I’ve had Stillness Is The Key by Ryan Holiday on my bookshelf for a couple years now. I finally picked it up recently, and finished it this morning. I don’t know why it took me so long.

“The closer we get to mastery, the less we care about specific results. The more collaborative and creative we are able to be the less we will tolerate ego or insecurity. The more at peace we are, the more productive we can be. Only through stillness are the vexing problems solved. Only through reducing our aims are the most difficult targets within our reach.”

I can’t think of a better paragraph to sum up where I'm trying to go. I’m living the life I want, doing the work I love, and yet here I am, still struggling to stay present in the moment. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in fantasy of the future, or regrets about the past.

So I’m rededicating myself to practicing stillness. I’m working shorter days to make conscious time to meditate, go for walks, eat better, and practice yoga. It’s been wild to notice the changes after just a few weeks. My anxiety is abating. I’m finding more joy in small moments. I’m getting more done. The quality of my work is going up. I just feel better.

It’s funny how I get wrapped up in imagining the things I want, but then my happiest moments are the ones where I’m most present. Who would have thought? Other than every spiritual teacher for the last several thousand years…

Recent Releases

After We’re Gone

I’m most comfortable in routine, but sometimes breaking routine leads to the most interesting results. I’m usually sitting alone in my studio with a song, whittling away at my ideas. This song was the opposite.

I worked with Dominic in a studio down in Arcata California, and he lead the creative process. It was the first time that there was a voice in my headphones giving suggestions while I worked on a string arrangement, and it was both unsettling and absolutely exhilarating. We arrived at something so different and beautiful than I would have come to on my own. I’m grateful for the process, and I’m excited to hear all of the ways this seeps into the rest of my work.

215 and Counting (Oh Canada)

This song is special. It’s such a potent protest song that it feels right out of the 1960s. I’ve never heard someone reimagine their national anthem to call a nation to do better. It was truly a privilege to work on this.

Favorite New Gear

DIY Rack and ADJ PC-100A

There’s a lot of expensive things that go into making music. Microphones, interfaces, preamps, acoustic treatment, a space to use… it feels like a pit of money sometimes. But there’s times when something really cheap makes a huge difference, and that happened to me last month. It’s dumb, but I wanted to tell you about my new power strip.

This thing is just 8 switches each connected to an outlet on the back. I have different combinations of lights, peripherals, and monitors hooked up to each outlet. That’s it. Couldn’t be simpler, but it has saved me so many headaches. It’s easy to turn my monitors on last so that they don’t pop when I’m booting up my computer, and turn them off first.

I’ll add that this rack has been wonderful as well. My computer screen sits on it, and it holds some extra i/o, and keeps everything organized. It’s just a 1x10 from Home Depot that I chopped up and slapped these rack rails on.

Favorite New Song

Saturn by Sleeping At Last

I was on a call with my friend Vintz Desert yesterday talking about a new song of his that I’m going to be working on, when one of my favorite things happened. He told me to listen to a song I had never heard, and it broke my brain. It might just be one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard. I could study this song for years and not learn everything it has to teach me. Give it a listen.

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Thank you for being here as always. I love getting to share little bits of my life with you in this format where I actually have the space to think instead of trying to fool an algorithm. If there’s any way that these newsletters can be more interesting or helpful to you, I’d love to hear about it. As always, just hit reply and let me know. I’m starting to protect the time to write these more, and I’m really looking forward to staying in touch.

Talk soon,

Harley

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