Ryan (of the Unswept) keeps threatening to write about the Lawnmower Theory of Songwriting, which posits that you'll come up with your best ideas when your hands are otherwise occupied and you have no way to write anything down. I rarely find myself mowing, but quite a few songs have presented themselves while I ride my bike. It's possible we need a bit of resistance to figure out which ideas are strong.
This week I finally finished the lyrics for "C'est la guerre," an idea that has been trying to happen for several years. I wrote last month about the process of clarifying a messy draft via a second longhand draft, a step that seems just terribly inefficient and inconvenient. What if you work from one notebook page to another, and then have to consult your French dictionary, and then run the lyrics past your Francophone friend to double-check? I regret to inform you that these obstacles seem to improve the writing even more.
I have a suspicion about why: many lyrics involve making the unconscious conscious, putting words around something our senses experience in an instant, giving the slower conscious mind a logical grasp of what instinct already comprehends. So the entire lyrical process is one of slowing down, smashing words together like flint rocks to help the duller wit feel the fire the body knows.
I have a suspicion about why: many lyrics involve making the unconscious conscious, putting words around something our senses experience in an instant, giving the slower conscious mind a logical grasp of what instinct already comprehends. So the entire lyrical process is one of slowing down, smashing words together like flint rocks to help the duller wit feel the fire the body knows.
(That idea came to me, naturally, while I was wrist-deep in rhubarb and sugar for a rehearsal pie.)
We've all been talking a lot about what ChatGPT means for the arts. There is a large amount of healthy (and justified) resentment that tech bros with only a superficial understanding of art are wrecking industries and careers that have taken lifetimes to build. Of particular offense is the idea that AI can remove all the cumbersome work from the process of creation.
At the risk of sounding too paradoxical, the work is the work. All of this is ultimately concerned with the anguish of being finite beings who can comprehend infinity but never experience it, who must exist within painfully brief stretches of time and try somehow to make meaning out of the inevitable end. Remove the end, and you remove the meaning. Remove the process of reconciling form to intent, and you remove the art. (To me, this is akin to what Clarke was getting at in "The Nine Billion Names of God"—which perhaps more tech bros ought to read.) So I can't trust anything that promises to make the process too easy. Of course I resent the inconveniences. But I seem to need them.
We've all been talking a lot about what ChatGPT means for the arts. There is a large amount of healthy (and justified) resentment that tech bros with only a superficial understanding of art are wrecking industries and careers that have taken lifetimes to build. Of particular offense is the idea that AI can remove all the cumbersome work from the process of creation.
At the risk of sounding too paradoxical, the work is the work. All of this is ultimately concerned with the anguish of being finite beings who can comprehend infinity but never experience it, who must exist within painfully brief stretches of time and try somehow to make meaning out of the inevitable end. Remove the end, and you remove the meaning. Remove the process of reconciling form to intent, and you remove the art. (To me, this is akin to what Clarke was getting at in "The Nine Billion Names of God"—which perhaps more tech bros ought to read.) So I can't trust anything that promises to make the process too easy. Of course I resent the inconveniences. But I seem to need them.
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