God Is A Coldplay Fan

Creating anything is difficult. Being faced with the blank page is intimidating. Art is mysterious. No one really knows where songs come from. In his most recent newsletter, Nick Cave wrote:

“My good friend, Chris Martin, once told me that when he needs a new song he asks the cosmos and God sends him one. Most of us lowly songwriters are not afforded such a largesse. I can only assume God is a Coldplay fan because from where I stand, God does not send songs, dispatch, deliver or gift them; or if He does, He’s sure not sending them to me.”

Emotional Dents

And when you finally get a song you ask yourself, “will anyone care about this?” “Is there anything here that people can relate to?” You never know if anyone will even hear it. Which is why you’ve got to be very tuned in with what moves you. Stephan Jenkins, Third Eye Blind frontman, says:

“I write from things that make an emotional dent on me. In whatever way that is — elated, rage, melancholy, longing, presence — whatever it is. Anything that makes a dent on me kind of goes through some matrix that eventually gets downloaded and picked up by my antenna. I start to tune it in and it’ll show up in melodies or rhythms. Or I’ll take a notebook and just write without asking myself why I’m writing what I’m writing down. That’s been a tool I’ve had for a very long time, so any word that I like, if I hear a word or a phrase, I just write it down without wondering. And then over time, it’s like the subconscious tells me what I’m thinking about.”

I recently covered Third Eye Blind’s “Losing A Whole Year” at a show in Austin:

Great Artists Are Great Workers​

This tool Jenkins talks about, receiving things on your antenna, capturing them and not asking questions, it’s what is required of any artist. Often times inspiration is actually just a function of the work that you put in. The 19th Century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:

“Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration, shining down from the heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects. All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.”

Speak To Their Souls

John Coltrane was a great worker, he had a finely tuned receiver. He practiced for 8 hours a day, endlessly studying music, performing in dim lit clubs every night in Philadelphia. His ability to transform what he felt into sound eventually shook audiences around the world.

“My music is the spiritual expression of what I am—my faith, my knowledge, my being…I think music can make the world better and, if I’m qualified, I want to do it. I’d like to point out to people the divine in a musical language that transcends words. I want to speak to their souls.”

What made Coltrane capable of this type of expression was the work that he put in. People see and hear the results. They don’t see the notebooks filled with wandering thoughts. The refinement and sharpening of your judgment. The thousands of hours spent learning the language. But that’s what it takes to speak to the soul.

Talk to you next week,

Dawson