Have you ever just finished writing or recording a song and been pretty psyched about it? And then slowly over the next few days, this little voice starts creeping in.
Uh, is it cringe? Am I making a fool of myself? What if they hate it? Well, they might. They actually might.
And today, I'm going to tell you a story about how I put out an album once that the entire world really did hate — and how it ended up being one of the best decisions I ever made.
So, we'll get into that: creative fear, the worst-case scenarios, and how the only way out is through.
Hey, what's up? Welcome to Scratch Track, the podcast for busy musicians who want more fans without burning out, chasing trends, or going broke.
Scratch Track is brought to you this week and every week by Demo, the promo system for people who actually have lives.
So, today's topic is the fear of putting your music out there. You've probably felt it. I still feel it. And today, we're going to dismantle it.
But first, I got a little bit of historical trivia for you. Which legendary artist once released an album so hated it got pulled from shelves because so many customers were returning their copies to stores?
Here's a hint: Rolling Stone said it sounded like "the tubular groaning of a galactic refrigerator."
Stick around to the end for the answer.
So here's the problem. Creative fear is a very lonely loop.
You finish a song, you are riding high for three days, let's say, and then that whisper creeps in.
It's cringe — or what I used to call cheesy, or what my parents would have called hokey.
It's too normal. It's too weird. It's too boring. It's too lo-fi. It's too polished. It's too vulnerable. It's too aloof.
It's too me.
You know, there's some critique that starts whispering to you.
And even when we put on a confident face, doubt and fear — it's like always waiting there underground, like some hidden caldera.
And that voice, that deep voice — the sad thing about it is it's not really saying your song is bad.
I mean, it is saying that, but it's saying something deeper and worse: it's saying you're bad for having made it.
And I think back over my own life and this lowlight reel I could run of all these moments where I’d be my own worst enemy.
It shows up in the form of half-finished tracks I've been afraid to complete, or finished tracks I've been afraid to release, or the long wait times between when I finish an album and when it finally comes out.
Sometimes years and years and years go by.
And we have all these justifications for this.
Like: "Oh, I just wasn't ready to promote it," or "I'm saving up a budget," or "I need to form a better band so I can take it on the road."
There's all these career-strategic justifications for the delay.
But ultimately, I think we convince ourselves we're not ready because we're afraid — afraid of critique, afraid of rejection, and what that critique and rejection says about our deepest selves.
Actually, I was talking the other night to a friend of mine who is an incredible songwriter, amazing singer.
And she uploaded an album eight years ago for distribution.
She put it up, uploaded it, sitting in the dashboard waiting to press that finalize button — which would send it out to Spotify and Apple Music and all the rest — and she never pressed it.
It was literally the last step in the entire process. Eight years went by. It's still sitting in that dashboard.
Now, she didn’t hold it back entirely. She put it on Bandcamp. She has CDs that she's selling to people at shows.
But there was some reluctance to making it go wide.
And maybe it was that she didn't feel she was ready to properly promote it online.
In a way, I think that's just another form of fear — which is a common thread for musicians.
We sort of disguise things as strategy that are actually caution.
Or we dress up our fear in a bunch of clothes and call it perfectionism.
There’s a lot of psychological angles for this.
There's negativity bias — that’s when our brains give more weight to possible embarrassment than potential joy.
And this also shows up in pain aversion — we’ll expend a lot more energy to avoid discomfort than we will going after things that are positive experiences.
Of course, there's impostor syndrome.
We don't want to look like we care too much on one hand, but on the other hand, we think we are frauds and phonies and we’re not as good as we pretend to be.
Then there's almost this thing that's like the opposite of sunk cost fallacy.
You know what that is — it's when you put a lot of time and energy into something that's not going well, and even though it’s probably worth abandoning, you're like, "I can’t let all that energy go to waste."
Now, in this case, it's the opposite — you’ve put a lot of time and energy into something, and you won’t see it through to the finish line because you're afraid of the consequences.
And the last thing — I don't know what you'd call this in terms of psychology — but one of the basic things about creating music is that it is very rarely a mystery to you, the creator.
