It’s so much fun to have a new project or song or idea in my head. My brain desires to be captivated & chewing on something delicious as often as possible. As an Artist it’s important for me to have something in the works, always stirring & devising, arranging & producing, to be playing with sounds & words & textures just thrills me.

I like to do it as often as possible because it’s as necessary & satisfying as eating & sleeping & breathing. I also feel that it is as easy to jump into the creative flow, as it is to plug an AC cord into the wall outlet to get power.

There’s a need for a decision, then an action of doing & some patience & allowing & then there’s the muse hanging with me while I play with words or instruments or plans as to what to do with all those words & music ideas. The inspiration always shows up when I do. We’re connected. So are you.

It’s trust, it’s intuition, and it’s fun & repetition. It’s habit & then confidence and there is always another part of it all to work on, to enjoy, and to spend time with.

When Joni Mitchell couldn’t find a music or lyric idea she’d paint. When the painting felt uncertain she’d go back to music. I bounce around to different instruments, new song ideas, older unfinished ideas & whatever feels interesting to me.

Sometimes Artists are afraid of too much freedom & too many choices. But I find it fascinating how we can start off with a blank page & blank recording & out of the infinite choose pieces, begin a puzzle, realize a form & direction & theme & finish a lyric or melody or progression. I love making those choices, taking my ear by surprise & pleasing myself & by getting tickled by the joy of it all. You have to show up & start, narrow it down, decide & add to it till it’s done.

I usually finish a new song in an hr or less. The whole thing: chords, melody & lyrics. I started writing songs at 10 yrs old & have written over the years in every order, from many different starting points. I love finding new ways to jump into the creative playground & have a go at it. When I hear another writer’s habits & process I like visiting their approach to get into the creative place in a new way. So if one attempt isn’t as effortless I can try another.

Since July of ’09 I’ve written a whole cd’s worth of new songs that I’m very excited about. Most were brand new ideas. Rescuing & finally getting to use a stranded verse or chorus or riff from the past became 3 finished songs. To my own amazement the new finished bits fit so well they sounded like they belonged together all along and two were ideas that I had had hanging around a long time. One was 7 years old. One was 12 years old & now these bits are finished whole songs. Lyrically 2 songs needed more life experience to unfold before I knew what to say. Another song got over it’s “I don’t know what I’m going to be” by co-writing with a friend.

I had been releasing digital singles through 2007 & 2008. I would write, record & release it to itunes, boom, done. I was getting a kick out of making the picture sleeves for them, getting to use my photographs for each. I’d also been asking everyone, “Do you prefer to buy digital downloads or cds these days”? Everyone was about 50/50 on this and so I have just worked on a cd visual layout for all those singles plus 2 unreleased songs and the full length CD will be called, Playing With The Pieces.

I have been recording the basic tracks to all the new songs as I wrote them since last July & that cd will come out this year as well. I want to call it Blast of Love. It was a fun phrase & when I heard it, I instantly thought it would make a cool title for my next cd & it would also be a great title song. So I sat down & wrote a song called Blast of Love.

It’s play. It’s easy. It’s just picking up instruments & letting yourself fly. It’s playing with all those pieces & choices & picking the bits & parts you love best & putting them all together. It’s giving it time & space to get a new perspective & point of view & seeing if you still like what you hear and if not, asking what does this need? Even asking the song itself. “Song, what do you want? Tell me your bass line. What do you want me to say here? How should I end it?”

One time I just deliberately sat down with 3 new songs & said, ok endings, find them, because these aren’t going to fade out. They want definite endings & boom the ideas just came. You have to decide what you need & what’s missing so you can find the solution. You have to let yourself begin and continue & then finish. If you’re happy with it, it’s good.

If you’re hungry you find things that are edible to eat. If you have a destination desire you get in your car & get there. It’s the same with writing. If you want to write words, play with words, visit with them & see which ones describe what you desire to say. If you want to write harmony & melody you have to play with chords & melodies & get to know the emotional side of the frequencies you’re choosing. If you are moved by your choices someone else will genuinely be moved & they are your true listeners & fans. They get goose bumps when you do. If they don’t they may never be converted. Doesn’t matter. People who dig what you do are out there. Some prefer strawberry; some prefer chocolate it’s about natural connection & being heard on a cellular level. But you have to dig it first. Your own connection to your art is what matters most & allowing your self to have that connection every day keeps you sane, engaged & fulfilled.

Writers say to me they don’t have time & they haven’t been playing or writing or jumping into their art at all. Why not? You sleep & eat everyday. Why not let yourself have what you love? Even if you sketched, played, wrote for 15 min everyday you’d have more ideas to play with than piling up years of nothing & disappointment.

