Enjoyed reading this.
Just think commerical song instead of art.
Same rules apply.
https://blog.bigcartel.com/selling-out-an-artists-search-for-money-and-meaning/
Monday, October 17, 2016
Sunday, October 16, 2016
Friday, October 14, 2016
Five years verse fifteen minutes!
How long does it take you?
Cool stuff from David Remnick’s New Yorker profile of Leonard Cohen:
In the early eighties, Cohen went to see Dylan perform in Paris, and the next morning in a café they talked about their latest work. Dylan was especially interested in “Hallelujah.” Even before three hundred other performers made “Hallelujah” famous with their cover versions, long before the song was included on the soundtrack for “Shrek” and as a staple on “American Idol,” Dylan recognized the beauty of its marriage of the sacred and the profane. He asked Cohen how long it took him to write.
“Two years,” Cohen lied.
Actually, “Hallelujah” had taken him five years. He drafted dozens of verses and then it was years more before he settled on a final version. In several writing sessions, he found himself in his underwear, banging his head against a hotel-room floor.
Cohen told Dylan, “I really like ‘I and I,’ ” a song that appeared on Dylan’s album “Infidels.” “How long did it take you to write that?”
“About fifteen minutes,” Dylan said.
This resonates with me because I too am a slow worker, often, like Cohen, laboring on and fussing with little things for years, though nothing quite at the level of “Hallelujah,” it’s true. It’s more like some people are Cohens, some people are Dylans. Speed-wise, I wanted to be more like Dylan for years, but now I’m more okay with my Cohen-like process, though the Dylan style has its advantages.
Here’s another great tidbit from the piece:
Cohen lived in a tiny cabin that he outfitted with a coffeemaker, a menorah, a keyboard, and a laptop. Like the other adepts, he cleaned toilets. He had the honor of cooking for Roshi and eventually lived in a cabin that was linked to his teacher’s by a covered walkway. For many hours a day, he sat in half lotus, meditating. If he, or anyone else, nodded off during meditation or lost the proper position, one of the monks would come by and rap him smartly on the shoulder with a wooden stick.
Thursday, October 13, 2016
I need to learn this solo. Wild!
Check it out. Starts about 3 minutes in.
show from 1970
25 or 6 to 4
Robert Lamm
Waiting for the break of day
Searching for something to say
Dancing lights against the sky
Giving up I close my eyes
Sitting cross-legged on the floor
Twenty five or six to four
Staring blindly into space
Getting up to splash my face
Wanting just to stay awake
Wondering how much I can take
Should have tried to do some more
Twenty five or six to four
Feeling like I ought to sleep
Spinning room is sinking deep
Searching for something to say
Waiting for the break of day
Twenty five or six to four
Twenty five or six to four
Wednesday, October 12, 2016
Some of these thoughts are true gems.
Bob Dylan: 11 Writing Tips.
by Nicholas McDonald
1. “It is only natural to pattern yourself after someone. If I wanted to be a painter, I might think about trying to be like Van Gogh, or if I was an actor, act like Laurence Olivier. If I was an architect, there’s Frank Gehry. But you can’t just copy someone. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to. Anyone who wants to be a songwriter should listen to as much folk music as they can, study the form and structure of stuff that has been around for 100 years.”
2. “You can go anywhere in daily life and have your ears open and hear something, either something someone says to you or something you hear across the room. If it has resonance, you can use it in a song.”
3. “That’s another way of writing a song, of course. Just talking to somebody who ain’t there. That’s the best way. That’s the truest way.”
4. “Creativity is like a freight train going down the tracks. It’s something that has to be caressed and treated with a great deal of respect…you’ve got to program your brain not to think too much.”
5. “Let’s face it. You’re either serious about what you’re doing or you’re not serious about what you’re doing. And you can’t mix the two.”
6. “The environment to write the song is extremely important. It has to bring something out in me that wants to be brought out. It’s a contemplative, reflective thing.”
7. “It’s not a good idea and it’s bad luck to look for life’s guidance to popular entertainers. It’s bad luck to do that. No one should do that. Popular entertainers are fine, there’s nothing the matter with that but as long as you know where you’re standing and what ground you’re on, many of them, they don’t know what they’re doing either.”
8. “The best songs to me — my best songs — are songs which were written very quickly. Yeah, very, very quickly. Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it.”
9. “In my mind it’s never really been seriously a profession… It’s been more confessional than professional.”
10. “It is the first line that gives the inspiration and then it’s like riding a bull. Either you just stick with it, or you don’t. (Bob Dylan)”
11. I couldn’t find the quote, but my writing professor in Oxford once told me Dylan always tried to take a classical story and add something totally unexpected to it. For example, in his song “As I went out one morning” Dylan takes the “Damsel in Distress” tale and adds his own twist – the Damsel is a prostitute. I’ll give 10 cents to whoever can track that quote down.
Tuesday, October 11, 2016
Sunday, October 9, 2016
Fogbow.
I had never heard of one.
Read across it this morning.
Looked it up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_bow
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