We all want to believe we are generous people. We give our friends gifts in season and out. We buy them lunch. We buy them birthday presents. We buy them coffee. Heck, we even give the homeless folks our change. And we put money in the plate on Sunday, too. We're just giving machines, aren't we?

But what we tend to not give is our time, not really. Yes, we spend time with people, visiting as friends do, whether we go over to their place or they come to ours. But that isn't really what I'm talking about. And I think that by now you know that about me.

Our time is precious to us. We probably value our time more than anything else upon which we place or assign value.

I know people who are always busy. They are so busy that their lives are falling apart and they don't even know it. They are work-a-holics, busy bees, always having to have something going on. No time to just sit and enjoy simply "being". Even their vacations are a whirlwind of busy; busy going here, seeing that attraction, this exhibit, that monument. They're exhausted when they come home!

And yet their personal lives are empty, more empty than the pockets of a homeless person. They are unable to give of themselves in the things and situations that truly matter in life.

While I am in no way going to suggest a solution to these particular issues, I am going to suggest that we can all benefit by slowing down a little, paying more attention when people are speaking to us, when they make time in their busy schedule to visit with us. Life is fast enough as it is, not because we make it that way, but because the world demands it be that way, at least here in the 'First World' of Western Civilization. I mean, God forbid you slow down and enjoy life, you slacker!

And how, you are asking, does this apply to music? Glad you asked...

One of my pet peeves is about music and this very subject of giving of ourselves in the creation and performance of our craft.

It has to do with the trite and incomplete nature of the music I am asked to listen to by bands, radio stations, friends and others.

During the course of this column, I have spoken about creativity, the creative process, the Muse and a whole lot of other stuff that outwardly may not seem relevant to the topic of music in general. But it is all relevant when you look at the deeper context in which I am writing. It would be easy to create a column that talks about the stuff everyone else talks about when we are on the subject of music as players and creators of this amazing thing that has such an impact on the lives of everyone in the world.

As an artist, both in music and in the literal field of creating paintings, sculpture, drawings and more, I strive to empty myself into the work I am creating so that it will truly be an expression of myself, whether reflective, autobiographical, metaphor, allegory, analogy, observational, or just plain fun. And the work will mature as I engage the process of creating it. It will change and morph into something I hadn't actually conceived, hopefully becoming something greater than the parts.

When I listen to the music coming out these days, it is somehow unsatisfying. Much of this music is just not done; it's incomplete and unfinished. It has not reached the conclusion it wanted. But it was recorded, published and released onto an unsuspecting populace anyway.

So now you're asking: How do you know? Who are you to say this song or that song is not finished?

Well, let me ask you a question: Why is it that when you listen to one song, it makes such a deep impact upon you and 'feels' so 'right'? But when you listen to another song, possibly by the same artist, it just doesn't 'sit' well with you? There is something not quite right about it. You can't identify it, even point to the specific 'thing' that makes you 'uncomfortable' about it. But in your gut you know it isn't, well, right. You may even like the song, but still be left with a feeling of wanting 'more' from it.

The first example is that the song that moves you so, makes the impact is actually a well thought out and created - and complete - work. The second shows a sign the song is unfinished, incomplete. The writer(s) didn't finish. Why? Why would anyone perform a song, even record it, if it wasn't finished? The answer is pretty basic: they don't know it isn't finished because a) they aren't paying attention, b) they don't care, c) they got tired of working on it, d) they don't know that a song can actually 'sound' finished, yet not actually be finished.

Yes, there are more reasons, surely. But you get the idea here.

I write a lot of music. Only those songs that are 'finished' will ever see the light of day, be recorded in a final form, published and released for general sale to the public.

Some of the unfinished songs may sound finished, but I know they aren't. Some will never be finished because they were exercises in exploring a style of music I may not really know.

One thing is always consistent, though. When I write, I give myself wholly to the process. I do not compromise for the sake of knocking out another tune to show some kind of results. That cheapens the process and the product.

Let me give you an example of my process, and how I know songs aren't finished until they actually are...

A number of years ago, a friend suggested a topic to write on. So I sat down and wrote a song on the subject he mentioned. It sounded pretty good, but I wasn't really happy with it. I felt as though it wasn't my best effort. But it was written.

