 This video is supported by Givewell, a really cool organization that's trying to make sure that your charity dollars can make the most impact possible. If you're in a place to make donations this year, this is a great way to do it. Go to Givewell.org and pick Polyphonic at checkout to get up to $100 of your donations matched. Growing up as a music fan, I learned to develop a healthy disdain for the word hiatus. I think my first experience with the word came in 2006 when, fresh off the release of their monumental hypnotize and mesmerize, System of a Down announced that they would be taking a hiatus. At the time I was 12 or 13 years old and really discovering music that wasn't my parents for the first time. System were an early obsession. I remember sitting on the school bus with my iPod Nano, listening to BYOB over and over again, enraptured by Serge Tankian's radical chant of why don't presidents fight the war, why do they always send the poor. I was far too young to understand the true weight of the song's political context, but it felt important to me. It felt like music that truly had something to say about the world. Like music that mattered. And listening to it helped me feel like I mattered too. So I took it pretty hard when I learned that System wouldn't be making music together anymore. Except maybe they would? That's the thing with hiatuses, right? They don't bring with them the clean closure of a breakup. It's always a sad thing when bands break up, but at least there's an ending. Breakups let you step back and get a look at the full picture. They signal that it's time to evaluate an artist's body of work in full, and to understand what they meant to the world, what they meant to you. Hiatuses don't give you that luxury. They keep you hanging in limbo, unable to truly say goodbye. You wait eagerly for news of a new release, a new album, of anything until time slips by and an act that once meant the world to you drifts away to memory. Eventually, most hiatuses end, but at least in my experience, I've usually sort of moved past artists by the time that happens. And if I haven't, the world has. It's not that there's no good music being made after hiatuses, it's just that usually the magic of the moment that birthed an artist is gone. And that's why when I was younger, I didn't really understand these hiatuses at all. But now I know these things happen for the better, even if it might not feel like it at the time. The realities of being a touring musician or of being a public figure are drooling. They wear people down and turn what was once passion into an empty sense of hollow obligation. I would rather be left in the dark wondering when a band I love might return than see a band I love devolve into an empty husk, putting out albums they don't believe in for the sake of finishing up contracts or supporting tours. When System of a Downwind on Hiatus Surge Tankian was able to step aside and put out a series of solo albums that would help define my high school experience, to this day I still think they're deeply underrated. And he's far from the only one who has benefited from a hiatus. When John Lennon stepped away from music in the mid-70s, he was able to take time for himself to deal with some of his traumas and personal issues. He came back in 1980 with Double Fantasy, an album that promised a new era of Lennon before his life was tragically cut short. When the Foo Fighters took a hiatus in 2008, Dave Grohl teamed up with John Paul Jones and Josh Homie to release Them Crooked Vultures, a magnificent album that is truly unlike anything else in the era. And ever since Grohl and the Foo Fighters have come back, they've been living it up on tour carrying the rock and roll torch. I'm guessing you might already have an idea why I'm talking about hiatuses right now. I've been working on Polyphonic for seven years. When I first started the channel, I was a fresh-faced 23-year-old with a deep love for YouTube and far too many opinions about music. I started this channel because I loved video essays and I had things to say. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought it could potentially bring some money in, but that was never really the goal. But I got lucky and within a year of writing my first video, Polyphonic had become my full-time job. And man, what a job it was to be able to talk about the music I love for a living, to be able to make my own hours, to get paid to read books about music I love and do insane motion design experiments. It was just the best. I had such a profound passion for what I did in those early days. I really genuinely believed in the video essay as an artistic medium. And honestly, I still do, but a lot of things have changed. I've changed as a creator and YouTube has changed as a platform. Frankly, the kind of videos that I want to make and the kind of videos that YouTube wants its creators to make have never been so divergent. As the algorithm has developed, success on YouTube has felt less and less about creating cool, interesting, and unique things, and more and more about playing games to satisfy the algorithm and feed the endless hunger for content. Content these days is about short, quick hits or excruciatingly long deep dives designed for people to background watch as they go about their day. Neither of those particularly interest me as a creator. To be clear, I have no issues with creators playing the algorithm's game. I have no issues with creators doing extreme long-form content. Many of my peers do these, and I love their content and deeply respect them as people. It's just that these things have never really been my goal. My goal has always been to make videos that are lean, informationally dense, and visually stunning. I've wanted to tell you stories that bring you closer to the music that you love, and I've wanted to pair them with visuals that are so beautiful that you can't help but give them your full attention. I've wanted to tell stories that help make the world a better place, and I've wanted to tell stories that help you understand yourself better. At times I think I've succeeded at these goals, but it's gotten harder and harder. My style of editing is just so time-intensive that it's become nearly impossible for me to keep up with the grind demanded by the