Thursday 1st June, 2023
Coming to you live, from Output Belfast!
I’m up here for a music conference with a whole litany of wonderful performances & talks lined up… & I’ve decided to disappear into a coffee shop & get this week’s journal written. But what, if anything specific, should we talk about? I had something planned yesterday, but I’ve since forgotten… so you’re getting…
Thoughts on pushing your creativity to the extremes!
I’m starting these thoughts with a presupposition: creatively speaking, extremes are what create dedicated fans… they also create dedicated ‘haters’, but I’d actually consider that a sign of progress. I came to this idea of beneficial extremity through noticing what made me love & hate artists…. & through analysing my own creative output, which was a harsh self-flagellating experience.
When looking back over the album, the film, my shows, & every piece of media I’ve made… the memorable responses always come from the most intense & dramatic moments. When Grim bows his head & drop to my knees screaming ‘TEAAARRRR’… ‘OUUUUT’… “THESE PAAAAAAAAAAAAGES’… people freak out in the crowd. They even interrupt the song to applaud! (which is a FANTASTIC compliment if they don’t just think your song is over too early & clap out of politeness.)
Overall I’ve deemed my creative output as a little toothless so far. When I sat by myself & listened to the album the other day, I was actually surprised at how good it was. I’d forgotten that we put so much love & care into the tracks. The problems with the songwriting & production wasn’t that we didn’t ‘get it right’… it’s that we favoured a ‘nice’ sound over a creative statement. (for the most part) When we had an idea for a sound, or a piece, or a ‘moment’ in the song, we wouldn’t allow it to reach an intense or extreme level. We would always pear it back & calm it down, so that it hit the ears just right & felt good.
But is that all we’re looking for from art?
Going forward, our approach & experiment is to reduce the polish & push the dramatics. If a pause is a beat long, let's see what a whole bar of 4 beats sounds like. If we have reverb bleeding into that empty space, what happens when we cut the gain completely & create an unnatural silence? What if the loudest part of the song bursts out of that silence? Maybe with the most intense & emotional lyric of the song… Maybe we can turn the reverb up waaayyy too far & ‘smudge’ the audio like you might paint. You get the idea. Taking features of creativity & pushing the saturation, wetness, or levels beyond what sounds ‘good’, & hope for what sounds ‘great’.
My dearest producer Brian & I have spoken at length about the phrase: “Good is the enemy of Great.” I love this phrase… it speaks to the agitating feeling of a horizon that’s always better. The caveat is that you must remember that a horizon is unreachable… it’s your duty to keep ‘great’ & ‘perfect’ segregated. This is the point that Brian tends to lean on… that perfection is going to kill the creativity of ‘good enough’.
Now, good enough might sound a little half hearted & depressing to some of you, (like it does to me) but it’s a powerful idea. There is a point to be made for completing an album of songs that are ‘good enough’, as opposed to completing a song that’s ‘great’. You will of course need both to make a career… but to sustain a career, a decent workflow, & creative output, you need to be okay with ‘good enough’ unless you have a massive team & ALL the money. While it might not be the romantic ideal of the creative genius, & while it may not transcend the artist… ‘good enough’ by definition, is all that people need. That’s why a lot of Pop Music in the charts doesn’t compare with the ‘great’ songs of the past & present… because that’s not what they’re trying to be. They’re well aware of their status as ‘good enough’.
This philosophy extends into all creative fields I reckon, into a whole lot of other industries too, but I’ll stay within my lane here. As a Circus Artist, I know that the majority of performances are ‘good enough’, & the gap between that & great is actually quite large. Because regular people have less exposure to Circus, their sense for what’s good & great isn’t as refined as the Music audience. It takes more to be good in Music than it does in Circus. So when I find a Circus artist that is genuinely great, I usually become obsessed. :P Someone like Veronika Goroshkova comes to mind here. While I’ve never seen her in person… her online work has enraptured me for years now. Oh Oh! Or someone like Yoann Bourgeois who’s been working with a string of artists recently, from Harry Styles, & Pink, to Pomme most recently.
It’s harder for me to speak about the effect of diminishing returns when it comes to Circus. As a side effect of a back injury killing my Circus career, I don’t often get to push too far beyond my physical capabilities… which is an important part of ‘great’ Circus. I am resigned to ‘good enough’ for my Circus work, because it’s now an addition to my Music, & not the tip of my proverbial creative spear. What I can say, is that creativity isn’t so tied to physical ability as to completely exclude me from doing something great with my Circus practice. As a storyteller, with a narrative slant, I reckon I could create a moment that breaks a heart, steals a breath, or ignites a celebration!
There are other aspects to pushing your creativity, like the confidence needed to take creative risks, your attitude towards failure & permanence, or even your access to money & skills… but I won’t harp on all day. There’s some coffee going cold & some food I need to eat.
I’ll catch up with you next week.
Nathan
