February 18ths (Riffs)

[From 2021-2024 I was keeping a video diary as a form of dictation, and these are some of the transcripts from 2/18, which I've edited into actual written entries}.

2/18/2021

When I first started writing songs in the early 90s I did write some political lyrics. Most songwriters typically do when they’re in their 20s and 30s because they become interested in the world and where it’s going. My first political songs were around the first Gulf War and the war in the Balkans, specifically one inspired by an article I had read about two young lovers who were trying to flee Sarajevo and were shot down. It was a galvanizing story in the news at the time and a documentary was subsequently made about it. Inspired by Sting’s Nothing Like the Sun and Soul Cages albums, it was more philosophical than it was political. The former actually interests me more. 

I’m not the kind of artist who can make effective political statements. I’m more comfortable writing the music and lyrics and having someone sing it. Music has become sacred ground for me and I don’t want to [approach it profanely]. I love political art done well but it’s very difficult to pull off. Picasso did it with Guernica and some of the Leon Golub paintings about incarceration are highly charged politically and bravely done. The audience has to see them as righteous—that you’re speaking the truth and taking a position for the benefit of the Oppressed. I also always liked Sting’s They Dance Alone—it’s so moving when you know Chile’s history under the Pinochet regime.

'White Squad V', acrylic on linen painting by Leon Golub, 1984

[2/18/2026: Another aspect of AI-generated music that I like is that I’m disabused from writing the music. Pop songs can be very quickly written, but it’s the production that can be tedious in some cases–especially when the ideas or strategies are murky. AI solves the problem in minutes–to a point. What I’ve realized after a year of using AI is that it presents a different kind of tedium–wading through multiple stylings, and how limited the production strategies actually are–not to mention many other pedestrian aspects, such as boring chord changes. Political songs become anonymized and trivialized as mere musical trolling].  

***

It can take me weeks to write a piece of music and record it, so I’m in it all the time, and can get tedious because you’re always playing it. But the listener isn’t going to always want to spend the same amount of time that you have, so it has to sound resolved within the first few seconds. But the hope is that you can get them to a saturation level. It was easy during the 60s and 70s when there were 50 songs in rotation every day. Many times you would think that a particular song was going to be next and it actually was. It was so predictable. Talk about earworms–you already had the earworm–the desire to re-hear a piece of music. If you had the record, you’d be listening to that as well. We lived with music in the 90s and 70s more than we do now. It was a reason to live.

[2/18/2026: AI music causes the same earworming effect, and can be as tedious because of repeated listening–especially when generating it–having to sit through all the slop. Some people think it’s all slop, but I like the ease of going out to dinner and not having to do dishes].

***

I see musical composition and performance as an activator of spirituality: they “siphon” spiritual elements, but more so in performance because there are certain parts of your brain that are deactivated when you’re performing—you tend to focus less in your frontal lobe and amygdala. Improvisation is controlled from the “black box” (or white box). When we’re improvising we’re not analyzing what we’re doing. The black box (perhaps left hemisphere) is always operating at a subliminal level. It’s what causes people to do weird things because it contains all the shadow elements, childhood trauma that’s percolating up and is affecting your personality. Music can kind of exorcise that, which makes it an effective therapy. I don’t see musical composition as being spiritual at all, even if there are spiritual topics in the lyrics. Writing is very Apollonian, whereas performance is more Dionysian—or should be. When you’re in a relaxed state you’re more likely to get into flow states. Whatever skills that you have acquired tend to show up in this relaxed space—not only in jazz but in any kind of music.  

2/18/2023            
        
Creativity as defined as a process from initial idea to finished results may be a natural trait that some people don’t possess. I don’t think it’s really a talent as much as it is a temperament. Naturally creative people tend to act on ideas more readily. Other people may have lots of ideas but they never pursue them for various reasons. They can “improve” their creativity by producing more.            

Some people may actually be more imaginative than people who are productive, but since they don’t act on ideas may make them seem less creative. Or, they may be going straight from imagination to innovation, and teams of people are producing the tangible results. People on those teams can also be imaginative and creative but they might not be recognized for it.            

***
            
I was watching an older interview with Peter Gabriel on the School of Life YouTube channel when he was interviewed by Alain de Botton. He asked him how it is that he can switch gears–where he can go into a persona for whatever the music requires. I know what that feels like when I start to do something or when I’m working on a song or an album of songs. I’m not always checking in with myself and thinking, “Is this my persona and is this something that I should be doing?” I think the way it should work is to leave yourself out of the picture and just adapt accordingly. I see it all as just creativity and is just artifice, not anything about me. I just wrote a new song with lyrics that I don’t identify with–it’s just word play. But of course people are going to think it’s in the first person. A good analogy is an architect who designs a building and the building isn’t designed for people to use as their “canvas”. In some ways, street art and graffiti are a way to project people’s thoughts about things on buildings, using buildings as a canvas. Similarly, they do that same projection on other forms of art, including music. I know some songwriters leave things open to interpretation; they leave it ambiguous so people can “write” things on it. In visual art I’d rather not do that and rather explain what I’m trying to say so people don’t project things on it. I like to give people all the details so there’s no other explanation. On the other hand, there are certain things that I think we have to leave open to interpretation, and that’s what gives it depth. There’s a certain balance between leaving things open to ambiguity and being explicit about what they mean. #riff            
 
            
[2/18/2025: When I did my recent “country” album with AI, that’s definitely not me, but actually I have liked some country music in the past, particularly if was more Jimmy Webb or Glen Campbell. I recall in the 80s, while studying classical music, I’d hear a country song on the radio and be captivated. I don’t think we always have to explain why we like things as listeners. The country album was my way of creating music that I had once liked as a listener, and realizing I still like it. It’s become one of my favorite albums. Sometimes I put it on in the background, and I know I didn’t write the music. They were 10 artists who wrote and recorded music to my lyrics, so they are my thoughts and ideas–the thoughts of a human, as opposed to dot-connecting in an LLM].