Take it Easy/How To Get Ahead While Others Take It Easy

The message of this pre-Christmas week for so many people is to take it easy and phone it in. I am a) 100% in favor of you doing that if that is how you feel. Get it, you deserve a break. Or you don’t, but even if you don’t deserve a break that’s a lie because we all do this year. But, in case you want a couple weird side takes on this here we go in rapid fire:

1) You put too much time into Christmas. Scale back your expectations and do a portion of work, home or job, that you would really struggle to fulfill if everyone was going on all cylinders. When everyone else is chilling you have the mental bandwidth to do something ambitious.

2) Working when others aren’t feels fantastic. Pre-kids I used to make a solid 3-4 hours at the office on Sunday happen while all you bozos were watching football. I felt so great, chipping at the away at the inbox while it isn’t getting even with me with new emails.

3)This is a great time of the year to be creative. I haven’t sat down at a drumset in months, I haven’t recorded anything into my phone since September but today I just spent about twenty minutes writing on Peter’s drumkit while looking at a picture of a bunch of my high school friends sitting on a bench at Grand Old Day. I heard chords, I felt tempo, I heard arrangement. I have no idea what will come of it, but the emotions of the moment are pushing me into more creative spots.

4)Wayne Shorter recorded one of the greatest jazz albums of all time on December 24, 1964. It’s called Speak No Evil. Listen to it.

There’s something magical about channeling your creativity at a moment when the world let’s you let up on the grind. Think about Wayne, Elvin, Freddy, Ron and Herbie finding the time to make this before they got their Christmas started. Also, I can entertain options for better jazz records, but there is no better set of arrangements of jazz songs than this record, so bright, so imaginative, so powerful.

5) All of my advice is easier cause my family doesn’t celebrate Christmas. We are Jewish. Did you hear talking this mess when in the throws of the 8 day miracle? No. So remember that.

6) Christmas is not two weeks long. A little bit of productivity (for work or at the home) in between Christmas and New Year’s will actually make New Year’s a lot more fun. If you’ve been wearing sweatpants and drinking Windsor Canadian for three days straight and the only reason you know it’s New Year’s Eve is because a ball is dropping, you’re not going to be a happy camper.

7) That’s it. Please do drink eggnog and purchase Heiruspecs new single which we will drop soon!