Yeah But What Does Leonard Cohen Think?

“If I knew where inspiration came from, I would go there more often.”

-Leonard Cohen

I’ve been thinking about this quote lately, and about how difficult and insane it is to be an artist, to do the practice of being an artist. I remember listening to an interview with Phoebe Bridgers where she talked about how she feels like she didn’t really write any of her songs, that she feels like she blacks out, goes into a fugue state, and then comes out again having no idea how she got there. 

And all she has left is the evidence of being in this different state – the song itself! I love that.

It takes a tremendous amount of openness and trust in the universe to be a songwriter. And persistence. I’ve written a bunch of songs I’m really proud of, and still, actually just last night, I was sitting at the piano and there was nothing happening. My emotions were a tangle, a mystery, something to be avoided if I’m being completely honest, and all of the chords and melodies and lyrics were boring and tedious and over-familiar. 

And then I’m going to look this failure in the face and try again today.

Because it’s this going to the well over and over that is the only way to get the water. Sit down, try to write a song, fail, try not to get lost in a story of what a horrible fraud/loser/failure you are (this one is tough for me!), repeat the next day. 

There is a part of me that thinks it is unbelievable that this is the only way. Can’t I somehow avoid this tedium and unpredictability and endless facing of endless failures — and just get to the good shit?

It takes a hardy soul and a patient mind to keep going back to a well that seems empty, that looks and feels and smells empty.

This well hasn’t seen water in 8000 years, says a gravely cowboy voice. He’s looking down too into this well that sits in the middle of the desert. He looks at me. A dusty wind blows.

Maybe it’s time to give up, his lined face says.

And yet, Mr. Cowboy, if I may be so bold, I am afraid that this is the only way.

What a drag and an amazing thing to have so little control over the outcome! In order to keep trying we have to hold such a deep feeling of faith that inspiration will come again.

So in that sense I guess despite what Leonard Cohen says above, we do and don’t know where inspiration comes from. We don’t know when it will come (will it be in 10 minutes? 10 weeks?) or in what form it will come (will it be a song about typewriters, loneliness, card games?), but we do know that it is only through consistently trying that the spirits of songs will want to come and speak through us. I think they’re always looking for a safe bet, you know what I mean? They’re like, oh, ok, they look like they have some follow-thru. They’ll do. Let the water flow!

What I Learned About Creativity From My Kids

“Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don't care if they lose it; they'll just make another one."

-Tom Waits, 2002, as quoted in GQ

The Self-Serious Artist

If you listen to my music even for a second you will immediately hear that I’m a little…self-serious, to say the least. There’s a part of me that wants to make sure I make something good or important. I know this is a big part of who I am. I know that more-often-than-not I must go to the depths of my soul and unearth my deepest truth in order to just write a damn pop song. I know this about myself. It keeps me engaged and interested and moved. But lately I’ve been thinking that the best moments in my music are when I’m the most childlike and free. Do you have this experience? I feel like this is true! I feel like the best moments are when the part of me that wants to prove my worth through song is too tired, or forgets, or is busy with something else, and the most-excited, most-child-like parts of me come out to play.

Let me backtrack for a second.

It is my experience that inspiration is a life force that wants to be known through us, that inspiration is a spirit or spirits that are looking for humans who will make them and their thoughts and feelings manifest in some way in reality. Songs are spirits looking for a songwriter. And it is also my experience that the friendlier we are, the more-open we are, the more-likely it is that these spirits of inspiration will want to do this communication through us. And what’s more friendly and inviting than our most child-like parts?

This Is Where the Kids Come in

When my wife and I had kids – first a daughter and then a son 5 years later – it was very soon that I saw how they were always playing and making things: drawings of huge colorful mountains, or monsters with long, sharp teeth, furry lamas made of felt, clay sculptures of hearts, massive lego cities. And it was the way they made these things that was a revelation to me. They made them with utter concentration, with a spirit of pride and celebration, and then immediately forgot about them and moved onto the next thing. Let’s for a second take apart these 3 aspects.

