I came up with the title first. Then I remembered where I got it.

It was a party in Brooklyn, an anniversary for a record label, in a very good room. That was the line on everything: too old to be new, too new to be classic. They made a film with the same name, about themselves. It was a joke about where they stood, and it wasn't a joke.

There's a bin in every record store for things that are too old to be new and too new to be classic. Nobody flips through it. The records are fine. They're just between.

I know the bin. Not as well as I did seven months ago, but I know it. The work is here. The ideas are here. It isn't new anymore and it isn't classic yet. The release isn't there yet.

Here is what that label did that was wise. The man at the middle of it started a band in his thirties. Not a kid. A grown man with an ocean of records in his head, every name, every pressing, and nobody had heard of him. He took the chance anyway. He knew he was that good. Think about how long you'd have to carry that around, knowing it, before anybody else did. Then he wrote "Losing My Edge," a song about having been there, early, for all of it, and about the kids coming up behind, and everybody heard it.

My beat is taking care of yourself, so here is the advice. The bin is not a bad place to be. It is the best secret on earth: holding the thing in your mind, all of it, before it comes out, and just being with it.

Play the whole record. Nobody's waiting for the single. Yet.