The "Incredibly Impossible to Derail This Thread" thread | Page 1170 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

The continuing saga of bungalow bill

@Neely 

Here’s an interesting video showing James Taylor’s fingers from a cam looking out from inside his guitar

Well I don’t mean to throw cold water on budding songwriters, but I kind of have the philosophy Kurt Vonnegut had about fiction writing. For a while after he became famous he taught a class in writing, and he told his students that he can’t teach them anything, because if it’s in you it’s going to come out of you, or you have to figure out a way to draw it out of you. But it’s either there or it’s not. In my experience of songwriting, it begins with a flash of inspiration, usually in the form some lick I’m doing on the guitar or some chord changes that catch my ear and make me think I could possibly build upon them. Sometimes this never pans out, and sometimes it does. The process of building upon it may also involve additional flashes of inspiration, but not necessarily. It’s more like a process of trying to flesh out that initial inspiration and make sure you don’t get in its way or detract from it while you’re making it larger and more complex.

It’s kind of like that experience or idea that I think Michelangelo described where when he’s making a sculpture he’s got just a big hunk of granite and as he’s chipping away he’s not so much imposing the form on the granite, he’s letting the form in the granite come out and he’s just chipping away what’s not it. So if you do have an inspired song, the initial seed of inspiration has the potential to grow into some structure that is also inspired, but you have to make sure you let it unfold on its own terms instead of forcing anything on it. Again, in activities of inspiration there’s no formula or instructions on how to do this. You just feel it along the way, and it either feels right or you end up realizing that you’ve been trying to hammer some kind of form into this thing you have and it’s just a misshapen mess at the end (I’ve got a drawer full of songs like that!)

As for needing to live life before you do art, I’m not so sure that’s always necessary. There’s the famous example of the poet Emily Dickinson, who wrote some of the finest poetry about love, and yet she lived the life of a spinster and never married or apparently never had even a lover.

I wonder if any Baker’s Dozen posts failed to get 13 references? I don’t think I’m going to browse through 363 pages to find the answer lol. 

That would be a fun exercise, to try to come up with a Baker’s Dozen challenge that you don’t want to succeed! For example, “name 13 Beatles & Solo songs that reference ice cream.” And the rule would be it has to be ice cream — it can’t be sherbet or gelato or pudding etc. nor can it be merely “ice” or “snow” etc.  The only one I can think of is Monkberry Moon Delight , insofar as a milkshake is technically made of ice cream, is it not?