The Loneliness of Building Something New: Music From People Who Ship

Builders know a particular kind of loneliness. It is not the loneliness of being unloved. It is not the loneliness of being unknown. It is a more specific loneliness, and it has, until recently, been almost impossible to find described accurately in music or in writing. The loneliness of being inside a project that does not yet exist in the form you can see, and that no one else can see at all, and that requires your attention every day in a way that no other person in your life can share.

That loneliness has, for most of cultural history, been documented mostly by the people who already finished their projects, in memoirs written years afterward, with the loneliness translated through the comfort of having succeeded. The translation is unreliable. The retroactive memoir tends to make the loneliness sound nobler than it actually was, because the memoir is being written by someone for whom the project worked.

What is new, in the current cohort of working-artist working-founders, is that builders are starting to document the loneliness in real time, while they are still inside the project. The artifacts are records. Some of them are early. Some of them are clumsy. A small number of them are accurate.

ROGA’s debut album, TO EXIST, is one of the accurate ones.

The Texture Of Builder Loneliness

We should describe the texture before we describe what the records do with it. Builder loneliness is, in our experience, made of three layers.

The first layer is the loneliness of holding a model in your head that no one else can see. The model is the thing you are building. The thing might be a company, a product, a record, a body of work. While the thing is being built, the model exists only in you. You cannot hand it to anyone in its current state and have them understand it. You can describe its outlines, but the descriptions never quite hit. The people around you are, with the best intentions, working with a different model than the one you are actually holding.

The second layer is the loneliness of working on a schedule that no one in your life is on. The builder’s calendar is structured by the project, not by the social rhythms of the people around them. You miss things. You are mentally absent during the things you do not miss. You are not avoiding your friends. You are, in some sense, in a different room.

The third layer, the deepest, is the loneliness of being responsible for something that does not yet have an audience. When you ship the thing, the audience arrives. Before you ship, the audience is hypothetical. You are working for a population of future readers, future listeners, future users, none of whom you can see. The work is being made for people who do not exist yet.

Those three layers are the loneliness builders know. The reason builder loneliness is hard to write about is that all three layers are invisible from the outside.

How TO EXIST Documents It

TO EXIST documents builder loneliness without naming it. The record does not use the word “loneliness.” The record does not use the word “builder.” The record does not use the word “founder.” It does not have to. The record’s pacing, its spatial sense, its lyrical preoccupations — all of them are recognizable, to anyone who has been inside the experience, as the experience.

The first layer of the loneliness — the model in your head — shows up on the record as a kind of interior monologue that never quite addresses anyone in particular. The lyrics are written in a register that is, on the surface, conversational, but the listener can tell the artist is talking to himself. The conversation is interior. The record is the artifact of an interior conversation that has gone on long enough to have its own shape.

The second layer — the schedule offset — shows up in the record’s pacing. TO EXIST does not move at the rhythm of a normal listening week. The record asks the listener to slow down to meet it. That is what it feels like, from the outside, to encounter a builder who has been inside the project for too long. You have to slow yourself to meet them. The record makes the listener do that work, which is, in a sense, the kindest thing the record can do.

The third layer — the absent audience — shows up most clearly in the record’s refusal to advertise itself. The record is, as we have written elsewhere, an inverted founder manifesto. The record does not address the listener. It does not invite the listener in. It sits, on its own, making the work without an audience. The listener who arrives at the record arrives at it almost by accident, and the record does not change in their presence.

That is, in our reading, the most truthful documentation of builder loneliness we have heard in a record this year.

Why Builders Should Be Making This Music

The reason builders should be making this music — and we do mean should, even though we are normally allergic to the word — is that the loneliness itself is not visible to anyone else. The teammates do not see it. The investors do not see it. The board does not see it. The press, when the press eventually arrives, definitely does not see it. The builder is alone with the experience, and the experience does not have a vocabulary in the wider culture.

When a builder makes a record that captures the loneliness accurately, the record becomes a thing the wider culture can borrow. Other builders, hearing the record, recognize their own experience. Non-builders, hearing the record, get an approximation of what the experience is like. The vocabulary expands. The next generation of builders has language for the thing they are about to be inside.

That is not a small contribution. It is, on this argument, one of the more important contributions a working-artist working-founder can make. The records are an export from inside the project, sent back to the wider world.

The Risk

We should also name the risk, because the risk is real.

The risk is that builder loneliness becomes a trope. Once enough records have captured it, the texture starts to be imitable, and the imitations are bad. The bad imitations are records that are about loneliness rather than records that are lonely. They reach for the texture without having lived inside it. They are the founder equivalent of “studio session” music that has never been played live.

We are watching for the bad imitations. We will say, when we hear them, that we are hearing them. The cohort is small enough now that the bad imitations are still rare. As the cohort grows, the imitations will multiply. The records that survive will be the ones, like TO EXIST, that were made from inside the experience by someone who would have made the record whether or not it was on-trend.

A Practical Note For Builders

For the builders reading this who are also making, or considering making, work that captures their own working life — a record, a book, a film, a body of writing — we have one practical note.

Do not write the work for an audience. The audience will arrive. The audience may not arrive in the form you expect. The audience may not arrive on the schedule you expect. None of that should affect the work. The work should be made for the version of yourself that needed it when you were younger. That is the only audience whose presence is guaranteed.

Andrew Rollins has said something close to this in interviews. He said he wanted to make a record he wanted to listen to. The brief was that simple. The brief turned out to be the right one. Builders making this kind of work would benefit from adopting a similar brief.

The Closing Note

The loneliness does not go away when the project ships. That is the thing the retroactive memoirs get wrong. The loneliness reshapes itself. The thing you were alone with becomes a thing other people are now allowed to comment on. The comments are not the same as the work. The loneliness, in some senses, gets worse, because now the project exists and you are no longer alone with it but you are still the only person who knows what it cost.

Records like TO EXIST do not solve the loneliness. They document it. The documentation is the point.

If you are building something new, and the loneliness is on you this week, ROGA’s record is one of the records we can vouch for. It will not fix anything. It might make you feel slightly less alone for forty minutes. That is what music has always done, and the new founder-artist cohort is just relearning how to do it.

We will keep listening.

Linus Embry writes about culture and the people building tomorrow’s tools.