Utter Concentration

I have memories of my daughter a few years ago, in her room, listening to calm, quiet indie folk, sewing little pink and purple llamas for hours. She’d be happy to talk and hang out, but only if it didn’t get in the way of her flow and focus. Or in the case of my son, all the time he’s making these truly amazing Minecraft buildings — huge architectural feats filled with secret doors, waterfalls, blossoming cherry trees — and he’ll be just hyper-focused on making these things for hours.

Pride and Celebration

This is where the parents usually come in. My daughter invites one or both of us into her room, and she describes everything that went into her lamas – all of the materials and creative decisions and time that went into it. What I love about these moments is that I can still hear in my heart the soft feeling of affection in her voice, the sound of care and pride. She loves these things she’s made. Or with my son, he’ll invite my wife or me to sit with him and his Nintendo Switch, and he’ll point out all of the incredible things he’s built. And it always really is so incredible. And he feels really good and proud of what he’s done, of how he tried to do a hard and complex thing and he achieved that hard and complex thing. Like, literally yesterday, he showed me this music studio he’s built in his Minecraft world, and how the piano that he’s designed plays the opening notes of “Never Gonna Give You Up” (a classic!). And when he showed me the incredibly elaborate mechanisms that had to go into that, it blew me away. We’re talking hours of time and Youtube tutorials to gain this level of mastery.

Immediately Forgetting and Moving On

This is maybe my favorite part. They so quickly just move on after making the things. They are not precious about what they create after a very short time. We have hundreds of their old art projects around the house, in drawers, in our basement, on our fridge and walls. They’re everywhere. And once the kids are done with what they’ve spent hours making – just for fun, for nothing else but the fun of it – they pretty much completely forget about it and move onto the next thing. There’s no angsty comparing and competing; there’s no hanging their self-worth on whether what they made is “good” or “bad.”

Watching my kids do this process hundreds of times tells me one thing:

Making things is our natural birthright. We are built in such a way that we love making things, celebrating what we’ve made, and moving onto the next fun thing. 

And all of this endless adult worrying and trying to control an uncontrollable thing (creativity and the outcomes of our creativity) is just a waste of time. It really is. In particular it’s wasting the time of all of the songs that want to get written through us. I’m learning this! I really am! I hope for you and your inner artist and for all the art that wants to get made through you, that you’re learning it too. :)

On The Unexpected Wisdom of Concussions

“I had a professor tell me once that there is, like…a lid at the top of your head and there’s a lid at about your solar plexus. And in order to be creatively fluid, you have to let things come in, and you have to let them flow out. And if one of those portals is blocked, you’re fucked.”

-Maggie Rogers, in a 2023 interview on the “Best Advice” podcast

I read that Maggie Rogers went to Harvard Divinity School and got her masters recently. This might seem like a surprising left-turn for her, but to me that makes perfect sense. At some point all musicians have to grapple with the fact that we don’t know where inspiration comes from and we don’t know when it’s going to show up again. And I do believe that if we want to continue on the artist’s way, we have to do some inner work around this. Because having so little control can be maddening.

Why is it that on one night there’s just this great, free feeling when we’re playing a guitar solo or writing a lyric, this feeling like there are no wrong notes, or the words just flow out effortlessly, and then the next night we try for the same thing and that free feeling is nowhere to be found?

Anybody who’s taking a crack at being an artist has to face this, even if they don’t want to. I didn’t want to.

Which brings us to my concussion.

Since I started writing songs back when I was 15, I’ve pretty much always written from the ground up, by which I mean I’d start with a beat, or a loop, or a chord progression, and then record all of that and then some more, and then only after a lot of the groundwork was laid would I begin to explore what the song was actually about. I think this might be how a lot – or maybe even most – songs are written these days. You just start fiddling around on your laptop with sounds and build a nice little bed, and then you write the “topline” after that. Which for me meant that the lyrics and story of the song were an afterthought. It was something I kind of hurried through at the last minute. And I’d been kind of in a rut for a couple years with this system.

