It's exciting to be able to hear some music I like and immediately fire off a letter to the composer or musicians on the recording telling them how much I like it. One discussion led me to change a chord in an older composition - it put things in focus for me and helped me hear what I wanted to do with the compositional form. I listen to more music by Indies and minor label artists now. Lately I've become involved in two Internet-related recording projects. None of my originals were appropriate for solo guitar, so for that project I wrote some new material I could play as chord-melodies.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
I used a new compositional technique which takes me in a different direction. It was really fun when we weren't arguing. The band was sort of like a re-creation of all our dysfunctional families, and at one point we also lived together in a collective. We met through various political activities we were involved in. Some of us knew rudimentary things about our instruments.