David A'd me something

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Dear David,

It’s a great question. Where does creativity come from?

I like this quote from a 1966 CBC interview with Leonard Cohen:

“It’s just a matter of what your hand falls on, and if you can make what your hand falls on sing, then you can just do it.”

Jason Isbell also put it eloquently when he once tweeted:

“Songwriting is like attempting to solve the NYT crossword during a therapy session.”

I’ve always liked puzzles. Songwriting is a puzzle, and just like with any puzzle, doing them regularly forges connective patterns in your brain. In short, just doing it a lot makes you better at it.

Songwriting is, for me, excruciating. It’s the notion that a perfect lyric is somewhere in front of me but it’s too foggy to see it. I wade through the muck until I find it, revel in the subsequent elation, and then free-fall into panic, wondering if it will ever happen again.

There is an ephemeral understanding that it comes from “somewhere else”. A religious person might suggest it comes from their god. In a sense, I don’t disagree, but I do feel the need to unpack that a bit.

My definition of god is pretty loose. Let’s say… a beautiful, ambivalent, cosmic and relative connection between everything perceivable and unperceivable. My god does not have a personality, or an opinion. You cannot displease my god, because my god has no sense of preferred self from which I can deviate. Scripture says that we are made “in god’s image”. I’d say humans have done a pretty good job of making god in our image.

But I do think that creativity comes from that indescribable ethereal space from which we summon meaning and impulse. The swirling sum of our experiences manifests itself in conscious and unconscious ways. We cannot help but regurgitate the reality we’ve been fed.

And sometimes, there is gold in our blindspots. Sometimes I get the feeling that a lyric unlocks an insurmountable truth but I don’t even know why. We don’t know where the smoke comes from, but we send it into the sky as if to say this is how I feel!

As we articulate our semi-digested, half-understood truths, we alleviate some of the existential uncertainty that lies within them. And when someone else sees our smoke signal, they think I feel the same way! I am not alone! - both the sender and the receiver experience relief.

When ChatGPT exploded a few years ago, I remember reading an article that described how the AI bot worked. In essence, when given a query, the AI scrapes through all known and available relevant historical online discourse, and then attempts to drum up something reasonable as a response, one word at a time. That’s how it prescribes a home remedy for an ear infection, and that’s also how it writes an episode of Seinfeld, but in the spirit of Macbeth.

But that’s exactly what we do. All the time. We just don’t have access to as much data as do these burgeoning AI models. ChatGPT knows every lyric, mood and tonal shift of every song on Spotify. I just know some Tom Petty songs.

Usually, I know I’ve got a song brewing when something is bothering me. I lie in bed, unable to sleep, and there are wispy fragments of notions circling my mind. To reference A Christmas Carol, I am haunted by The Ghost Of Songs Yet To Come. It’s always some type of conundrum or perception through which I’m mulling.

Maybe it’s something like:

Why do bullies claim to be the victim?

or…

Nobody is solving our problems because everybody is trying to make enough money that the problems don’t affect them.

or just some stupid pun that somehow articulates more than it ought to, like…

Barf Code
Depress Conference
I Can’t Believe It’s Not Buddha

Anyway, none of this has really answered your question, David. The truth is that I’ve been asked many times to teach courses on songwriting, and I can’t bring myself to face the fact that I actually don’t know how it works. But you just have to do it. Over and over again.

You have to wake up to that big beautiful sun, understand full well that you’re still an idiot, and proceed.

Oh, and one more thing… You have to tell the truth. Not just something that sounds clever. The actual truth. Your gut knows the difference.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk,

Dan

AI PROMPT: “Buddha is standing on stage at the TED conference. Buddha is giving a TED talk”