When, in mid-2000, I released my mostly home-recorded CD Fish Wigs Hats Rats, I was elated and eager for reactions. They were mixed: some enthusiastic reviews and comments, and some expressions of disappointment along the lines of “You played cello so beautifully in high school.” Putting it all together, I see the mistake I made: this should have been a draft of a more honed project. Oh, everyone can say this. It’s hard to know when to stop. But this album suffered primarily from two problems: technical clumsiness and the effect of laying too many tracks on top of the previous ones, adding stray noise each time. (That in turn came from singing and playing all the parts myself, except in Gourds, where Hannah Marcus plays drums and synthesizer, and recording all but three on my own, at home.) Also, I didn’t know how to sing yet: how to work within my range, how to give shape to the words and phrases, how to pour forth and hold back. This little album did have its strengths. I am proud of the lyrics and some of the musical composition. But the weaknesses strain the listening, even today.

For years, after the initial excitement, I couldn’t listen to it at all; I cringed to think of it. I don’t cringe any more. It’s something to learn from; I can take the lessons into my writing. When I finish something, I often can’t wait to put it out there, but usually there’s more to be done. Finished isn’t quite finished. I need to step back a little.

This isn’t true for everone. There are those who work so long at something, trying to get every last detail right, that they never finish it, or, if they do, it feels over-labored. A work has to be lively (by which I don’t mean peppy; there’s liveliness in slowness). But probably each of us has a tendency that both helps us and gets in our way, be it impatience, perfectionism, sloth, self-doubt, imagination, or something else. To make a work of art, you have to both follow and resist your own tendencies, in the right proportion. If I weren’t a little impatient and impulsive, this thing would never have come into being, and all and all, I’m glad it did.

“Too Much Giving” (which I co-wrote with Mahlah Byrd, who died in 1994) is my favorite, followed by the first song, “The Ear.” After that, the title song, which was inspired by a sign I saw outside a store in Petaluma, California, with exactly the words “Fish Wigs Hats Rats.” The song alludes to a story a friend told me about a dream he had had, as well as some things that I was going through at the time. I like the eerie mood of it, although God, I wish I had had the sense to bring the key up a bit higher and add some more melody to the vocals. After that, “Funny Funny Grief,” and after that, there’s no particular ranking. “Gourds” and “Marks” are busier than I would make them now, but were recorded, along with “Too Much Giving,” by Joe Goldring at his wonderful studio in San Francisco, and you can hear the difference in the sound.

But those are thoughts two decades after the fact. The real lesson, for me, is to wait just a little longer than I would like, to take just a little more time with projects before hurling them outward into the world. Usually the world can wait too.