It takes 28 days to break a habit & 28 days to start a habit. Waiting around for bolts of lightning, “when inspiration strikes”, isn’t consistent enough for me. I don’t want to be so numbed to creative kindling that I have to be struck out of my regular life routine to catch a creative idea. I love being in it all the time. Staying warmed up & expecting keeps me receptive & eager & open & bolts of lightning happen every day & many times a day. There’s healthy respect that we need to have for the muse & when ideas do come I catch them on paper, recordings, videos & have a source to go back to if I’m in the middle of something else. Then when I am free to experiment & play with the pieces I have a starting place. The overwhelming infinite possibilities have been narrowed down; I have a new idea to run with.

I have videos on you tube about the creative process too. I can talk about it forever. It’s one of my favorite subjects. I believe it’s the life force I’m admiring so we all have it or we wouldn’t be breathing. Flow with it. Let it in to your every day experience instead of complaining. Show up. Invite the muse for tea & visit together. Stop being at odds with yourself. Splash, just make one. Nike, just do it, weave some wonder.

You feel terrible when you’re out of sync with yourself & a huge part of it for many creative people is they call themselves writers or players & never write or play. Deep down this bothers them big time. So change that. You’re the only one who can. Worse, they stop calling themselves writers & players & accept the tortured existence of being a creative human that has no outlet or art form. John Lennon said, “I can’t wake up you. You wake up you”.

YOU CAN

We have been taught that we need to work for a living. And that we keep the things we love to do as our hobbies.

Has it ever struck you that this is distorted and weird? Have you ever wondered whether you can do what you love and attract abundance while doing it?

The purpose of work is not to work at all – it is to express the Joy that you are through the activities of your mind and your body and your soul – to give you a means of expression of who you are and who you choose to be. It is not to create a dead-end life, a life of drudgery and sadness and disappointment – it is to create a direct experience of who you really are through the outflowing through you of the creativity and the talent that you are.

You will always attract abundance doing what you love – because doing what you love keeps you in a place of happiness, of gratitude, of waking up in the mornings looking forward to doing what you adore doing.

We have been taught that we earn money through work – let’s look at this – we do unhappy things, create unhappy lives, and then we expect that to bring us abundance – and not the salaries which we are paid, but real abundance. But – when you vibrate at a place of unhappiness, you attract unhappy things, events, occurrences, and you attract unhappy people who agree with your unhappiness and so it feels as if this is really what life is all about.

When you are happy you attract abundance.

When you are happy you make money.

When you are happy you bring to you what you need.

Always.

And so if you are working at a job that makes you unhappy, it defeats the whole purpose of what you call work.

You CAN do what you love and create your life. You CAN wake up in the mornings and expect what you need for that day to come to you magically, because you are magic, you are your dreams come true, you are what you want, what you have dreamed of.

You don’t have to spend your lives in drudgery. You can find out who you are, what you have to give, who you want to touch, and how to do it. You can find clarity on this.

The purpose of all this is for you to decide who you are – and your work expresses you.

Abraham- Hicks

You go forth from time to time, place to place, open & eager for all you can feast upon, dancing with words to have the resources to peal through for things to sing, songs to write, thoughts to share.

We’re asking you to trust in the Well-being. In optimism there is magic. In pessimism there is nothing. In positive expectation there is thrill and success. In pessimism or awareness of what is not wanted, there is nothing. What you’re wanting to do is redefine your relationship with the Stream. We do not ask you to look at something that is black and call it white. We do not ask you to see something that is not as you want it to be and pretend that it is. What we ask you to do is practice moving your gaze. Practice changing your perspective. Practice talking to different people. Practice going to new places. Practice sifting through the data for the things that feel like you want to feel and using those things to cause you to feel a familiar place. In other words, we want you to feel familiar in your joy. Familiar in your positive expectation, familiar in your knowing that all is well, because this Universe will knock itself out giving you evidence of that Well-being once you find that place.

— Abraham-Hicks

“Essentially, I want good company in my creative life, and I want to provide that to my fellow creators. I want to help other people love their work so that they keep going and give it the very best attention and skill they have, and I want that fostering in return. I want to make the most of my spark and enjoy the warmth and light of my friends making the most of theirs, too.” ~ Kate Chadbourne

What a fabulous way to say it! ~ L Pass

Given what we have since learned about life in the Nazi camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture — why would anyone bother with music? And yet even from the concentration camps we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

Music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pastime. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.

(Music) has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

Someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used cars. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

I expect you not only to master music, I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. The artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives. 

Elizabeth Gilbert is a superb author who’s voice & spirit I deeply enjoy. She has the intelligence, humor & playfulness combination that seriously tickles me. Here she talks about all of us & the creativity we use & the courage it takes to show up everyday & do the work that we were put on this earth to do. Her novel, Eat Pray Love is being made into a movie with Julia Roberts.
Elizabeth Gilbert – On Genius

Once you get a feel for being submerged in music & in your self created life nothing compares. It’s always getting better & hard to go back.