And getting my ego out of the way makes it easier to listen to myself with some objectivity – to hear myself almost as a different person would. It makes it easier to have moments of truth and recognition, and it gets my ego out of the way. So that’s why I surrender to process, why I so regularly employ the mental tricks that get me in the right frame of mind to create. You need your human frailty to be at least somewhat visible if you want to connect on an emotional level – if you want things to feel real. And that’s why it can be such an unwelcome intrusion when we’re trying to create or perform. Your ego wants to conceal your insecurity and your fear. To protect your idea of yourself as smart, and handsome, and someone who should be taken seriously and never be laughed at. That’s kind of having an ego in a nutshell. Voice of Observing Ego yelling over amplifiers: WOW! YOU ARE FUCKING KILLING IT DUUUUDE!. twinkle of awareness that rocking has been achieved. When I’m on stage, my experience often goes something like this: Blankness. How it’s important to get to a place where you’re confident enough to prevent your ego from overseeing every move and hiding your vulnerability. I’ve talked to other songwriters about this, and some have pointed out how it can also be a vital part of performing. And it’s the part that’s long over with way before a record comes out. Beyond what it helps me create, disappearing is also the most sustaining part of what I do. It’s the door to the disappearing that is my ultimate desired creative state – being able to get “gone” enough long enough for a song to appear.
Getting started song series#
“Process” is also the only name I know of for whatever series of contortions and mental tricks we have available to lose ourselves in when we create. To me, process is whatever act you can engage in, whatever steps you can take, and whatever device you have at your disposal that you can use, together, that reliably results in a work of art. Photograph: Ken Weingart/Getty Images Process Most of the time, inspiration has to be invited. But it’s much more in your own hands than the divine‐intervention‐type beliefs we all tend to have about inspiration. When it does come out of the blue, it’s glorious. What I’m trying to tell you, and what I still tell myself frequently, is that inspiration is rarely the first step. The point is, when I say something like “inspiration is overrated”, it’s not because I think you don’t ever need to be inspired. The song didn’t chart, even though the label dudes claimed that they loved it and that they were going to give it the “big push”. Eventually I found inspiration in the process and even felt good about taking their money to teach myself that lesson. It was the first time I confirmed for myself that inspiration wasn’t always the first ingredient in a song. I wrote most of Can’t Stand It on the plane. In reality, I had no such song, of course, but I thought it’d be interesting, since they were paying for it, to fly to Los Angeles and pretend that I knew what a chart‐scorching pop song sounds like. In my mind, every song I’d just delivered was a solid gold pop gem! But I lied and said: “Boy, I have just the song.” That even though we’d just spent months making a record, I’d for some reason forgotten to mention the surefire hit I’d been keeping in my back pocket. We had finished the record and we were happy with it, but the execs at the label said to me literally the most cliched thing anyone could ever picture a record exec saying: “We don’t hear a single.” So they wanted another song – “And this one better be good!” I’ll spare you the deliberations that went on behind the scenes and my own annoyance about the whole thing. I think I taught myself this lesson during the making of Summerteeth.
Getting started song how to#
Knowing how to write a song isn’t going to help you much if you never find the inspiration or discipline to get started. At any rate, we’re going to have to unlock what motivates you to get started. Maybe that’s not the level of commitment we’re shooting for here, at least not yet, since we are focused on just one song. As the saying goes: “No work of art is ever finished it can only be abandoned in an interesting place.” At this point in my life, I write with such regularity that being given a deadline (for example, an exact date when an album needs to be delivered to the mastering lab) is basically a “pencils down” alarm bell that allows me to stop making up new songs and to spend some time whipping an LP’s worth of tunes into shape. I do, because they fit with my belief that art isn’t ever really complete.
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