New Monday #61
Happy Monday!
Remember Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups commercials on TV?
Some guy walking around with a chocolate bar would trip and collide into another guy who was conveniently walking around with an open jar of peanut butter. And the chocolate bar would slam into the peanut butter and snap off, and each guy would have a chunk of chocolate with peanut butter on it. And then they would yell at each other:
“You got peanut butter on my chocolate!”
“Oh yeah? Well YOU got chocolate in my peanut butter!”
Then they would pause, and take a bite of their chocolate/peanut butter hybrid, and of course they would be delighted. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are awesome. Two great tastes that taste great together.
It's the very definition of a Happy Accident.
This is all thoughtless thought. The commercial doesn't show people pondering, “What would peanut butter and chocolate taste like together?” Instead, things are physical. People collide, shit happens, and the result is awesome.
This is EXACTLY what you want to go for in your creative work.
Don’t just think about it. Get it out into the real world and try it. Force a happy accident, an unintended experiment.
Your brain is not capable of thinking the wrong thought. You can’t make a “mental typo.” You can’t think “tree” and by accident think “three.” You can think of rhymes, but that’s not the same as misreading something, mishearing something, accidentally getting chocolate in the peanut butter, etc.
But you could point to a tree, stumble on your own tongue and say, “Look at that beautiful three.” And Beautiful Three might strike your ear, and suddenly you're writing a song about a father, a mother, and a child, or a love triangle, or three high school girls killed in a car accident, etc. It all rolls out of making that mistake and then recognizing the value of the idea.
Your brain is also syncretic. It can’t think of a new idea. All it can do is remember old ideas and combine them in different ways. You can think, “I wonder what Z might be like if I did X and Y?"
But if you take that thought and try it physically in the world outside your head, you might be able to force a happy accident.
Don’t Work in Your Head
If your brain can only think of what it can think of, and it can’t make mistakes, then you need to work in the tangible world where someone can walk by and get peanut butter all over your chocolate. Where you can misread your own handwriting. Where you can accidentally play the wrong notes. Where you can mean to put blue on it but accidentally stick your brush in red. Where you can drop something. Erase something. Where you can mishear someone's mumbles.
Don’t write music in your head. Write it on an instrument—maybe on an instrument you really can't play. Screw with the tuning. Have everyone in the band switch instruments—that's what they did to record this mega-hit. Great stuff. The playing is such a mess!
Mishear stuff. Tune a radio to a station you never listen to, put the volume way down, and go into another room and wash the dishes. You'll hear little bits of melodies and words, tiny quiet snips of music. Your brain will try to assemble it into some sort of song. Get a bit of inspiration and then write that song down.
Add something random. John Lennon turned on a radio during the mono mix of I Am the Walrus and it was printed into the mono mix master tape. It also happened to work perfectly. At 2:00 you’ll hear the sound of him tuning in the radio.
You’ll also notice from this point on that the mix sounds really weird. The radio part was added to the mono mix, so when it came to the stereo mix, they had to splice in the mono mix, but did some processing to it so it sounded somewhat stereo. Whatever. It's very cool. And it’s absolutely an accident, a very happy one.
Also, they mixed the snare too low on the drums on the left side, so they overdubbed someone hitting a chair with a spoon in the center to reinforce the snare. The Beatles were all about happy accidents.
Use the wrong mic. Play with one finger.
React to problems in a positive manner. I tracked a really quiet drum part that was played with brushes. We had mics close and the preamps cranked to get all the details. I forgot that the ending of the song was really loud, so we're cruising along and suddenly the drummer switches to sticks and bashes the hell out of things, mic overload, preamps overload—it is total distorted mess. It sounded great. Kept it.
A guitar player had to cut a solo part. I snuck into the studio and totally cranked up his amp. He rolled up his guitar volume as I punched in and surprise, surprise! Everything exploded in feedback. The result was wonderful. Kept it.
Have the singer sing while screwing with their headphone volume.
After you complete a mix, go through and click randomize on every plug-in you can. Record that, then mix it with the other mix. Use the randomize buttons in general.
Use outboard or plug-ins designed for one thing somewhere else. Put vocal processors on bass. Use drum presets on guitars. Put guitar pedals on everything.
I had a dog named Buster I used to bring to recording sessions all the time. I did one series of sessions where I just decided I would always try to record my dog. So we had a mic set up and every now and then I would hold him in front of the mic and get him to growl and bark and make noises. Sometimes it was really cool and we kept it. It only had to work once or twice, in a long fade out or something or during a guitar solo.
Best Happy Accident Ever
Tommy James and the Shondells had a hit in 1967 called I Think We’re Alone Now. Huge record.
They were in the studio to work on their next single, and the engineering staff went to play I Think We’re Alone Now in the control room, but the tape was on the reel-to-reel wrong, and the song played backward.
And they liked it, and wrote their next single based on it. They named the song Mirage, which is bizarrely appropriate. And it became the follow-up single to I Think We’re Alone Now.
We made a quick recording so you can hear how these two songs are really the same thing.
The Luke Law
I came up with this as a way of forcing happy accidents and keeping my momentum up while painting. It works for anything though.
The Luke Law is: do the next thing that comes to your head no matter what, no matter how stupid it might be, no matter how destructive it might be. The Luke Law believes that going forward is better than sitting there thinking.
As an example, I was working on a painting and got stuck. And what popped into my head was, “Paint the person red.” I sighed, because I knew this would probably wreck the painting, but the Luke Law must be obeyed. Promptly. So I painted the figure red, and promptly wrecked the painting. In a desperate attempt to fix it, I started painting over the red figure with white. The net result was a strange-looking white figure with bits of red showing through all over. And it looked really cool. Kept it.
Go make some accidents this week. Come up with some ideas and execute them in the physical world. Get out of your head.
Warm regards,
Luke