New Monday #60
Happy Monday!
How is your brain? Mine is a pain in the head. It's lazy. It procrastinates, especially when it has something difficult to do, like write another New Monday for you all. My noggin has trouble making decisions, especially when I'm tired. It can fall into loops of judgment: "This is no good. This isn't very innovative. Everyone has heard this before. You have no talent. You should take a nap. Let's do it after the nap. You're always taking naps. What is wrong with you?"
It always wants to pull me, or push me, into something that seems too easy or too familiar: "Don't experiment. Just get the burger. You love burgers." It can be like riding a bike, and the tires keep going into a rut on the road.
By design, brains are very energy-use conscious and have a "there are starving children who would love to eat that potato salad" attitude towards everything. Brains want to conserve energy. They never want to get off the couch. They know it burns a lot of calories to think, so brains try not to—because who knows how the next mammoth hunt will go (evolutionarily speaking). Brains are into fast answers, copying, finding repeatable patterns, outsourcing, muscle memory, habits—anything to avoid thinking.
Creative brains also like to problem-solve. I'm often stuck with half my brain fascinated by something it wants to play with, and the other half complaining from the bedroom, "Just come in here and watch Star Wars again."
Defining the Problem
People say, "Get out of your head." Exactly. What we want is to have thoughtless thoughts. My thinking often devolves into a familiar thought pattern—a rut, or into a judgment loop, or some other mental activity that saps my energy and resolve.
But I also experience lots of moments of inspiration, where some idea comes slamming in, jumping the ruts and judgment. It's fresh and energetic, and off I go writing, playing, or painting, or what have you. It's a great feeling. The thoughtless thought.
Remember back to your last bit of creative work and you'll sense its structure is similar to telephone lines hung on a few telephone poles. The poles are inspiration. The telephone line is technique: how to form a sentence, load a paintbrush, cycle through chord changes by fifths.
The creative act is stringing technique wire between phone poles of inspiration.
This is exactly a song: there's an inspiring idea, and then a bunch of music theory or familiar hand movements, or something you nicked off a Jamiroquai record, and hopefully there's another phone pole of inspiration at the start of the chorus.
Great songs have a couple of inspired moments, like this:
Love – "Alone Again Or". I'm going to have to do a whole thing on this album.
Some songs have one inspired moment, and then the rest of it is like an injured duck waddling around. Technique. There are tons of songs like this:
AC/DC – "Thunderstruck" Notice how unquantified the opening guitar part is? Also, how Malcolm Young's rhythm part just makes it happen?
Eddie Money – "Baby Hold On" Good riff but it never gets beyond it, really.
There are songs that are ALL technique, and the only inspired bit is the concept or the title:
A lot of stuff is built around some sort of sound someone stumbled on, and that's all there is for inspiration:
Frankie Goes to Hollywood – "Relax"
On second thought, it's a good melody too, using those four notes, so maybe it's a bit more than the bass sound.
Obviously, anything might work.
Also, quite obviously, there are two ways to get better at making creative stuff: get better at the inspiration stuff, and/or get better at the technique stuff.
For the next few weeks, we're going to look at how we get better at the inspiration stuff. I'll be tossing you all a boatload of ideas pulled from records, research, and my own 10,000+ hours in the studio. But that is for next week. I don't want to have these things go above 1200 words.
In the meantime....
Bowie's Daughter
This came out a few days ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a98wIRa_reA
Lexi Jones is the daughter of David Bowie and Iman Abdulmajid. Lexi is twenty-four, a visual artist and designer, and she put out an album, Xandri, on April 2nd. It was a very low-key release, just some snips on her Instagram. Her YouTube channel has 235 subscribers as I write this.
I can't find out much about it. I don't know who played on it, where it was recorded. There are indications that she wrote the songs and played and produced it, but who knows. It's not on a major label—she put it out herself using DistroKid. I'm guessing that was her choice—what label would turn down Bowie's kid?
I had a hard time finding a representative song. The recording is all over the place. It sounds like songs cut at different studios, or at least at different levels of quality. There's radically different levels of playing on it too. There is something, though, consistent about the songwriting. It sounds like it was all written by one person.
The vocals... there's something pitchy about them. Like they were either corrected but not all the way, or that they weren't corrected at all and the pitch issues are just what's there.
One thing I'm clear about: she has a gorgeous, rich, round, natural voice. She doesn't know how to use it yet, but if she figures that out and gets the songwriting together, Alexandria Zahra Jones could be a thing.
There's another Lexi Jones. She's from the Midwest and her YouTube has about the same number of subscribers as, uh, Lexi Jones.
Here's a song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bv0bhC20OhM&list=RDEMTHEEcg-BUicMpgOX0o_dwA&start_radio=1. It's about the Kansas City Royals.
Well, look at the time! Have a great week.
Warm regards,
Luke