Waiting for the Fairy Nymph
There are people, usually the most obnoxious breed of artists or musicians, who will tell you that inspiration is just something that kind of comes out; a mystical, unexplainable phenomenon which some people have the gift of channeling; a moody little fairy nymph that flitters about your shoulders but disappears if you try to catch it. I believe that this is all a big lie, propagated by “artists” to make them seem much cooler than they really are.
Here’s why: in a typical month, I get thrown into a staggeringly wide variety of musical situations; I am often asked to contribute original musical material (solos) on the spot, with no chance to prepare beforehand. Each note becomes history the moment after it’s played so editing and rethinking are out of the question. Self-critique is also unhelpful, since mistakes are impossible to go back and fix. It's basically ready, set, go and don't look back - no time to wait for the fairy nymph, no time for writer's block, no time to consider the infinite possibilities and choose the perfect notes and absolutely no time to doubt yourself. You might finish a solo and feel satisfied or even shocked at your own brilliance or... you might feel as one does when waking up after a night of heavy drinking next to someone you'd imagined was much, much more attractive. The shame. Did I really do that? Deep breath.
But whether the results are good or bad, inspiration happens for one reason and one reason only: because it has to. After all, when you’re put on the spot what other choice is there?
Ask me to take a solo, point your finger at me and I'll take a solo. But ask me to compose a piece, give me unlimited time to get lost inside the swirling storms of shiny musical bits inside my head and I usually won't even get started. Oh, I'll plan to start. I might sing some melodies in the shower or tinkle a few notes on the piano, deluding myself into believing that I'll write it down later once a really good idea hits, but start I will not. And even if I did start, trying to compose music can be like walking towards infinity, moving forward but never getting any closer to the end. To use a different analogy, if I had a long, unspecified time to cook dinner and at the end of the day I hadn’t made something tasty, it would be a huge let down whereas if I only had a half hour and threw together something that tasted halfway decent, I'd be thrilled. If given too much time to think, the temptation is to wait around for a fairy nymph. Thus, improvising a solo is easy and composing a piece is really, f--king hard.
After a long hiatus away from the painful endeavor of composing, I recently decided that it was time to write some new music. The first obvious step was to set a deadline. So I booked time at a rehearsal space two weeks in advance and called several musician friends to come read through the new music once it was done. I even made an agreement with one of these friends that we'd each have to have a new piece finished by the specified date. That way there was no backing out.
Then I did what I always do: procrastinated for as long as possible.
Finally, with the deadline looming, I began to think through what I wanted the piece to be and what I definitely didn’t want it to be. I considered moods and feelings, time feels and grooves and spent some time improvising melodies for each, jotting the best ones down and eventually finding ones that I liked and wanted to work with. Giving yourself something to work with is usually the hardest part. My old roommate used to say that you can carve a giant piece of shit into something pretty but it still has to start out as shit.
So the next day, I spent several hours just hammering it out and refining it. I'd play a phrase and try to hear in my mind what should come next. If you've ever played the game Simon you understand how this works. Push the green button, then green and red, then green, red, blue... and pretty soon you've got something kind of impressive. After hours of adding phrase upon phrase I was able to create something that made my spine tingle a little (always a good sign) and with the combination of hard work and the certainty that not finishing would lead to extreme embarrassment, I was able to get it done. And I’m happy to report that what I came up with actually didn’t suck at all.
This may sound like some kind of new age cliché but life is all about inspiration. Whether you are an “artist” or not inspiration, like life, happens every second of every day. You play the role of the soloist on the band stand, creating your journey as you go because you took the gig and have no other choice. Every conversation, every decision and every “creation” happens by way of the same force, necessity. It does some good to remember that the world’s most creative people are not particularly special, they’ve simply given themselves more urgent deadlines. You can bet that the “artists” whose work you love have a giant pile of failed pieces and false starts in their closets (or garbage cans) which they’d just as soon forget about. If you think about it, even our DNA is just a long string of artistic decisions that got made because they had a nice, firm deadline – so in this sense, we are literally made from inspiration. But as special as this might make us feel, we also all have a deadline and the fairy nymph won't come unless you make her, so... you know, get to work.
