Musical procrastination was where Arthur Russell found his bliss. When the musician died in 1992, he left behind nearly 1,000 tapes of recorded material
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskAs a teenager he ran away from his home in Oskaloosa, a small Iowan town, after his father found drug paraphernalia in his bedroom, and the youngster ended up in a Buddhist commune in San Francisco. There he found peace for a while. He gave up drugs, enrolled in a community college to finish high school and took part in fire-walking rituals.
He grew tired of this in time and moved to New York to focus on his music, yet the mantras he learned in the commune never left him. He was more interested in the meditative process of making music than the finished product. Repetition and echo are themes that recur in his songs. Listen to “This Is How We Walk on the Moon” for an introduction to his oeuvre.
Incompleteness is desirable, wrote Yoshida Kenko, a Japanese monk from the 14th century: “It is only a person of poor understanding who wishes to arrange things in complete sets.” Musical procrastination was where Russell found his bliss. Never satisfied with his output—when praised for a song, he would immediately declare it was terrible—the composer was always changing the beat, fiddling with arrangements, seeing what would happen if he did things slightly differently.
In a documentary about the musician’s life released in 2008 Russell’s boyfriend, Tom Lee, described how the composer liked to set his keyboard up in front of a huge fish tank in their apartment so he could hear the sound of the water while he tinkered with his work. He loved jogging with his Walkman too, music blaring as the city droned around him. Russell developed throat cancer but every evening he would sing one of his songs, “Love Comes Back”, to Mr Lee.
When melancholy strikes, pop on some headphones and listen to Russell’s looping, lulling, sweet songs while you walk the streets as he once did. Start with “That’s Us/Wild Combination” and be reminded, ever so gently, that “it’s a big old world/With nothing in it”. Your to-do list is never going to be finished. Everything is impermanent. But you may as well “push up and be part of it all”.
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