Opinions and The Creative Process…

Posted by admin on April 16th, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Last saturday I plugged in an old external hard drive and found 2.2 hours of old recordings of songs, song ideas, lyrics etc on my computer from a long time ago.  I eagerly cleared my schedule for the evening and uploaded the entire 2 hour playlist on my ipod thinking that there had to be some gold to find.  I then spent the next two hours being incredibly humbled by how truly terrible I was…how off pitch my voice was…how bad my songs were and I couldn’t get over the fact that at that time in my life…I actually might have considered what I was doing to be good/presentable to other people.  

I listened to a song that I remembered playing for my music class about a girl who had large breasts.  The song was intended to be a joke about how men will do anything for a girl that has a nice rack, and I arranged the song in a mixed time signature of rotating bars of 6/8 and 9/8 thinking that I was indeed, the most clever person on the face of the planet.  Not only was I making a humorous societal reference and commentary on the ridiculousness of men and our fascination with large breasts, but I was also doing so in a complex arrangement of mixed measures and odd meters.  Man was I clever in my mind…

However, when I listened to it the other day…not only could I not help myself from laughing at how truly awful the song was…the lyrics were and my voice was (not to mention out of tune) but also at how difficult it was to follow because the meter kept changing.  In fact, it didn’t sound like the meter kept changing…it sounded like I couldn’t play and sing at the same time and thus, was having trouble holding a steady rhythm. 

And I got me thinking about my “opinions.”  My very “intense” and “important” opinions about things…life, music, quality of art, people etc…and how fast and hard I hold onto them. It also got me thinking about others opinions…and how people, not all people, but A LOT of people totally FREAK out when their opinions about things are challenged.  Have you ever been in a conversation or around a conversation where somebody’s opinion is being challenged as “wrong” and it’s like they are fighting to their death to try to defend the fact that they are actually not wrong?  Almost to the point where it feels like they are defending their life? 

Here are some examples from my own life…

-When I was 15, I was OBSESSED with Dave Matthews Band.  In fact, I ONLY listened to Dave Matthews…and pretty much refused to listen to any other music because “nothing compared” in my mind.  I learned almost every DMB song on the guitar and would spend countless time on DMB chat forums.  Anybody that didn’t like Dave Matthews was clearly a moron…

-When I was in college…Dave Matthews sucked…I hated Dave Matthews and couldn’t believe that I was ever so into him and that I went to 18 live DMB shows.  I used to make fun of people who liked Dave Matthews and who would cover Dave Matthews songs…

-When I was in college…John Mayer couldn’t have been more of a cheese ball

-Now, I love John Mayer…and Dave Matthews.  Now I think they are both amazing.  

-When I was a sophomore in college, the only music that was really “good” was either free jazz, be-bop jazz, modal jazz, mozart, avant gaurde or phish.  Anything that was “in” was lame in my book, and anything that was “out” was not only the shit…but also the only kind of music that could really be “respected.”  Anybody that didn’t agree with me was a moron.  I listened to Coltrane’s “Sun Ship” a lot and the idea of writing a song under 5 minutes was a joke to me.  Everybody told me my songs were too long…I told myself they were idiots and didn’t understand good music.  

-When I was 14 years old…I hated my mother

-When I was 21 years old…I hated my father

-In my life now…I love and respect and honor my parents in a way I never thought I would.  They are so important to me and I am so grateful for all that they are and everything they have done for me.  I deeply love my parents.  

-When I was in high school…I was an avid athlete, never smoked during season and hated sissy and wimpy feminine men…and disrespected pot heads.  

-When I was 21, I hated “macho men” and wore make up and sarongs and felt like the only way to be a real man was to embrace one’s feminine side and smoke weed.  

-I never wrote love songs cause they were cheesy

-Now I hope that one day, I will write the perfect love song…

-I didn’t like to be friends with girls when I was in high school

-I didn’t really like to be friends with men my first two years of college when I was in college

-Photorealistic art was stupid after impressionism…why would anybody want to paint a photorealistic piece of art after Monet???