modern creator economy. This past fall I tried to buckle down and create on the schedule that YouTube demands, and it was one of the most successful periods in my channel's history. But man, it's just worn me down to the bone, and my quality has been slipping because of it. My history of the guitar solo series is something I'm deeply proud of. It's been fun to make, and I think I've told a pretty good story. But in the rush to get this content out in time, I've found myself slipping. I haven't been creating visuals to the quality that I want to, and even more damning, I've had stupid, catchable mistakes fall through the cracks. That's not who I want to be as a creator. It's not fair to you as a viewer, and it doesn't hold up to the standards that I want to set. But I think what's most frustrating about it is that I've been rewarded for these mistakes. When I slip up and make mistakes, more people comment on them, which creates more engagement, which further drives the video in the algorithm, because that's the reality of content creation right now. Platforms do not care about the quality of content, they care about the quantity of content. And for me at least, those things often have an inverse relationship. The more love that I put into my videos, the less videos that I'm able to make. It's infuriating, and that's just one of the things about this platform that has beaten me down. For the past six years, I've spent every other day fighting off copyright claims on my content, even though it falls well within fair use. Most recently, my upload of my entire Dark Side of the Moon project was taken down, and my channel was copyright struck. I've gone through all the proper channels to appeal to YouTube, and they've decided that I don't have a fair use case. And that's not all. Every one of my guitar solo videos has seen dozens of copyright disputes that I've had to deal with. Some have kept the video down for 48 hours in crucial moments where they should be gathering momentum, and that's after I already trimmed the solos down to tiny clips that don't even properly represent everything I'm talking about in the video. It gets me worked up as you can probably tell, but I don't want to linger on the negative for too long. I think I'm inclined to right now because I'm feeling like a shallowed myself. Even this video isn't the video that I wanted to make for this announcement. I had way bigger plans, but time and life caught up to me. So I guess that's one of the reasons why this is a hiatus and not the end. I feel like I've accomplished some pretty incredible things with Polyphonic. I've made a few videos that I think are stunning visually. I've told a few stories that I think are really important. I like to think I've even tried to challenge my own assumptions and put my mark on the musical canon in my own small way. But even with all this I don't think I'm done. I still have things that I want to say and I still have stories that I want to tell. I just can't tell them right here and I can't tell them right now. Not up to the standards that I would like to anyways. So I'm going to take some time off and get myself back in a place where I can tell these stories. A place where I'm not seized by dread and anxiety every time I hit the publish button. And a place where I'm not autopiloting my way into lazy mistakes and stupid errors. I honestly don't know how long I will be gone. And I don't know what it'll look like when I'm back. But I know I'm going to be creating all sorts of projects while I'm away from here. In fact I've got stuff that I've been working on that I'll probably pop back in to announce in the new year. Stuff that I'm really really excited about. I'll also keep podcasting over at Ghost Notes so check that out if you still want to hear me rant about music. And if you like my visual work I'm planning to ramp up some stuff on my in-print so there'll be art for you to see and buy. I've also got various motion design projects in the works that I'll announce as you know as I do them I guess. And I'm even slowly developing something very different for Nebula that I'm pretty excited about. All of this is to say that I won't be gone for good. And I'll be popping in here semi-regularly to tell you the cool stuff that I've got going on. Really I don't think I'll ever stop making videos. I just love the craft too much. But one way or another this era of polyphonic is over. Next week I'll drop the final video in Axe to Grind and I'll be releasing a few shorts to close out the year and that'll probably be the last you hear from me for a while in the race. So before I go I just wanted to thank you all so much for your support. I've gotten so many kind words from so many of you over the years. I feel truly blessed that I've been able to touch your lives and I really really hope that I've enriched your experience of music. I got to live a dream for a while and that wouldn't have happened without you. So thank you. I don't really know what to say to leave here so I'll turn to the man who always says things that I don't know how to say. Bob Dylan. Leave your stepping stones behind something calls for you. Forget the dad you've left they will not follow you. The vagabond who's wrapping at your door is standing in the clothes that you once wore strike another match go start anew and it's all over now baby blue. Given the nature of this video I didn't really want to run a sponsor but Givewell isn't really like most sponsors. Givewell is an organization that has spent the last 15 years researching charities to figure out which ones make the biggest impact on real people's lives. They don't take a cut of your donation or anything they're just looking to help people in efficient ways. They support charities that do things like supplying preventative malaria medication or vitamin A supplements to children in need. If you've never donated to one of Givewell's recommended charities you can have your donation matched for up to $100 until the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. To get that match and help send more funds to people in need go to Givewell.org pick YouTube and enter polyphonic at checkout. Again that's Givewell.org to donate or find out more. Thank you so much for all of your support. I guess I'll see you in a while.