Or if it started with inspiration and mystery, it fades really quickly after you've edited the songwriting and changed the lyrics 20 times and gone into the studio and made decision after decision after decision — where to pan the things, how to mix it, you’ve done 40 takes of the guitar solo.
Think about when you hear a song by your favorite artists.
It arrives fully formed to you, with all of the mystery intact, because you were not there to make those decisions.
If it's good, it’s an awe-inspiring work.
Your work? You can't see it that way anymore. All it is to you is this archive of decisions.
It's like a ledger. And every time you listen to your own music, it gets less and less magical and more and more a revelation of the decisions you’ve made.
And some of them you come to second guess.
And when you second guess decisions, you start worrying that's how everyone else will hear the music the first time around.
Now, does that mean that your music is guaranteed to be amazing?
No, of course not.
And I have a story from my past I want to tell you.
When I grew up, I grew up on the East Coast and I had fairly pedestrian musical tastes — but my tastes were weirder than most of my peers.
They were into Top 40 and the most popular hip-hop and the staples of classic rock.
And I drifted a little bit artier than that stuff.
Then after college, I moved out to Portland, Oregon.
Now, Portland is a town that prides itself on being extremely weird — avant-garde, kind of post-punk, indie rock, very strange music (at least from the reference point of my childhood).
I show up in this new town where I’m kind of caught between worlds.
I’m too weird for the East Coast and I’m too square and normal for the West Coast.
And in that environment of me not really having a good handle on who I was creatively, I wrote and recorded an album with my band that I thought was going to bridge that gap somehow.
And instead, when we put it out, it got absolutely trashed by the press.
This was a time just before MySpace and before everyone was chronically online — where the most important music institutions for knowing what was happening, what was cool, what you should like, what you should go see, were the local print magazines.
There were two art weeklies in town and one music zine that were everywhere — every coffee shop, every barbershop, every music store.
Everywhere you went. If you cared about music at all, you read these religiously.
And I got trashed in all three of them. They hated this album.
As far as I was concerned at the time, those three publications were the entire world. The entire world hated my album.
I got pretty depressed. I was afraid to go out in public because most of the places I hung out were where musicians hung out: coffee shops, music stores, venues.
I was convinced that the first person I would see would be like,
"Oh… shame, pity. I can’t be near you. You suck at songwriting. You suck at singing."
And my girlfriend at the time was like, "This is ridiculous. You haven’t left the house in a couple weeks. You gotta go eventually. Get out there."
So I went to this local club called the White Eagle.
Walk through the doors and the very first person I see is an acquaintance of mine in the music world who’s like:
"Saw those reviews, man. So sorry."
Confirming my deepest suspicion and fear — that all 1 million+ people in the Portland metro area not only know who I am but think I suck.
Which makes me feel like a fraud.
So I stay home for another week or two.
And then that same girlfriend comes and says,
"Okay, here’s the deal: Music is not a temporary thing for you. You’re going to be making music till the day you die.
Let’s stop pretending this one bad album spells disaster for the rest of your life."
And she gave me a challenge:
"Write more songs. Make them only for you. Pretend no one will ever hear them. Then go into a studio and make an album no one will ever hear."
So I did.
Over the next two weeks, I wrote 10 songs.
I looked through the liner notes of some CDs by local bands I liked, found this guy’s name that kept showing up as a producer and engineer — Adam Selzer.
I called him up and said,
"Hey, would you make a record with me?"
He said, "I don’t know. Come over and play me the songs."
So I did.
I showed up shaking and sweating, sat down in this plush chair in his living room, barely whispered the songs, my voice cracking.
He goes and gets some tea, brings me a cup and says,
"I like those songs. Let’s do this. Let’s make a record."
We scheduled some time and over the course of five super fast-paced days, I recorded those 10 songs — played every instrument except drums on one track.
I tried to stick to the challenge: it was just for me.
But of course… I put it out.
And the whole world loved it.
Or at least, my local world loved it.