Then in June of 2021, I got a pretty serious traumatic brain injury.

It’s a stupid story, but basically I was playing with my kids and jumped off a bed and wacked my head on a big slab of wood that was part of the structure of the house – and that big slab of wood turned out to be harder than my head was. So I got a concussion. One of the symptoms of my concussion was that I couldn’t look at screens without getting a terrible headache. Or read books. Or drive. And this went on for the better part of a year. 

Did I mention I couldn’t look at screens at all?

No making music the way I’d made music since forever, no watching Youtube or scrolling through social media. I couldn’t even focus my eyes to read a book! I had to take a 2-month break from my job as a therapist, and then after that I could only handle about 8 clients a week. 

It was like an enforced spiritual retreat. And it sucked. 

I suddenly had a tremendous amount of time on my hands that I couldn’t distract myself from. And I had to re-figure-out how to be a musician, which meant I had to learn how to write songs without a computer.

Boo-hoo, right? You mean I have to go back to how humans have written songs for thousands of years? But I’m telling you, it was tough! At first it was slow going. It had literally been me and a computer writing songs for 2 decades, and before that it’d been me and a 4-track or 8-track — and I didn’t own a 4-track or 8-track anymore! So I wrote a lot of bad songs on my guitar and piano. Many bad songs. I went deeper into my daily meditation practice. I did yoga. On the advice of my therapist, I started praying, which was very unusual for me (both of my parents are atheists; I’ve only been to church a handful of times, and always as a guest of friends or family). 

And then slowly, over several months, my mind started to settle.

I remember the first moment I noticed this. I was lying on the couch and listening to an audiobook, and both of the kids were gone. It was winter, and very quiet. And I heard the clicking-on of the forced-air heat from the basement. In our house there’s always a little click right before the hush of the warm air starts coming through the vents. And as I listened to that click, I thought to myself, wow, that sound is so peaceful.

And then, sometime later, after writing a whole bunch of not-good or just-fine songs, the character for a song came to me. Poof. Just like that. I suddenly knew who the character was, what he was like, how he talked, where he was, what his job was, and what he was going through. That had never happened to me before, ever. And I had no idea where it came from.

My prayers up until that point had been something like, god, tell me what to do, and I’ll do it: help me see how to be a better parent, and I’ll do it; help me see how to be a better husband, and I’ll do it; and (of course, you’ve read this far, so you know) help me see how to be a better musician, and I’ll do it.

And I learned it was all about figuring out how to get my mind still, and listening.

Duh, right? Particularly with music. How can I get better at this thing that is literally made of sound? I don’t know, maybe, listen? I’d been rushing past the most-important part.

So this song came. The main character and point of view, and the melody and words came shortly after. I’ll never forget it. A part of me – the part that wants to wrestle things to the ground, the part that is very worried about impressing everybody and being “good” and “doing things well,” the part that wants to rush through the listening part — just stepped aside and rested for a minute, while god or the universe or whatever just spoke through me, sending me the idea for this song.

I call it “god or the universe or whatever” because I’m not sure what to call it, but I do know this: it was not me. That’s the feeling. It was something coming through me, that was not me. Is it the best song ever written? No, that would be either “Think” by Aretha Franklin or “If I Told” by Courtney Marie Andrews or . But was it a huge leap forward for me as an artist? Absolutely. You can listen to it here.

I opened up a channel by clearing away the clutter of my mind, because I was forced to. God or the universe or whatever forced me to unscrew the cap on the top of my head and unscrew the cap on my belly, and only then did the songs start coming.

My concussion is all healed-up (thank you, Canadian concussion doctors!), but I will always, always be grateful for the wisdom that it taught me.

What Is Success? Jonathan Richman, Robert Smith, Superman, and Peter Gabriel Weigh In

“Well the girls would turn the color of the avocado when he would drive down their street in his El Dorado. He could walk down your street and girls could not resist to stare. Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole.”

