Inspiration from Other Artistic Mediums

Typically when people find out you’re a musician, you get one of two questions:

What kind of music do you make? 

Who do you listen to?

Now, I understand why these questions are asked, and I always do my best to give them an honest answer, while also trying to explain my art beyond the practical answer.  At the end of the day, I’m only trying to create something that sounds like what I feel in hopes that when you hear it, you feel it too.  

When I was young, consuming music was everything.  I didn’t have the skillset to create the sounds I felt, so I relied on the talents of others to fill that void.  The older I get, the less I listen to music.  Now, I can create the sounds I need to.  Not that I listen to no music, but rather my motivations are different.  I’m often listening to types of music or artists I never listened to before.  Yes, I will still listen to the new Cure album or Morrissey album, but over the last year or two I spent most of my time digging into nooks and crannies I previously had passed over; such as Massive Attack, the Afghan Whigs, Echo and the Bunnymen, etc.  I’m looking for inspiration.  Otherwise, I’m content to listen to Bach or Liszt, or simply play Apple Radio if I’m in the car.

Increasingly, I’m drawn to other artistic mediums.  I want to make music that sounds like how I feel when I look at an Edward Hopper painting.  I want to make music as literary as a Flannery O’Connor story and as deep and complex as a David Lynch film.  Spending time with any of these artists, or with Stanley Kubrick, Cormac McCarthy or others, inevitably gets the creative motor running at full speed.

There is enough pure escapism available in our culture, I’m not inspired by it, nor do I see any merit in making more of it.  What Hopper was trying to explain one hundred years ago is even more true now: the encroachment of modernism on the world is only increasing loneliness in the world.  People are sitting next to each other and not looking at one another.  We feel alone surrounded by people.  O’Connor and Lynch were often criticized for being grotesque, but it was only people being uncomfortable confronting the truth of what they were saying.  

The darkness is in all of us, to varying degrees and in varying ways, but it’s in all of us.  I, like O’Connor and Lynch, feel like confronting these things is far more important than pretending they’re not there.  When you pretend it’s not there, the monster only gets stronger.

Much as it’s harder to consume this art, it’s definitely harder to make it for most people, I get that.  Even I, at times, am inspired to write something more light-hearted, but once you’ve cracked that door and started confronting the monster, it’s kind of hard to go back to writing fluff.  At the end of the day, it’s not about the artistic form, it’s about the message.  There are great musical acts like this, but there are great writers, poets, filmmakers, painters, etc. too and they should not be ignored.  Artists are storytellers, philosophers, and commentators on the human condition.  The deeper we go, the narrower (usually) the audience, but that’s a choice we all have to make regarding the intentions of our own work.