All three of those publications that trashed the last album loved this one.
Called it one of the best of the year.
That opened up regional press.
Regional press opened up national press.
National press led to international reviews.
All glowing.
I was proud.
And that set me on a path where — I haven’t had the most commercial success, I don’t have the most Spotify streams — but one area I’ve always done well in is critical reception.
And almost every album I’ve put out since has gotten nearly unanimous praise.
I credit that to the lesson of failure:
Don’t try to make music for other people. Make it for you first.
When I protected my own desires, passions, influences — when I said, "This is my own little world" — it was more resonant with others because there was generosity in me being true to myself.
So yeah. The world hating that bad album?
It was a gift.
That failure changed my life.
It challenged me not just to keep going — but to keep going in a different and more adventurous way.
So I've already described the worst-case scenario, right? I mean, you are making this music, you're proud of it for a little bit, and then the pride dwindles. The fear and the doubt set in.
There’s a game you can play at that point. You ask: What am I going to do with this fear? Am I going to let it freeze me here? Am I going to keep this unique voice that I have — this unique thing I have to say — to myself? Not share it with people who might need it, simply because I'm worried what will happen?
Okay. Well, then here's the game: Ask yourself, "What's the worst thing that can happen?"
I think I just described it to you. You put it out, and everyone who ever hears it is like, “This is awful. You suck.” Okay. So someone hates it. You have to live with some embarrassment for a bit. A critic tweets something snarky that lives forever online, or you get a bad review that lives forever online. If you have existing fans, maybe some of them unfollow you. Maybe you feel like a try-hard or a fraud.
Okay. And then what?
You survive. Most likely, your actual existing fans still continue to love the music they originally fell in love with — which I’m sure you can relate to as a fan of other artists. You don’t necessarily love everything they ever put out, but you still continue to love what you loved already. You live to fight another day. You write another song. You record another track. And then another. You grow. You learn from your failures. You stop giving so many f***s.
So really, when you ask yourself this question of “what's the worst that can happen?” — and then what? — the real failure that you get presented with is letting yourself freeze.
And remember: even the greats blew it sometimes. Like, every legendary artist has some stinkers in their catalog, right?
When Bob Dylan put out Self-Portrait, the critic Greil Marcus said, “What is this shit?”
Miles Davis — one of my favorite artists of all time — has an album called Doo-Bop. Critics thought it was awkward and desperate. They hated it. And it was his final album.
Joni Mitchell has an album called Dog Eat Dog from the mid-’80s. It’s super overproduced and falls prey to that synthetic ’80s sound, and it doesn’t have any resemblance to the production style of her earlier, folkier work.
Aretha Franklin has an album called La Diva — a disco album from the late ’70s. It was a commercial flop. It barely charted. It’s pretty much regarded as a failure.
David Bowie had an album in the ’80s called Never Let Me Down. Fans hated it. Critics hated it. And he hated it.
And of course, there’s one more album by a classic artist that I’ll tell you about at the end. Almost all the masters have a misstep. And they keep creating.
(Well — except in the case of Miles Davis because it was his last album.)
But in most cases, they keep going. And if they’re allowed to have missteps, you are too.
So we’ve discussed the worst-case scenario and how to push through it. But what’s more likely?
Here’s a more likely scenario: You’re getting better with age. Your perspective is deeper. Your skills — music is a craft — and you’re getting better at your craft. So chances are, your music is good. It’s just that the mystery, the magic, has worn off on you.
Let’s imagine there’s just one person out there who will hear your song, and it will mean everything to them. It lands in their life at the right time. And it’s like a life raft. Or a mirror. Or a prayer.
The song might say things they couldn’t say themselves. It might make them feel seen. It might be that they didn’t know other people felt like them.
And that’s the real magic of music — that ownership gets transferred.
Don’t be so selfish and protective of your music. Let it go out there, and other people will claim it as theirs.
I mean, we use the term share your music so much that it kind of loses its meaning. It’s like, “release your music,” “drop your music,” “put it out there.” But think about it — share your music.
