I adore this story of the creative process/presencing from a blog of the the NY Times :
April 29, 2008, 7:02 pm
Don’t Fact-Check the Soul
By ROSANNE CASH
Apart from “which comes first, the music or the lyrics,” the question I am most often asked (mostly by music journalists) is whether it isn’t “hard” to “reveal so much” of myself through my lyrics.
This question annoys me to no end. I always sputter that the songs aren’t a diary, a blog or a therapy session. I’ve never had a fact-checker come in to go over my lyrics. I haven’t worked through all my childhood issues and achieved enlightenment through songwriting. I can write whatever I want, and I’m the only one who knows what is indeed fact (or at least my version of fact…you see the problem?) and what is poetic license.
Conversely, where am I supposed to get inspiration, if not from my own life? Television? (Yes, I can have it both ways: “Consistency is the last resort of the unimaginative.” — Oscar Wilde).
I used to teach a summer songwriting workshop, and sometimes I would suggest a change of a line or phrase in a song a fledgling writer brought to class and the writer would say, “But it didn’t happen that way.” I would remind him or her that these were songs, not news reports, and if they were bound to just the facts, they should consider science rather than art. (I said this in a very nice way, of course. Songwriters are notoriously insecure. The palpable fear that always hung in the workshop classroom like a toxic mist made me want to take several showers a day and seriously consider changing professions. I’m speaking of my own fear, of course.)
Having said all this about poetic license and the difference between truth and facts, I cannot deny that my life is entirely contained in my songs, even the songs I wrote in another character (“Last Stop Before Home,” “The Good Intent,” “Second to No One”), or wrote to try (unsuccessfully) to get Vince Gill to record and turn into a big hit (“Closer Than I Appear”) so I could pay my taxes and my American Express bill. [Audio clip above.]
Sometimes songs are postcards from the future. Often I have found that a song reveals something subtle but important about my own life that I was only vaguely aware of while writing, but that became clear as time went on. I wrote “Black Cadillac” six weeks before a rash of deaths began in my family. The day I finished writing it, I played the completed song to myself, as a kind of last run-through to check for rhyme scheme errors and syllable scanning, and a tidal wave of anxiety started rising in my gut. I knew I had given myself a message.
I don’t consider these postcard songs prescient as much as just coming from a source of creativity outside linear time. (I am certainly not the first to notice this phenomenon in creative work. Thornton Wilder, for one, wrote, “It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.”)
But with or without prescience, considering only the hard-earned craftsmanship of songwriting, as I get older I have found the quality of my attention to be more important, and more rewarding, than the initial inspiration. I’ve found that the melody is already inherent in the language, and if I pay close enough attention to the roundness of the vowels and the cadence of the words, I can tease the melody out of the words it is already woven into. I have found that continual referral back to the original “feeling tone” of the inspiration, the constant re-touching of that hum and cry, more important than the fireworks of its origin. I have learned to be steady in my course of love, or fear, or loneliness, rather than impulsive in its wasting, either lyrically or emotionally.
This maturation in songwriting has proven surprisingly satisfying. Twenty-five years ago, I would have said that the bursts of inspiration, and the transcendent quality that came with them, were an emotionally superior experience, preferable to the watchmaker concentration required for the detail work of refining, editing and polishing. But the reverse is proving to be true. Like everything else, given enough time and the long perspective, the opposite of those things that we think define us slowly becomes equally valid, and sometimes more potent.
And speaking of Truth, and its relative experience, those niggling questions about the specifics of writing — the order of creation, the source of inspiration, the parsing of individual truth and the wrestling of facts and the divergence of the two, are better left alone and in the realm of mystery, where all creative work forms. I am of the same mind about these things as Martha Graham, who told a young dancer who asked if she should be a dancer, “If you have to ask, the answer is no.” Perversely, if you have to ask which came first, the lyrics or the music, the answer is… No. Or Yes. Depending on your maturity and how slow the opposites are to reveal themselves.
Back to “So It Goes,” the raison d’etre for this blog: Joe Henry came to New York, and quickly arranged for us to meet at a studio in the East Village in the two hours he had free before beginning a new project with Allen Toussaint. He wanted me to sing the lead on the song, but after tinkering with different keys and trying to fit my voice around the unusual (for me) cadences of his melody and syllabic structure, I talked him into letting me record a duet vocal, part harmony and part lead. [Audio clip above.]
The demo we did together retained the simplicity of his original version, and I think it’s a great second step toward a full-fledged recording. I don’t know where the song will exist, on whose record, in what form, but I feel proud of this long-delayed experiment with Joe, and look at it as a great beginning. A little mystery becomes tangible, the friends I lost are respectfully acknowledged, and Joe and I, after a combined half-century of songwriting between us, become beginners again. And so it goes.