-Jonathan Richman, “Pablo Picasso”

I’ve been thinking lately about why I make music, and particularly why I continue to make such hugely unsuccessful music.

Check out my Spotify stats; check out my Instagram followers; I’m not lying. I have been stupendously, completely, utterly unsuccessful, at least according to the metrics of how we normally define success in this late-stage capitalist dustbin, i.e. money made, influences had.

When I first convinced my parents to get me a guitar, I was 14, shocked that they would actually buy me one, and had my eyes set, clear as day, on becoming the next Robert Smith. I wanted to be dazzled by stage lights and moved to my soul by the righteous and melancholy sounds pulsating from the stadium speakers, all the while – equally important – being adored by super-hot goth girls, swooning and singing along from where they stood in the front row. Of course, I would also be deeply kind and gracious from my seat of incredible rockstar power too, obviously.

If you can’t already tell from my musical taste, back then, in the worst moments of my life, I was bullied pretty relentlessly. And at the best moments I was an outsider who felt very bad about himself. I needed a life raft. I was drowning.

When I was 9 or so I took up a comic book obsession. Superman was my favorite. I drew endless Supermans in my bedroom. I wanted to be a famous comic book artist, of course, but in my heart of hearts, really I just wanted to be Superman. I have a very clear memory of a fantasy I had: I was flying from high in the clouds down onto the black, hot playground macadam and saving my crush. She would be shocked and amazed and her hair would be flying in the wind and I would be seen as good, kind, and strong. I would be proud of who I was. And the girls would swoon and the bullies would back the fuck up.

Do you see it? The Robert Smith fantasy was just an extension of the Superman fantasy. A part of me held and still holds my musical ambitions as a way to heal and be triumphant and protected and safe and feel good about myself. No one would ever call me an “asshole,” right? It worked for Pablo Picasso, so why not me?

Problem: I have not gained the popularity of Pablo Picasso, or Robert Smith, or Jonathan Richman, for that matter.

I remember a therapist a long time ago asking what I wanted from my music. I said something like, “I want to be a brilliant and successful artist, obviously.” She looked at me, and smiled, and then for the rest of the session, we took that statement apart.

What does “brilliant” mean? Well, “brilliant”, for me, means full of light, full of brilliant illumination. Do I have moments like that in my musical process? Absolutely. Does that happen all the time? Absolutely not. But I’ll tell ya, when it does happen, I feel very joyful, and very clear. If you’re a songwriter or an artist, you know what I’m talking about. It feels very good. In its best moments, being creative feels somehow like shedding light on and bathing with love a long-neglected part of yourself, while simultaneously being visited by a spirit that is most-definitely not you. It’s like being a channel for healing energy.

What does “successful” mean? If I really think about it, for me “success” looks like a lot of things. It looks like a song just written that I really like, or a vocal take that feels really good and true to the character and tone of the song, or a mix that just sits so nicely, with warmth, balance, and clarity.

And all of these things I can control, sort of. I can at least put the time in and know that if I spend lots of moments doing all of these things, I will have more experiences that are “successful.” 

I remember a quote from Peter Gabriel I read a while back. It went something like, “People say how much they admire my work, and that’s very flattering, but really, if you work really hard at something for a year, you will get good at it.” 

It’s like success = time spent + more time spent.

Here’s something I can’t make happen: I cannot make more people like my music. This is the usual definition of success: lots of people liking what you do. And this lack of this particular kind of success is a problem for my childhood fantasy of becoming a musical Superman.

But here’s the thing: that fantasy got me through some hard fucking times. It was a life raft.

And here’s another thing: you have to leave the life raft behind when you reach the far shore. When you feel the warm sand on your feet, and you start to enter the jungle, it’s just an impediment to carry around a big, heavy raft.

In other words, like any fantasies, when we reach reality, it’s time to let the fantasies go, and thank them for how far they got you.