Lesson 2: Effective Creativity Workshop
How Your Music Connects To The Hearts Of Fans
You made it to Lesson 2! Did you take a couple of days to integrate and rest and dream? Good. Now let’s get roll!
Previously, we discussed how connecting deeply with the music you make is critical to the success of your music out in the world.
Now I want you to understand emotional your story.
Why do you need a story, you may be asking. I’m just me, isn’t that enough?
It might sound funny, but your story actually isn’t about you.
It’s not even about your music.
An artist’s story is about embodying a vivid and specific slice of the human experience.
When you offer that to your listeners, two incredible things happen:
They can adopt your experience as part of their own story to gain a richer, more complete picture of the human experience.
They use the truth and emotion in your music as a way to access their own feelings more deeply, adding more meaning and depth to how they’re experiencing their own life.
Music is about connection.
If your music is failing to draw in fans, it’s because they’re not seeing a clear way to access that connection.
Connection can come in all forms! It doesn’t need to be all navel-gazing and journal entries about your childhood!
Kim Gordon playing for an audience. (Courtesy Linnea Stephan)
As a teenager discovering Sonic Youth, I felt a connection to righteousness and freedom when I heard Kim Gordon’s pointedly ugly and sublime anti-patriarchal lyrics. Many of the specifics were lost on me, and still are probably, but I immediately recognized feelings that had gone unarticulated from my own subconscious.
Bringing the subtleties of a rage I was beginning to experience into a collage of words, she gave me a story of femininity both ragged from surviving countless indignities, and razor sharp in clarity about the nature of injustice. She gave me power and helped me understand what kind of adult I was going to be. Kim Gordon had my back. She told me that I wasn’t alone and showed me tools I would use to fight back.
My imagination. My ability to defect. To flip off the light switch of my budding desirability. To rattle anyone by showing the wretched nature of the damage I had sustained. To be exacting and ruthless when someone tried to make me small, as many would and will until I die.
LCD Soundsystem filled me with excitement and bliss as I came of age. With their records, I felt free and funny and hot, despite and perhaps because of my many glaring flaws.
Death Cab For Cutie (but only the first four records, don’t at me) helped me find the beauty in the mundane moments of my life. I would say they made me fall in love with living, and acted as the gateway drug for many of my favorite bands, LOW, Delgados, Yo La Tengo, Duster and so on. They probably had more impact on how I live day to day, and the kind of energy I embody in my private life than any other artist.
Find Your Story And Share It Clearly
It can be hard to step outside of yourself and to see what you’re offering people.
Of course, your songs will have different tempos and themes, so how do you sort out what your story is?
Please share your exercise answers to the questions below in the discord chat under:
Coursework > #creativity!
I want you to begin by setting the intention of honoring yourself as an artist.
Coursework
I want you to begin by setting the intention of honoring yourself as an artist.
Exercise 1
Go back to your answers from the first part of Lesson 1. Examine those songs and see if you can boil your answers down to 2-4 of the most important pillars of your music. These can be sonic components or emotional truths, but they should all feel very concrete to you.
Spend 5-10 minutes refining these words, and write 1-2 sentences defining what they mean to you. You should be able to feel whatever words you land on.
If you’re having trouble doing this with your existing music, consider making a short playlist (roughly 5 songs) of your very favorite songs of all time—the songs that made you want to make your own music. Songs that give you an almost indescribable feeling, that you play for others and desperately want them to understand.
You can use these feelings to create a new direction for yourself as an artist if the music you’ve been making isn’t feeling strongly resonant for you.
Your answers could look something like this:
Pillar 1: Sweet melodies - communicating both wistfulness and levity through the use of dynamic and sometimes surprising pop melodies. Often they push up against the boundaries of my vocal range, causing warbles and imperfections that create space for raw, human moments.
Pillar 2: Stillness - my writing comes from a place of stillness that is impenetrable by the outside world. It’s the way I feel when it rains, when I’m by the ocean on a grey day. It’s a sober, cottony energy I inhabit where it’s safe to unpack my most painful feelings. It’s a feeling/energy that mixes peace, loss, and wonder.
Pillar 3: Resignation - freedom to own and sometimes laugh at the most wretched elements of myself and my experience. This is a way of transmuting my own ugliness into something understandable, for myself and others.
Exercise 2
In order to transmit intense emotion to your listeners, you’ll need to cultivate as much of that energy in your own life as possible. What is that energy?
Powerful rage? Stay gassed up by attending demonstrations and reading Marx.
Tenderness, longing, and resignation? Make more space for walking alone in rose gardens.
Freedom? Fill your creative tank by going on last minute roadtrips.
Journal: write 1-2 sentences for each of your pillars about how you can intentionally make more space to bring those elements into your life. See if you can find a way to not just do one or two things, but carve out some time in your weekly schedule to prioritize those elements.
Pillar 1: Sweet melodies - communicating both wistfulness and levity through the use of dynamic and sometimes surprising pop melodies. Often they push up against the boundaries of my vocal range, causing warbles and imperfections that create space for raw, human moments.
Here’s what that could look like:
Pillar 1: Sweet melodies - spending time listening to melodic music outside of my normal listening lanes. Maybe Tchaikovsky. Or Paul McCartney solo records. Or Django Reinhardt.
Pillar 2: Stillness - this is something I’m constantly working to cultivate more of. I spend time by the water as much as I possibly can. Also going for walks in my pretty San Francisco neighborhood at dawn when everything is wet and foggy gets me into this space.
Pillar 3: Resignation - British humor is great for this. They’re a culture that’s great at being kind to themselves about being crappy at stuff. I bet I could also find warm, joyful books about the joys of being a failure. This is one to work on for sure.
Exercise 3
Come back to these each day. Revise them. Add 2-3 more if you feel moved to. Or scrap all but one. Come back periodically and intentionally until this feels really good and right and true. And then put your final (ish) draft somewhere where you can revisit it often. The fridge, maybe.
Spend as much of your days as possible inhabiting the energy of who you want to be as an artist. For the next week, keep a list of the ways you’ve added your pillars into your daily life, in big and small ways.
It’s likely that these pillars will change with time. That’s awesome! Keep tuning in, learning more about them, and defining them for yourself as well as you can, so you can better embody the artist you were born to be.
Paid members: please share your exercise answers in the discord chat under Coursework #creativity!
Finally, here’s the intro of our last session. Going in a little deeper on how we should be thinking about and using our pillars from the exercise above.
Enjoy!
Can’t wait to see you all in Lesson 3!
Cassidy