One of the ironies of being a creative in any medium is that sometimes what you perceive to be your lamest work becomes inexplicably popular. Of my Top 10 tracks on Spotify, nearly half are things that make me wince a little.

In 2006 I answered an ad on Craigslist to do audio for an alleged film, the details of which I will address another time. As a sort of audition, I was asked to produce two tracks, one of which was supposed to be New Age-type piece for use in a smoking cessation video. I spent a few hours working with a Japanese scale and some koto and shakuhachi flute samples and called it Zen Garden.

Much later, after the anti-smoking video didn’t happen, I uploaded Zen Garden and a bunch of other tracks to a production music site (canned music you can download for use in videos and such). There are a few versions, the full 2 minute version, a 60 second edit, and maybe a shorter one; it was a long time ago. Anyway, the track ended up getting licensed to dozens of CDs relating to yoga, reiki, and other Eastern wellness practices, racking up hundreds of thousands of plays. It apparently gets played in restaurants and seminars and who knows where else. It’s the closet thing I’ve ever had to a hit. 

It’s also not very good. It’s basically some cliched melodies played on Japanese instruments over some washy synths. Very “meh.” For some reason, though, it caught on. It’s receded somewhat as I put more music online, but for years, anyone who Googled me would have assumed I was a New Age artist. The two longest versions are still my top tracks on Spotify. By a lot.

A similar, albeit less popular example is a number called Sawdust On The Floor. The title comes from a Howlin’ Wolf lyric and is probably the best thing about the track. I was asked to do a blues track as a result of a miscommunication on score for the above-mentioned alleged film, and wound up producing the lamest “white-boy blues” one can imagine. I carelessly uploaded it in the same batch of tracks as Zen Garden, and now it gives me a little cringe of embarrassment every time I hear it.

Lastly, there’s a track called Bellville Blues, which was based on a noise I made when I plugged an ancient rhythm machine into a bunch of effects boxes. It’s actually not a bad track. The misadventure is caused by the fact that it was, without my knowledge, added to a compilation CD called “Black Music, Delta Blues 2,” and I am… not Black.

Since the internet is forever, I’ve made my peace with all of these miscues and fully anticipate having more in the future. “Ars longa, vita brevis.”