Blog: Rediscovering The Joy In Your Passions

This past week I had the utter privilege of spending some time with a few fellow artists & friends in Arizona at a songwriter’s retreat put on by the Songbird Society out of Adelaide, Australia. This camp was centered entirely around two concepts; tension & release.

The first point of interest, tension, was meant to help us as songwriters find the points of tension within our creativity that keep us from creating to our fullest. We each were given a series of prompts at the beginning of the day, after a morning yoga session, & asked to think about them throughout the day & bring them with us into the sessions we were given. The rules were simple regarding the songs themselves. Whoever’s idea the song started as had right of first use. The sessions were also meant to be open, honest, & vulnerable & established a safe space for expression & transparency. The songs that each of the two groups of writers produced were organic & an amazingly natural flowing process of creation. When snags were reached, they were easily talked & worked through without allowing the session to get bogged down & turned into a grueling task. The art that was created in these sessions was free, personal, & inspiring.

Following our sessions on the first day we sat down to engage in symposium. Each of us took turns discussing the areas of our lives that we felt carried tension, be it personal or creative. From there we were prompted to see ways forward through our lives & creative process that would allow the alleviation of said points of tension.

The second day focused on release. We started the day with a five AM double black diamond hike up the side of a mountain & then spent the remainder of the morning in ease while contemplating the prompts we were given post hike regarding the release of our points of tension. Sessions took place in the early afternoon after we’d regained our energy & footing & were once again an inspiring free fall into the depths of what it is to be a songwriter & to create amazing, personal yet still widely appealing, art. Both sets of sessions ran into often outright painful points of tension for the focal songwriter but both groups worked through them in a loving & understanding manner. The evening concluded with us showcasing our songs & once again engaging in symposium.

On the third day we shifted course a little. We ended up setting two rooms in which the producers/engineers on the track were given a prompt that would put them out of their comfort zone, allowing them to experiment through trial & error in an affirming & encouraging space. The writers for each of these rooms were not set but instead kind of ended up happening by happenstance & once more, beautiful, innovative art was created!

My point in bringing up my week & telling the base story around it is not to showcase or showoff how great & amazing a creative experience I was privy to, but instead to encourage. You see we all left this week (there were more days that just the three where we did other engaging & creative pursuits) with a new found sense of purpose, with a newly established spark of creativity. Songbird took a group of individuals, a lot of whom knew each other very well, & fostered an experience that expanded & fine tuned not only our interpersonal relationships but also our creative spirits. We all left the camp with hope & optimism & a joy for the art of songwriting that I personally had lost.

We’re all led to do the things we do out of passion. We’ve all heard the saying “do what you love & you’ll never work a day” but so many of us end up resenting the thing we started doing out of love & enjoyment because it becomes work & loses all sense of fun. I know I can speak to this personally by saying that a lot of the writing rooms I’ve left in the past few years have left me almost with an icky feeling stirring around my gut, because that love of what was being done & what was being created was absent. Now, that’s not to say all writes were like this but there was truly something different about the writing that was being done & the spirit in which it was being created that made me feel reborn.

So often we go into our work with the purest intentions & somewhere along the way lose sight of the reason behind why we started it in the first place. I mean, to be honest, I was really starting to question whether or not this was something I even wanted anymore because of how grueling it had become. I knew, deep inside that the answers was ‘of course’ but I could for the life of me find that ember that was still holding on to the hope of what I love doing.

How does this apply to you? Well I ask you, when was the last time you felt inspired & in love with the work that you do? When did you lose that & why? These are not things that are irreversible, you got into the rut somehow & there’s always a way out whether that lies in the past or in moving forward towards the future. In all honesty, I spoke to my father about the week & he said something rather jarring to me. I said that for once writing doesn’t feel like work, it feels free & creative & fun. To which he replied that work should feel like work, that’s what it is. Which then led me to this blog because I know so many people who are miserable doing the things they set out to do with the purest intention because they’ve lost the spark that brought them to where they are now.

