thekenshow's blog

Where to begin? A familiar question, no doubt. Whether you're the kind of person who has hundreds of ideas stalking her day and night, or the sort occasionally accosted by tantalizing visions, the manifesto offers a bit of Cage advice:

9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

Follow this advice any time you find creative urges trapped inside thoughts like, "I'd really like to [insert unmanifested idea here] but I don't know where to start." For example:

• Writing a song about tweed jackets (or whiskey, Darfur, baboons, etc.)
• Recording that brilliant Latvian-Irish fusion dance tune
• Forging a meaningful bridge for a song about rivers
• Publishing a ballad about the disappearance of old-growth forest
• Choosing the right songs for an indie eight-track concept album
• Learning to play the ocarina solo from Wild Thing on an iPhone

Beware the trap of not applying this advice because you're not sure where to start. See how sneaky this is? Begin beginning now. Anywhere!

The number 8 is considered auspicious by many Chinese because it sounds like their term for "prosper" and "fortune". A phone number composed entirely of eights sold for $270,723 US in Chengdu, China. Bruce Mau – I know, it's been a while, but I'm determined to polish off his manifesto in 2008 – approaches #8 as follows:

8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

How this Relates to Songwriting

It's easy to feel stuck when you're short on song ideas or wondering how to proceed with a half-finished tune. Feeling stuck is only a hop, skip and a thump from actually being stuck (funny how the mind works, eh?), so when you notice this feeling it's a good time to apply #8 sauce. Be sure to choose unfamiliar terrain to roam and pack plenty of curiousity.

When you find yourself bogged down in the manufacturing side of creativity, turn to #7 in Mau's manifesto and rethink the Stu-stu-dio:

7. Study
A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

How this Relates to Songwriting

Whether it's practicing scales or tweaking the low-pass filter on that vocal for the 23rd time, it's tempting to push ahead for the sake of getting it done. That might be the right thing to do in some circumstances, but it shuts down any chance of learning, of delving more thoroughly into your craft. Instead, study your environment – and yourself. You'll ease the press of time on your psyche (making you oh-so-much more pleasant to be around ;-) and invite the muse of discovery to boot.

No matter what Debbie Harry says, accidents do happen in a perfect world. The sixth point in the Incomplete Manifesto is concerned with how we relate to them:

6. Capture accidents.
The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

In the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, the following sequence of meeting the world is recommended as a way of uncovering and sustaining a clear mind:

• Recognize
• Contact
• Release

It's terrific advice for developing equanimity but leaves a bit to be desired when it comes to writing songs. All that's needed to set matters right is a soupçon of 6:

• Recognize
• Contact
• Capture
• Release

Capturing our accidents doesn't happen by accident, it takes intention and practice. But once you get the hang of it, those four simple steps are a potent means of engaging the world while stoking the creative fire.

On TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, when Faith was asked how she was doing, she would often reply "Five by five". Thanks to Wikipedia, I was able to figure out where that phrase originated and what it meant . By what about five in the context of Mau's Manifesto?

5. Go deep.
The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

Absolutely. The way to go deeper is to be fully present with what is happening in this moment, letting go of time, of past regrets and future anxieties. Then can you begin to merge with the exploration, eroding the boundary between you and the world you are pondering. As Eckhart Tolle put it, "True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found."

Continuing our perambulations through Le Manifeste Inachevé , we arrive at #4:

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child).
Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

Ah, yes! Your best so far, Mr. Mau. For all its gifts, a maddening feature of our modern world is a paralyzing craving for control, order and perfection. The misguided belief that accidents are necessarily bad or wrong gives rise to ever more laws and insurance regulations bent on choking off all things unplanned.

How this Relates to Songwriting

There are no recorded fatalities or even minor injuries incurred while writing a song. Check your inner bureaucrat at the door and make havoc and mayhem part of your process. Take time to acknowledge the beauty of your mistakes. Pause to wonder where that gaffe would lead if you followed. Out, damn'd order!

Item 3 of the Incomplete Manifesto doesn't mince any words:

3. Process is more important than outcome.
When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

I know that shifting our focus to what we are doing (the Now) instead of why we are doing it (the Plan) can be tremendously freeing, and can lead to insights and novel approaches. But what if

• Process and outcome are not separate?
• Processes, like outcomes, can be repeated?
• Insisting that process drive outcome is an outcome?

How this Relates to Songwriting

Take time to play, to write, to compose for no reason. In Zen, this state of being is called mushotoku. If you feel a direction emerging, an impulse to take form, honour that direction all the way to its outcome. If not, no big deal.

In which Ken continues to riff on Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto. Today, #2:

2. Forget about good.
Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.

This is excellent because it broadens the definition of growth; I love the phrase, "an exploration of unlit recesses". Here we discover that growth – becoming more open, more encompassing – requires digging in the dirt even if that produces nothing of apparent value. We grow beyond our preconceptions by digging precisely where they shed no light. That bare, creative act is inherently valuable and it contains the seeds of possibility.

Songwriting Zen reposts Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto as a creative suggestion list for songwriting. I havent' looked at Mau's list recently, so I thought it would be interesting to riff briefly on these one at a time:

1. Allow events to change you.
You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

There's a subtle bias in use of the word "growth", because we can grow more loving, but we can also grow more bitter. We can grow more tolerant or we can grow more judgmental. These are all forms of growth. We change continuously by simply being alive, but sometimes we grow away from our dreams, like the trees on Long Beach yearning to taste the ocean but bent away from it by a relentless wind.

Willingness and openness are absolutely required to grow into our ideals, though. We must willing to open ever wider, and willing to stay open when we least want to. Gradually we can discover that, as philosopher Ken Wilber puts it, life "hurts more and bothers you less."

I'm listening to a composition produced by Bang on a Can, a contemporary music project based on San Francisco:

The San Francisco Chronicle has called Bang on a Can "the country's most important vehicle for contemporary music" but is has been a long road getting there. That road began in 1987 with a series of conversations among three friends, Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe, about where music was and where it was going.

I confess I don't listen to much contemporary music. It feels great just now, however, a sort of aural yoga stretching my preconceptions about songwriting and peformance. Refreshing!