How to Take Advantage of Accidents
by Derik Nelson
I want to tell you a story about this photo.
We used this as the album cover for our debut full-length sibling record Home Again. I wrote, recorded, produced, played all the instruments, and mixed the whole thing myself (type-A meets control freak meets perfectionist). Making an album is one of my all time favorite projects. It’s deep, it’s artistic, it’s personal, it’s sometimes solitary, but with the promise of an end result that’s immortalized in time, and forever available for friends and strangers to listen to. Whoa.
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Home Again was my 7th full length album, and I’ve been writing and recording since age 14—an average of about one album every two years or so, with a flurry of YouTube covers and other singles in between—and the feeling of anticipation once it’s finished is always the same. You listen to your creation front to back when it’s all said and done and imagine all these different people hearing these songs, and what they might think. I think of my teachers, and what they would say about the writing. I think about my parents, and what parts they might be particularly proud of. I think of my musician peers, and what they might be most critical of. And I think of my heroes, in the off chance that one of these songs reaches their ears in an Uber or a Spotify shuffle, and I wonder whether or not they would hear their influence on me. In every instance, you’re still objectively analyzing a piece of art that was entirely intentional. Detail-oriented. Painstakingly thought through. And a year’s worth of dedicated work should warrant an album cover design worthy of representing the careful planning and forethought of the music inside, right?
Which brings us to the photo: it was an accident.
That’s right, we used an accidentally taken photo as the album cover.
(thanks @RianaNelson for being our hand model)
Dalten has this device that attaches to a tripod and hooks up to his camera that automatically takes photos. It’s called a velocerometergrapher or something, I don’t know—I can never remember the name of it so we just call it the Velociraptor. Basically you can tell the Velociraptor to take 25 photos, one every 3 seconds. Then you can stand there and do a bunch of poses and try to get some good shots without needing a real photographer (disclaimer: the Velociraptor is absolutely no match for an actual professional HUMAN photographer. We especially love working with our friends One Beautiful Life Photo and Boston Harbor Photography, but the ol’ Velociraptor will do in a pinch). We did our very formulated poses out in the field on the spike that we had carefully set so we’d be in perfect focus, and when the timer was up, started walking back towards the camera to see how the shots turned out. Only the Velociraptor glitched out and belatedly shot one more photo. An accidental photo. This photo.
There’s a lot of things in life we think we can control. And the beautiful part of life happens when we let go, and embrace the things we can’t control. As someone who is innately abstinent towards change, flexibility is a lesson I keep reminding myself to take to heart. We could try to take a million more photos and never get this shot. We’ve got a folder filled with crisply focused and perfectly posed photos, yet this is the one we went with.
When I look at this photo, I see three siblings in their own worlds, but coexisting with each other. I see myself, guitar in hand, careful and methodical as ever, keeping my eye on my footing for what’s to come. I see Dalten the dreamer, gazing at the horizon with his head in the clouds. And I see my beautiful sister Riana, happy and radiant as ever, naturally out in front to lead and guide her younger brothers. I also see a photo that wasn’t planned.
It goes to show that when things don’t go the way we planned, we’re faced with two options. Option #1, fight it. Get frustrated. Get disappointed. Stress out about it. Option #2, embrace it and find the beauty in the ability to see a new perspective or a new path. Accidents have a way of showing us our true selves. And without accidents, we’d all be weird routinized robots.
Now I want to hear from you! What accidents in your life can you learn to embrace? How can you relinquish your need for control, and allow change to show you a new path? Tell me in the comments below!