What a beautiful way of saying: It’s not only yours. Eventually, it becomes theirs, too. And if it reaches that one person that way, who’s to say it won’t reach two? Or 2,000? Or 10,000? Or a million people?
So go ahead. Play the worst-case scenario game. I do it every time I put out new music. I’m always afraid. I’m always dealing with the same worries. I guess they get a little better with age, but sometimes we just trade one set of anxieties for another. And I’m still left being like: Should I put this out?
I play that game. And I remember — the worst thing that can happen is you’re sad for a couple of weeks, you go out, you get shamed, you come back home, you write more music. You live to fight another day.
So play the worst-case scenario game — and write it down.
Fear hates daylight.
The minute you put that down on paper —
“I’m scared to look like a fool. I’m scared to be judged. I’m scared to say this thing in public. I’m scared to admit that I’ve had these feelings or these thoughts.”
— whatever it is, put it down on paper.
The minute you do, you’ll see that it’s worth sharing. Because there is risk there. When you are risking something, it means there is something meaningful.
And something meaningful has all the more power to connect with audiences.
Then once you’ve put your fear on paper, hopefully it evaporates.
But if it doesn’t, here’s the next step: Schedule your release date anyway. Put it on the calendar. Tell a friend. Let people hold you accountable to it and make it real.
And if you’re still having a crisis of confidence, you can always share the song with just one person. Like pick a trusted friend, a bandmate, an old collaborator — whoever it is. Someone safe. Someone supportive. And someone honest.
If it’s got some flaws, and those flaws can be fixed, this person can tell you — in time to actually address it and make those changes in time for the release.
But don’t stop there. Because you’re probably sitting on a goldmine of things you’ve been afraid to put out. You might have hard drives full of half-finished tunes. Well — finish them.
And one thing that actually might be cool about that process is, because so much time has passed, maybe some of the magic has come back.
I’ve gone back and listened to old stuff of mine that I haven’t put out, and I’m like, “Ah! How did I think of that?” That was like a whole different person who came up with those chord changes, or that production thing.
You might actually rekindle some of the magic and be motivated to finish and release those.
Publish the weird songs. Put out some raw demos.
Get yourself into the habit of just releasing stuff so you become less guarded, less precious — and more about just the process, the momentum, the discovery. And giving listeners a chance to respond to all that.
Because there’s probably great stuff there.
Essentially, what I’m trying to say is: Reframe your fear as a signal that this thing is worth doing.
As I said, if you feel like there’s something at risk — that’s where all the good stuff is.
In fact, there’s a kind of cliché in the writing workshop world, in the poetry world:
If there’s nothing at risk, there’s nothing worth reading.
Your audience wants to feel like there’s something on the line.
If you’re afraid of your own song, it might mean that song really matters.
All right. Trivia time.
What artist put out an album that was so universally hated that customers were coming back to the store and returning it — asking for refunds in such high numbers that the label pulled it from the shelves?
Lou Reed.
It’s an album called Metal Machine Music. It came out in the ’70s, and it was basically just four sides of noise. Like, just feedback. People hated it.
But since then, it’s become this kind of proto-noise classic. It’s got this huge cult following amongst people who are really into noise rock and ambient music.
So let that be another lesson to you, too.
You might put something out that is a commercial failure — that people really hate — and then, like this Lou Reed album, it might have a second life.
Of all the jobs you have as a musician, the most important one is for you to keep making noise.
Keep going. Keep changing. Keep growing. Keep releasing.
And when it comes to all the rest of the stuff — the promo, how to get it out there, how to build an audience without going insane — well, that’s what Demo is for.
Demo is for artists who want to be artists first. Not influencers. Not content creators first.
You want to be heard by the right people — and without burning out.
So, to get started, go to musicdemo.org.
If you’ve finished some new music, you’ve kept your creative fear in check, and you’re about to release it — be sure to download our guide.
It’s called The Music Release Checklist That Your Distributor Hopes You’ll Never Read. It’s free, and you can get it at musicdemo.org.