-Jackson Pollock was the greatest artist ever

-Matisse was the greatest artist ever

-Picasso is so over-rated

-Picasso was the greatest artist ever

-When I was 12 years old…I wore jeans the size of an elephants hoove.  I could literally stick my head in one of my pant legs…

-When I was 19 I thought people who used the word God were stupid and religious and didn’t understand anything about real spirituality or how the world really works.

-When I was 23, I would cry sometimes at the love and joy that would overflow in my heart when I heard the word God mentioned…

and on…and on…and on…

My question here and the point of this post however is how are we served by our opinions?  When I am 72 years old God willing…will my opinions about life be totally different?  The answer is obviously yes…but then why feel as if my opinions about things matter so much now?  Why hold on to them as a defining aspect or characteristic of my life…of my foundation…and more importantly…how do they serve my creative process?????

I didn’t want to write love songs…I didn’t want to write pop songs…I wanted to be like dave matthews…I wanted to write complex and “out” be-bop lines…etc. etc. etc. and WHY?  

My feeling is that my opinions about music…about what is “good” actually hinder my creative process rather than serve it.  How? 

Because what I have learned over the past year is that creativity has the most liberty to flow when there is nothing obstructing it.  Think of it like a river.  My opinions about music, about life, about what was “right” were like little mini-damns in my river.  When I release those opinions…my river flows.  Creativity is greater served from a place of empty space…so that it has room to arise…rather than from a place of preconceptions, false beliefs, and bottomless opinions.  

However…one could also play the devils advocate and say that if it weren’t for my old opinions…and my creative attempts before that didn’t work…then I wouldn’t have learned from my mistakes and be in the place that I am now…

This is also true…So my question remains slightly unanswered…

No matter what, as human beings, it is natural to have opinions about things…but as far as the creative process is concerned, when those opinions turn into judgments…we enter a more dangerous territory.   An opinion becomes a judgement when it starts to be held as something finite.  The opinions I listed above had become judgments.  

We can’t escape forming opinions…especially as artists regarding art.  However, they should be taken as seriously as the weather….present for the day, but in a constant state of change and flux.  Otherwise, we do not allow our creative to flow in the manner that it can.  

…in my opinion that is  

Comments always welcome…

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Martin Sexton and “It” Moments: Musings on “Artistic Grace”

Posted by admin on March 25th, 2009 | 2 Comments »

I saw Martin Sexton, one of my favorite singer /songwriters live at the “Belly Up” in my hometown of Apen CO two nights ago.  I had seen him before at the Gathering of The Vibes Music festival three summers ago performing to a crowd of 10,000+ people.  There were about 300+ people at the Belly Up.  This was not a good show for Martin it seemed.  I could be wrong, maybe he felt differently, but to me, it was sub-par.  The sound was surprisingly off for the tiny venue and for some reason, the sound-man didn’t EQ his vocals correctly so you couldn’t hear or decipher any word that was sung.  All of his songs ended up sounding like scat solo’s over whatever progression he happened to be playing.  I am a huge Martin Sexton fan, but the show was mediocre and I actually left in the middle of it.

Now, I don’t believe that this was in any way shape or form, Martin’s fault…or actually had anything to do with him at all.  Some things are out of the artists control, and in this case, the Belly Up didn’t do it’s job in providing top quality sound.   Perhaps another reason why it was hard to hear Martin, in addition to the sound quality was because a little over half of the crowd on the packed dance floor were chatting it up…talking at the top of their lungs, while Martin, onstage alone was falsettoing, bellowing and belting over the chatter.  I am not sure if he noticed, or even cared.

There is an open-mic everynight in Aspen at the Crystal Palace Grill. It is an amazing open mic…usually packed with people and each artist gets to play three songs. I have been performing every Monday night give or take for the past three-ish months and every-time I have performed I have left feeling somewhat discouraged by the fact that during my performances…as well as during all the other artist’s performances, there are sometimes a select few, sometimes a majority of people…again, chit chatting over the music.

