking with THIS one? Why on earth did I think this would work with no drums whatsoever?"

I like listening to stuff I'm working on as I work on it, because that helps my perspective on that particular piece, helps me write kinda subjectively, and sorta separate myself from it and look at it as the audience rather than the performer.

I really enjoy listening to some of my really old (pre '99) 4-track stuff, 'cause it doesn't even sound like me, more like a horrible Pod-era Ween meets ODB with really god-awful microphones. Nobody else would enjoy it, but it cracks me up to think "dear God, that was ME!"

I stupidly submitted an old song to the ILX comp which I now concede is total crap. In fact, I've probably written about 100 proper songs over the last five years and I hate pretty much every single one. I don't think it has as much to do with anything like low self-regard as it does the fact that my tastes have changed dramatically over the last few years whereas my songwriting style (or implements, perhaps) haven't.