Fast forward about seven years. I'm in the studio recording music for a singer and I bring this song out because I think it fits her style. We lay down the basic guitar track, a bass track and scratch drums. We then lay down a guide vocal track. As I'm recording the lead guitar part, something begins to happen. It is very hard to explain, but as I'm putting this particular track, I'm also listening to the music, the words. And the music, the song, sounds different. It no longer sounds like the song I'd written seven years earlier. It was changing.

The structure of the song was no different, except for putting in a short instrumental section in the middle. But the combination of the guitars, bass, drums and vocal were bringing out a quality in the song that was 'hidden', for lack of a better word. The song was blossoming into a form I had not even thought possible.

When we sat down to mix the song, after adding backing vocals and re recording the drum and vocal tracks, the song's potential poured out of the speakers. This was no longer that song written seven years earlier. It was more, a whole lot more.

In laying down the tracks, I was listening to the song the whole time. And I was responding to what I was hearing, letting the process go where it needed to go, rather than trying to control the process. I've done this with a number of other songs, too, even re recording everything because the song demanded changes -- additions or subtractions that were not part of the original composition. And when we got the final mix of this seven year old song, we knew it was truly whole, fully formed and fully realized. It was everything it should be, was meant to be, and truly a finished work, all because I paid attention to what the song was doing as I added instruments, heard how it was changing, and responded to those changes.

Granted, sometimes it results in great music. But, to be honest, sometimes songs just don't work at all. And that's okay. They become part of the greater process that is composition. Perhaps, as has been the case many times for me, the purpose of those tunes is that you will raid them for a riff here or a progression there, all in service to the creation of a whole song that does want to be complete.

Remember when I mentioned the Nashville system of writing songs, where a collective of people sit in a room and knock out songs? This actually can be part of the bigger problem, that all these folks are trying to create tunes, and doing so on a 9 to 5 schedule, like an assembly line. It has, in fact, been called just that, assembly line composition. I mentioned the problems with this system, as well as the benefits. Personally, I find that process very troublesome because, as I've mentioned, writing by committee is not an ideal way to create anything. Compromises are always made and the potential for a great song is often destroyed for the process of that compromise.

When you write in an assembly line fashion, you are not vesting yourself in the process. You're knocking these things off, hoping for a winner to emerge out of the myriad bombs that inevitably ensue. Again, occasionally a great tune manages to emerge from this kind of process. That is inevitable. But creativity is not something you can subject to a managed process.

And as you have surely learned, managed processes do not encourage creativity. They actually discourage creativity, personal investment and letting the process go where it wants to go. All efforts are constrained by the process. The process is king and must be adhered to, no matter what.

So, we take this learned behaviour and apply it to our personal lives. As artists and writers, if we allow that process to invade our creative efforts, our creative process, we will diminished the whole, we will lose something precious and valuable beyond measure. And we will not pour our life's blood and time into following the process where it wants to go. We will try to manage it - because that is what the world teaches us we must do.

Society as a whole generally discourages the free thinker, the free spirit. Yet, ironically, they demand products that require this ability, this liberty if they are ever to have a hope of being made.

We the artists must insist that our time be more fully, wholly and pointedly devoted to the process of creating finished works of art, whatever form they take. We must not compromise for the sake of a deadline or demand or any other force that shortchanges the completion of any artistic endeavour in the way that guarantees a truly complete and whole work that will be enjoyed all the more for being just that: a finished work.

You have to remove all the distractions, all the things that diminish your focus and attention during the time you are in the creative process. Turn off the TV, the cell phone, the home phone, lock the doors...do whatever you must to ensure you are uninterrupted in that time devoted to the creation of your artistic work.

If you give of yourself, commit the whole of your heart, mind and spirit to the creation of something so beautiful, your music, your scupture, your painting, your whatever it is you do, if you pour all of yourself into that process, that work, you will find that you are now listening, hearing, seeing, and so knowing the process is working right, and so then also knowing when the work is truly, wonderfully, faithfully and entirely complete.

And it takes that precious commodity we all abuse - Time - spent in the way the work requires, not what we decide to devote to it, if ever it is to see the light of day in the way it was meant to be seen, heard, experienced and enjoyed.

And the benefit of all that? Well, people will know you - the real you - all the better when they experience your creations as they were intended to exist. Isn't that the real gift we want to give to everyone?