I've been pondering, not for the first time, the mysteries of the creative process. Where does the music I hear come from? How does it take shape? How do I dissect the good ideas from the mediocre?
For all of us the process is different. Honoring our own pathway to making art is of fundamental importance. Some people plot out an entire composition before committing a single note to paper. Some songwriters write lyrics before melody. Some writers work the end of their novel before the beginning. Some sketch out an entire book chapter by chapter, spending weeks or months refining their plan, and then setting down to write. Others just start scribbling on page one with little idea where it’s headed. Some compositions stem from an intellectual construct, say limiting oneself to certain intervals, or inventing a bass line in odd time with a melody in an unconventional mode. Some music is all heart. Some all intellect. Most lie between. All are worthy.
I usually cannot plan what I'm doing. In fact, I've never been inclined to. I suppose sometimes I believed I should. But it's not me. If it were, I'd know by now. The older I get, and I'm into my 5th decade as a composer, I see that trust is of great importance. I trust my instincts. It doesn't mean I don’t question them after the fact. I throw ideas away, I amend them, I scrutinize them with every faculty of objectivity I can muster. But I don’t question the birth of the ideas themselves, because those ideas are me. If you reject your own ideas too often, you’ll never compose anything. For me composition usually starts with a feeling. I can’t and won’t try to name it—but it holds the shape of the piece. It knows what’s needed in a way that my conscious mind doesn’t. This “feeling” is more than just an emotion—it’s a world within a world containing the soul, shape, the DNA of my piece.
These are all generalities. Let me give you an example of how a recent, poignant piece worked for me. This is an example of a piece that demanded birth, a piece that had a distinct purpose and trigger. It’s a rather extreme example, so I suppose it’s on one end of the creative spectrum.
My oldest brother, David, died two months ago. He drowned while swimming off the beaches of Mexico. My reaction upon hearing the news was instantaneous. I sat down at the piano and sang a simple melody that I recorded. I guess this was my grief finding an outlet, a path forward. I process the world with music and words. I fussed with the melody, essentially asking it where it wanted to go, knowing there was nothing to force. When I had nothing else to add, I set it aside.
After the initial shock of his death, some part of me went numb. I couldn't figure out why I felt so little pain. People asked me how I was doing, and…I wasn’t quite sure. My sleep was continually disturbed. I found myself needing to lay down in the middle of the day. I had a hard time focusing. I was a bit more irritable than usual. When I'd wake up in the morning I’d sense that there was some presence, some voice inside me that knew a deeper truth that at least for now I was unable to access.
I wondered about the song. Oddly enough it began to call out to me, to take shape, when I was at the Big Ears festival a couple of weeks later, in Knoxville. I'd stay out late hearing all this amazing music, and wake up in my tiny hotel room with a cup of coffee and a pen and paper in my hand. 3 mornings in a row I sat with my guitar, not for long, just enough to see what was traveling from the inside out. Eventually I had something that I thought worked. Now I had a good part of the original melody, but the feel and chords morphed.
Again, I set it aside.
I knew it wasn't finished. But this was not something to sit down and hammer out. Some pieces need the hammer. Others drift in from a place that is more liminal. This piece might run away from the hammer and chisel. A songwriter I recently interviewed for Premier Guitar magazine, Chris Smither, said something in our interview which perfectly described what I'm talking about. He said, “Half the time I write songs I’m halfway through before I have any idea what it’s about. I get a tune in my head and just start making funny noises, a conversation with that part of the brain I’m not on speaking terms with. Then I’ll sit back and ask ‘where is this going?’ Eventually a little light comes on and I start to see what the song needs. Then the left brain takes over, and I can be more diligent about it.”
There is MUCH to be learned in this simple, not simple, statement.
The moment of insight for my song actually came to me in a dream. (Sorry I’m breaking one of the first rules of writing: “Write a dream, lose a reader.”) However…
I was walking up a dirt road into the mountains searching for something. Suddenly I realized I was about to see my oldest and best friend who died a few years ago. He appeared in front of me and I was overwhelmed with emotion. I said to him, “You showed up, I can’t believe it!” He smiled a beautiful, radiant smile. I wanted to hug him, but I knew if I did he would disappear. Still, I had to. I went to touch him and his face turned into my brother's face, and as I wrapped my arms around his neck he evaporated into space.
Reality had shown its silver, stained face. I woke up with that profound heaviness in my chest that I'd been looking for all along. The tears finally came, and they came in abundance. And in that pool I saw things as they are, not as I wish or think they should be. I felt no distance—only love, pure love, a child’s love. I knew, again, that one by one those we love fall away into the void. There’s no one to replace them. Each is a precious part of us gone forever. True, their spirit, some piece of them, survives inside us. But that's cold comfort. One loss becomes every loss, and each loss points the way towards our own end. To perceive that, to truly know it, to not run from it, is to welcome the whole of our ephemeral lives on earth—to make real and celebrate the gift of life and its inevitable destination. This was the “feeling” of my song.
I found my groove. It turned from a kind of R&B song into a finger-picked affair on acoustic. Here are the first 2 verses:
I’m walkin’ up that long dirt road
As if I could ever know
How far it goes or where it ends
To the mountaintop cold and clear
To the burning bush the veil of tears
Thinking I’ll find you again
Just when I see your face
It melts into eternal space
And then I finally see
A piece of me forever gone
And somehow still holding on
With the blood inside of me
I had found the heart of the piece.
I go back to the issue of trust. The first, simple melody I heard had emotional resonance. I knew it had legs. It stuck with me. I had a few lines of lyric when I started. They were the first layer. I eventually rejected most of them. They were sentimental, prosaic. What came next was something closer. But I wasn't quite there. Each of these false starts cleared the way for the final narrative. I trusted that they would take me where I needed to go. And I kept asking the song what was needed. This wasn't an entirely conscious process. Interestingly ideas often take shape when we walk away from them. I often solve the riddle of a composition when I decide to take a walk and forget about what I'm doing. The creative process doesn't always conform to a laser focus that might be compared to an MRI. Sometimes the muse comes alive when you walk away and let her speak to you on her own terms.
I want to talk more about this process. So next time I'll write about discovering the music I’ve composed for a new 20 minute cello and piano duo. There are similarities in the processes but key differences, mostly centering around the fact that the piano/ cello work has no words.
I’d be curious to know if you trust your words, or your music. And how do you get from that first seed, to the flowering of the tree?
Thanks for reading.
Nice piece! Sorry for your loss...