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Stephen Pickering

Tag: Art

  • The Secret of Songwriting and Art in General

    Groovin'

    If you’re looking for a how-to article, you’ll be disappointed. No, I don’t have a 10 point list, a “paint by numbers” step by step process to writing a hit song.

    Since Christmas, a lot of song ideas have been coming to my head very spontaneously. OK, I’ll take back that first sentence with one little tidbit you can put to work right away

    • When a song idea comes to your head, usually in the form of an opening riff and first line, finish the song in one sitting. Give birth to that baby, no matter how bad you think the lyrics are. Finish a first draft. You’ll find it takes less than 30 minutes.

    What has happened to me in the past is that an attractive melody and first line or first verse will come to me out of nowhere, and it feels right, but then I’ll bring my “editorial” complex in and nothing I write after feels right. So I’ll stop it there. Record a few moments of the idea, with the thought I’ll come back to it later. Well, guess what? You’ll never come back to it. I literally have a 100 iomega zip drives full of these ideas, that I never have gone back to. Complete the song, right then and there. And what is more, don’t let your editorial complex in. Just write whatever comes to your head until you have a complete song. What happens then? You have a something that takes on a life of its own and doesn’t disappear in your drawer forever. You have material. And then the more you play and sing it, the more you’ll spontaneously edit it with subconscious sounds in your head that have lyrics buried in them just crying to get out. Getting that first draft down, complete, gives them that chance to breathe again.

    But really the point of this article is something more esoteric. Lately I have been doing the above and it has helped immensely. But I noticed that when an idea came, I wanted to finish it quickly and then start recording. It was fun at first, but then stress entered the picture. I asked myself, “What’s causing this?”

    Then I had a spontaneous thought that I tweeted: “The test of a good song is not whether anyone likes it, but, rather, whether you enjoy playing and singing it.”

    With the rush to record, I had gotten myself into this mode of trying to impress an audience. I don’t feel that’s the right attitude. Now I’m starting to have the feeling that, yes, I should finish the song immediately like I mentioned above, but before I start recording let’s play the song for a while, let it build some character, let it breath and start taking on a second life of its own. Then ask yourself, “Do I enjoy playing and singing this song?” The simple answer to that question is whether I’ll start taking the recording of it seriously. If I don’t enjoy it, well at least the process is taking me to a place where something I do enjoy will more likely spontaneously spring to life. It puts the intent into your subconscious mind. If I do enjoy it, playing and singing, then I’ve got something that’s worth the effort of putting down and releasing.

    I would apply this philosophy to art in general. Do you enjoy the process? That’s the key. Not the end result. It’s very much in the sense of the Bhagavad Gita: You attach yourself to the process and be unattached to the result. In other words you don’t stress about the result. You don’t stress about anything. You immerse yourself and enjoy the process. You live in the process. The irony is, of course, your end result will not only be better, but more an authentic representation of the archetypal spontaneity that drives your fulfillment to begin with.

    • So, make it interesting to yourself first, the process that is, and then it will more likely be interesting to others.
    • Here’s another way to put it, “Don’t be concerned about making something like other people are making. Be concerned about expressing what is bubbling up from your own subconscious.”

    What do you think?

  • No Possum, No Sop, No Taters

    The trouble with authentic artists is that they’re in a silo both psychologically and culturally, so its not feeding the culture, and we have a Wasteland situation. Science, Art, Philosophy, Psychology, Media, Business, Politics, Technology, Religion are all walled off into separate silos. There’s no integration because they are controlled by protocols and systems, institutions. They are not feeding or being nourished by each other. The instutition becomes a complex both physically and psychologically that snuffs out the exuberance and spontaneity that gave birth to an organizing factor to begin with. This is what Nietszche calls “Groveling before sheer fact.” Nature, which unites and integrates, gives birth to all consciousness, becomes repressed by systems and institutions, which ironically enough were initially created to make life happy and instead have had the opposite effect.

    Whenever a spring pops up out of the ground, people figure out they can make money from it, and build a wall around it and charge for admission. Then the spring gets angry, dissappears and pops up in a new, unexpected place.

    “Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit unto the measure of his life? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?”

    No Possum, No Sop, No Taters

    by Wallace Stevens

    He is not here, the old sun,
    As absent as if we were asleep.

    The field is frozen. The leaves are dry.
    Bad is final in this light.

    In this bleak air the broken stalks
    Have arms without hands. They have trunks

    Without legs or, for that, without heads.
    They have heads in which a captive cry

    Is merely the moving of a tongue.
    Snow sparkles like eyesight falling to earth,

    Like seeing fallen brightly away.
    The leaves hop, scraping on the ground.

    It is deep January. The sky is hard.
    The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

    It is in this solitude, a syllable,
    Out of these gawky flitterings,

    Intones its single emptiness,
    The savagest hollow of winter-sound.

    It is here, in this bad, that we reach
    The last purity of the knowledge of good.

    The crow looks rusty as he rises up.
    Bright is the malice in his eye…

    One joins him there for company,
    But at a distance, in another tree.