I walk home and think about my musical heroes…about the greatest singers of all time, and wonder if they too, would be greeted by a mixture of listening ears, and chattering mouths.  I wonder if Aretha stepped into the Crystal Palace Grille, but nobody knew who she was…just another unknown Aspen local playing a song or two…and she started fucking WAILING, if there would still be somebody talking…and I don’t know the answer…but if I were to guess, I would say that yes, people would still talk.

The whole point of these two juxtapositions…Martin’s performance and the open mic at the Crystal Palace is to address this idea I have had of what a “successful” performance should entail.  I’ve had it in my mind that everything falls short of success unless you, the performer are SO captivating, SO mesmerizing and SO powerful, that literally nobody has the choice but to shut the fuck up.  I realize that this is quite a ludicrous concept, which is why I am writing about it, but I think it spawns from the few and far between magical moments I have felt at some very special concerts I’ve gone to.

For example, when I saw Martin perform at the Gathering of the Vibes in front of 10,000 people…FAR less intimate than the Belly Up…I felt an “it” moment.  I felt like I was right there with him, connected to him, his openness and vulnerability…deeply rooted in what he was singing about.  Even though he was far away from me on a huge stage and I was surrounded by masses of people I could still feel his connection with both the audience and his music, almost as if I was in his living room.  As a concert goer, and as a performer myself, nothing comes close to comparing to these “it” moments, and thus, I think I have started to associate successful performances with whether or not I feel “it” so to speak. These moments feel objective to me…It’s like everybody in the audience starts breathing together when “it” happens.

However, after seeing Martin Sexton up close and personal, in a room of bad sound and chattering fans, I realize what an extreme practice of insanity it is to feel that a successful performance entails a silent crowd and or undivided attention.  Did Martin Sexton fail two nights ago?  Was his performance a failure because me, a huge fan, left because the sound was bad and the audience wasn’t giving him their undivided attention?

The question is obviously rhetorical, but it points to the main issue of this post, and also, one that I feel every artist can identify with to some degree.  On a personal level, I truly believed that my open mic performances were failures to some degree or another because I had failed to capture the attention of the entire room, for the entirety of my performance.  Perhaps I am both arrogant enough to assume that I am deserving and commanding enough of such attention, and also insecure enough to require such attention to feel good about my performance, but either way…my artistic grounding is no doubt, off-skew.

I realize now after watching Martin Sexton perform a less than mind-blowing performance, that as artists, we must connect to something deeper than the need for “it” to happen…on a regular basis…or at our beck and call.  Most have felt those “it” moments in some form or another, but when I really think about them…I realize that I  must not mistake them for anything other than artistic versions of Grace, or Divine Intervention.  I understand that I can
only do my diligence to practice being as open and vulnerable as possible in my expressions, and the more I practice opening in my day to day life, the more frequently I will be open enough for Grace to enter, but I cannot force it or even take it personally because Grace is impersonal.

…Impersonal because I never feel worthy of Grace.  In the instances when Grace does come into my heart,
I know that it’s not because I have done something to deserve it…but instead because I have either consciously or serendipitously allowed myself to relax enough into my “essence” so that Grace has room to enter.
 In other words, when I do nothing but relax into the “deep river” (to avoid using religious terms) that is always flowing within me and within everybody, and I am not blocking it’s flow with my thoughts or my habitual patterns, or more importantly, my need to force things to go “my way”…then Grace has the room to take over and “it” happens. 

This is what I believe happens when musicians talk about being “played” by the music, rather than playing the music themselves.  But, after watching Martin Sexton — an artist who on a regular basis creates “it” moments, give a mediocre performance due to sound issues etc… I understand now that as artists, in order to keep our sanity, we must be connecting to something beyond our desire for “it” to happen…especially in our internal measuring of our successes and failures…

What that new connection is…I have to think more about (any suggestions, please offer a comment) …because up until this point, my gauge of fullfillment has been based on whether “it” happens or not…  Now I feel I must gauge things very differently, and when those magical moments do happen, simply be grateful and maintain my connection to my artisit process…in whatever form it presents itself.