A few days ago, a friend dropped what she probably thought was a simple compliment: “I’ve been listening to your music on Spotify: I really love your guitar pieces. But why don’t you ever play them live?” Her face when I answered was priceless: “I don’t play them because they don’t actually exist!”

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Before you start questioning my sanity or wondering if I’ve discovered some quantum musical dimension where songs exist in a perpetual state of Schrödinger’s melody, let me explain this seemingly paradoxical statement. It’s a story that begins with youthful ambition, takes a detour through economic reality, and ends up in a rather unconventional creative process that would probably make traditional musicians either laugh or cry, possibly both.

Picture this: twenty-year-old me, armed with romantic notions about making it in the music world and absolutely convinced that my future lay in concert halls, recording studios, and maybe even stadium stages. I had just finished my studies and dove headfirst into the musical ecosystem with the enthusiasm of someone who’d never heard the phrase “starving artist.” I was doing it all: recording sessions, arrangements, concerts with bands ranging from punk to traditional folk music. I was living the dream, or so I thought.

Reality, however, has this annoying habit of showing up uninvited to the party. Over the years, two particularly sobering truths began to crystallize. First, music wasn’t paying the bills. That IT job I’d considered “just a fallback” was starting to look less like plan B and more like the sensible choice that would keep me from having to explain to my landlord why my rent was late again because “the gig didn’t pay as expected.” Second, and perhaps more humbling, I had to admit I wasn’t a virtuoso. I was a decent multi-instrumentalist (solidly average, you might say) but I didn’t excel at any single instrument enough to build a live performance career around it. What I did excel at, however, was the behind-the-scenes magic: arranging, composing, and producing music.

So gradually, almost imperceptibly, I began reducing my live commitments, focusing more on that “fallback” career while keeping music as my creative outlet during free time. It wasn’t dramatic, no tearful goodbye to the stage or burning of guitars. It was more like slowly turning down the volume on one aspect of my life while turning up another.

This brings us to the present day and the mystery of my non-existent songs. The guitar pieces I release today, with very few exceptions, are the product of an extensive post-production process that would probably horrify purists but absolutely fascinates me. Here’s how it works: when inspiration strikes, I grab my guitar, hit record, and just start playing. Not performing, playing. For hours sometimes, I’ll improvise, experiment, throw out ideas, explore melodic fragments, try different rhythmic patterns, make mistakes, stumble onto happy accidents, and generally treat the recording session like a musical stream of consciousness.

The magic happens afterward. I go through these raw recordings like an archaeological dig, extracting the gems buried in hours of musical meandering. I’ll take a beautiful melody from minute 23, marry it to a rhythmic pattern from minute 67, and maybe add a harmonic resolution I stumbled upon at minute 102. It’s musical Frankenstein, if you will, but instead of creating monsters, I’m assembling songs from the scattered limbs of improvisation.

The result is something that challenges traditional notions of musical authenticity. These pieces have never been played from beginning to end. They exist only in their final, edited form: a greatest hits compilation of a single recording session. It’s not romantic in the traditional sense. There’s no story of sitting down with a guitar under a tree and playing a song perfectly from start to finish while birds chirp in harmony. Instead, it’s more like being a musical editor, curating moments of inspiration into cohesive narratives.

Some might argue this isn’t “real” music-making, but I’d disagree. It’s simply a different approach to creativity, one that embraces the possibilities of modern technology while acknowledging my strengths as a producer rather than a performer. It allows me to explore sonic territories that would be impossible in a live setting, to craft compositions that exist purely in the recorded medium, freed from the constraints of what can be reproduced on stage.

This process reached its culmination in my latest album, “Acoustic Almanac,” released just a few days ago. I went through a year’s worth of recording sessions and managed to extract twelve complete pieces. The idea of assigning one to each month, taking into account the original recording dates, felt naturally poetic, like creating a musical diary of 2024, where each track captures the atmosphere and emotions of a specific moment in time.

It’s funny how career paths rarely unfold as we imagine them. That young musician who dreamed of sold-out concerts has evolved into someone who finds fulfillment in the quiet craft of musical assembly, creating songs that will never be performed but somehow feel more honest than anything I played on stage. My friend might never understand why I don’t play these pieces live, but perhaps that’s the point. In a world obsessed with authenticity and “keeping it real,” sometimes the most authentic thing you can do is embrace your own weird creative process, even if it means creating music that exists only in the space between recording and editing, in the realm of the possible rather than the performable.

So yes, my songs don’t exist in the traditional sense, but in another way, they’re more real than anything I’ve ever created.