A million options… choose one.
My son is learning guitar.
He’s six, but he’s having a good go at Back In Back, Sunshine Of Your Love and Behind Blue Eyes. When his lessons are over I step in and have a try at what he’s learned, which gives me a clear idea of each and every note that goes into Seven Nation Army or Come As You Are.
That’s a fascinating process and makes me really aware of how every song that feels as if it just rolled naturally into position is actually the result of a deliberate creative process. Even if it just happened via a spontaneous jam session, the decisions were made to place each note in a particular order and keep them there, and if you multiply every note by every length, pitch, volume and instrument you understand that the intro to Hey Joe or the riff from Heartbreaker survived a mind-boggling range of alternatives.
As a writer I’m fully aware that every word I write has been selected from 171,476 possibilities (and any number of neologisms) and could be anything: gerund, goitre, ocular, cattle, marmalade, calamity, oleaginous, fester, smile, nimrod, piece, serendipity, Africa etc., which again means that the existence of something like Catch-22 is verging on the miraculous.
I guess this is one of the reasons why we marvel at the creative process and deify those responsible for its successful outcome: it’s like herding infinity.
“Like herding infinity”.
Great summation of the development from Id to Ego, Ben.
When we change from nothing but awareness to self-awareness as individual beings.
Wonder how many Led Zepp songs had to be shown to a creadiv director, a planner, a client, a research group and any number of talentless fuckos before they saw the light of day? If they were they would end up (after a few “builds” as just one inoffensive note played over and over again and a person singing ahhh endlessly (assuming ahhhh doesn’t offend the client’s wife in which case Planty could just change it to laaaaa).
Christ this job has become shit.
I think Morrissons have made a pretty decent xmas ad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk1F1uynims&feature=relmfu
that’s so true. i think having an attitude about things is what makes it easier.
you know that Led Zep (having made the decision to rip off the Jeff Beck Group – see Rod Stewart’s new autobiography) were dead set on doing things their way. This considerably reduced the possibilities. they had an identifiable flavour.
“no way i’m fucking doing THAT!”
Yet D’Yer Mak’er still exists.
Indeed.
When asked what our ‘ideation process’ is, I sometimes reply, that our ‘process’ is much the same one as used for writing a song. One or two people sit down and try to come up with something. Sometimes it’s great. Sometimes it’s not. The key factor isn’t process: it’s talent.
I have to agree with Ed Krill-Tomahawk, which is why I find song writing infinitely more gratifying than my job as a creative.
There are no boundaries other than your imagination. No brief, no budget, no client… pure bliss.