Your work shouldn’t be draining, especially if it’s something you love doing. It should be life giving & inspiring & if you find that isn’t the case I would challenge you to take the time to figure out why. To find your points of tension & release them so that you can spend the time living in a place that brings you happiness & satisfaction, not just potential profit & gain.

As always, much love to you all,

-C

Blog: Forcing Creativity

As songwriters the message that we seem to have drilled into our heads over & over again is that in order to be successful in the writing realm, or in music in general, you have to be able to force creativity at any given moment. While on the surface I don’t entirely disagree, you do need to “show up” to do your job. You need to be able to walk into a room, especially when writing for a major artist, & pull a quality song out at the drop of a hat. It’s a scenario I am sure a lot of us are familiar with even in the non-musical world, the need to tap into the creative on the fly, but something I’ve found that is next to impossible to get on demand is that of inspiration.

Inspiration & creativity often go hand in hand, especially where the art world is concerned. It tends to hit like lightning & fade quickly. The trick of striking while the iron is hot can be a difficult one. Inspiration, unfortunately, often comes exclusively from life experience. It comes from living, failures or successes in love, stories that invigorate you, adventures that flex your sense of wonder, etc. Inspiration is not something that can be faked or forced & when an attempt is made to do either it ends up being abundantly apparent.

I’m going to once again refer back to a writing camp that my dear friend Leena Regan put on, if you’ve read any of my other blogs you’ll know that bring up often. In said camp Leena really hammered in the point that if, in a writing situation, you feel like you’re pulling teeth, stop immediately. It’s a mistake I’ve made in the past for sure & I’m sure a lot of us who create have made as well. The problem that ends up arising when you force your way through painful creation is that it completely saps the joy out of creation. Your piece ends up being soulless, heartless, lifeless. It ends up being a stand in that you lock in a drawer & never look at again.

I was discussing this very topic with a producer friend of mine, Joshua Gleave, last night! We were both talking about how we feel it’s a complete & utter waste of everyone in the room’s time to try & juice a song from the pulp of your brain if the spark just isn’t there. He said that he’s had writes where he & his co-writer got a verse & chorus into a song, both looked at each other & immediately said “nah,” calling the session. I’ve definitely had the same, but I’ve often found that going from a different angle ends up igniting the fire of inspiration.

I was in a write back in October with my friend Frye & she & I had the exact same experience as Josh did above; we got a verse & a chorus in & were like “nah.” Nothing wears your creative brain out faster than writing something you’re not feeling at all or creating something you have no attachment to & know will end up going nowhere. We did end up getting a song out of that session but it was one that ultimately we both felt incredibly drawn to & inspired by.

I ended up getting burned out of writing for this exact reason. I stopped looking forward to writing because it felt like a chore, & not a fun one at that. I had always been told what I mentioned at the top of this post, write to write so you can write more & write better. I don’t disagree that we should flex our creative muscles on the daily, no argument there, but I don’t believe that has to take the form of torturous forced “mea culpa” style “inspiration.” You can be creative in other ways! Greet your day with some object writing, paint, draw, dance, sing, play an instrument, do something that gets the neurons of the left side brain firing. You can flex & maintain your creative muscles by broadening its definition for yourself & simply creating to create.

I’m sure that any of you in the virtual audience who are songwriter currently reading this can attest to the following; the best songs I’ve ever written were those I never planned to write & most of the time they were those that just came pouring out of me like lava. In addition to that, most of the best co-writes I’ve had were those where we’d either given up on writing, taking the pressure off, or had just been goofing around. Pressure, to me, brings instant death to inspiration.

Please, please, please don’t burn yourself out creatively the way I did! Find new ways to integrate your art into your life, to get the juices flowing. The songs will come when it’s time for them to, I promise, but you must be persistent & patient with them!

As always my loves, have a fantastic weekend!

-C