A lesson from the weekend

I nearly lost everything I've been working on for the past year

Last week my laptop became a non-functional brick due to water damage from a leak in my bag. It was one of many moments in which I wish I could have turned back the clock and undone what had just happened. Fast forward to a consultation at the ‘Genius Bar’ at my local Apple store, where I was told it would cost me £1000+ to repair and my hard drive would be wiped in the process. Dejected, I took it to a third-party repair shop and left it with Abdul, a very friendly man who promised me he’d do what he could.

Let me interject here on the subject of backups. Should I have backed up? Yes. Did I? …

I’m not one to get attached to my work, in fact in the past I have relished a blank slate and the opportunity to start anew when something similar has happened. I have a tendency to disregard my own demos – perhaps there’s something about the seemingly endless number of 8-bar loops us producers seem to make and discard. Or perhaps it’s due to the fact these ideas exist entirely digitally, and they cost nothing to engineer (as opposed to a band recording demo tapes). It’s not that I’m not excited about them, but when they sit on your hard drive for months it’s easy for them to lose importance in my mind. They start to feel disposable and replaceable – after all, if I did it once and it took me half an hour, what’s stopping me from doing it again, and doing it better? For many years I’ve held the mentality that my ideas can only be improved by their subsequent iterations.

Yet for these three days of limbo, I experienced an awful, gut-wrenching feeling. The sobering reality of losing everything I had been working had begun to set in. 200+ ideas all in various stages of completion. My 10-year-old sample library. The vault of tunes I use to DJ with. The blueprints of future albums. I felt foolish not to have treated these things with respect and preservation. I waited to hear from Abdul whilst mentally mapping out ways to stitch back together my projects from old masters and snippets of samples. I got a call from him on the third night to let me know that I had been very lucky, and he had managed to resurrect my laptop by replacing its power components. It is with thanks to Abdul I got out of this mess relatively unscathed.

I find it a common trait amongst artists to be dismissive of their work, especially if the only stakes involved are their own (and therefore value has not yet been ascribed by a third party). I didn’t realise the value of what I had until it became irretrievable, at which point of course it was too late to do anything about it. The lesson here is not “back up your data!” – that much is obvious. But perhaps the lesson is, as creatives, to value our own work as if it is that of our favourite artist, and to do our due diligence in respecting and preserving it.

Thanks for reading. Leaving you with my favourite from Pet Sounds. Rest in peace a true pioneer Brian Wilson.

- Anish