Day 7: Alicia Keys and Melodies
I felt different today. Last night, the fingernails of self-doubt and self-hate were creeping toward my jugular, trying to get full fingers gripping. To head that off, I decided my schedule needed a shift. The Artist’s Way came first thing in the morning for two hours. I’m on Week 2 which is about recovering a sense of identity. One of the weekly exercises is to read the Basic Principles of creativity that Julia Cameron shares at the start of the book. I’ll copy some of the most pertinent ones for my mental state today:
-Creativity is the natural order of life. Life is pure energy: pure creative energy
-Creativity is God’s gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God.
-It is safe to open ourselves up to greater and greater creativity
That last one seemed written for me. It often feels dangerous and unnatural for me to create because my mind immediately goes to my own imagined lacks – lack of knowledge, lack of ability, lack of experience, lack of interesting brain function.
Today I had to practice keeping my brain focused on what is already there rather than what is missing. My friend Joel has a line that I utilize as a mantra often: You already have everything that you need. I’ve missed out on so many hours of songwriting and singing over my life because of the mindset of lack – “I need to have a vocal coach before I can sing.” “I need to learn music theory before I can write anything.” “I need to have more life experiences before I can write.” Even though I know that there is a lot I need to learn in order to write more advanced music, I really am trying to not allow those thoughts to enter and distract me when writing this month.
Thinking of myself as a part of nature, and inherently connected to creativity as a creation myself, helped me. I spent a lot of time on the roof with my plants – scanning their dirty beds to check for newcomers from the ether regions. Watering them and paying attention to them made my life important to me today.
It’s been a sort of pleasant byproduct that as I get on YouTube to find different vocal exercise videos, I catch suggested videos in my peripheral and, sometimes, meander over there. Today, I watched one of Alicia Keys reading a passage from her book More Myself. She was talking about the difference between a mindset of lack versus a mindset of abundance. It was a very similar concept to Dr. Joe Dispenza’s about thinking and feeling abundance in order to bring it to yourself. That was another time-marker today that assisted me to stop going to a mindset of lack.
Last night, I was writing down memories to fill my “Hall of Champions” – another exercise in The Artist’s Way where you keep detailed accounts you remember of people who supported you creatively and affirmations you have received. One of the people I wrote about was my guitar teacher when I used to live in Lancaster, Don Peris. [He and his wife have a band called “The Innocence Mission” – they make beautiful work.] And I recalled how I used to write when I was taking lessons with Don and showing him my work weekly. I typically would write the lyrics out, like a free-standing poem, write the guitar part separately to focus solely on instrumental embellishments, then stitch them together with the melody. I’d eventually abandoned this method after an old bandmate told me it was evident my songs were written separately, and I should write lyrics/music simultaneously.
Upon reflection last night, after emotionally recalling my times with Don, I decided to try writing in that old way again. I had been trying to write simultaneously this past week, and all I was getting were mediocre lyrics and shoddy melodies. Up until today, I had been content thinking, “Well, at least I’m trying.” But after listening to Louise Goffin and Paul Zollo’s “The Great Song Adventure” podcast episode interviewing Sonny West, I was caught by Sonny saying you should write every song as if it was your best. He said:
What I want and what I get is two different things. But what I want is a song that people will know all over the country, all over the world. That’s what I’m looking for. Now, I don’t find it. But it’s there. I don’t want to just say, ‘I wrote 10 songs today’ . . . I don’t care to do that.”
That translated to me as self-belief. If you approach a songwriting session thinking, “Uuuuggghh, OK, I guess I’ll try to eke something out,” that’s an energy you’re putting forth into the quantum field that will yield the same apathy. But if you come to the session thinking, “OK, this is my next hit,” that’s a different energy entirely.
Another realization today was that in my writing times, I had completely been forgetting about/ignoring the Higher Power. Julia Cameron calls it “the Great Creator.” Whatever force and entity that is, I had been not treating it as a factor at all. The responsibility and stress and need were all on my shoulders. I realized how arrogant I had been acting in the writing process. So, I did as Julia Cameron had suggested, and put a sign on my keyboard that says: “Great Creator, I will take care of the quantity. You take care of the quality.” That idea of a conduit came again.
So, before beginning to write lyrics today, I prayed, asking for humility and courage and endurance. I prayed the Great Creator would speak through me to say whatever needed to be said. And the entire process felt different. It felt like staring something dead in the eye rather than passing by it swiftly, catching bare glimpses with peripheral vision. It felt like purpose and possibility. It felt like I was digging around, not skimming the surface. And it didn’t feel frightening, but rather, calming. Often when I’m writing, I feel like a failed version of that one writer who said he tries to scare himself into writing, rushing around his day, running his errands, and bashing into his study to get something down. I understand how that could work, but my method of that was resulting in laziness rather than heightened blood pressure and creative sparks.
I was really happy with the lyrics, although, immediately after writing them, I wondered, “What effect is this going to have on the world? Am I wasting my time?” But I reminded myself, “Self-healing is the best way to help others.” And as Sonny West put it, songwriting is a form of therapy.
When I began writing the instrumental, I didn’t throw myself blindly and sweatily into it. I picked a key that felt good for my range; I looked up a list of the most popular pop keys; I read an article about most typical chord progressions. My ego was screaming, “NO! You need to be ORIGINAL! Don’t do what everyone else does!” But I recalled Don saying, “Simplicity is best.” And instead of merely meandering around desperately for a melody, I plunked out Adele’s melody from “Someone Like You” in the key I was writing in, trying to feel the repetitions and the attractive intervals, trying to comprehend what a good melody is.
Today didn’t just feel vague and formless. It had elements of formlessness with clear-cut decisions, creating my form for the process for creation.
I need to take a shower and shave. That will feel good. Melody will be a focus for me tomorrow.
Night xxx
