interview by casey inman

Who are your muses?

Perhaps like many contemporary artists, I don't relate to the idea of the muse, per se. For the ancients, creative inspiration was something gifted to the few and ascribed to the influence of the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. Around the time of the Middle Ages the arts became more elaborated, requiring patronage and protection. It became a matter of survival to take inspiration from the noble station, refined appearance and exalted lifestyle of those who underwrote the expenses of one's work. The troubadour tradition in particular not only acquainted us with the veiled seduction potential of music and poetry, it gave rise to the radical notion that human courtship should be a product of spontaneous, individual passion rather than calculated tribal arrangement. The vehicle of art as a means by which one could reflect, cultivate and express purely personal desires, especially the most sweet - the unobtainable - was firmly established.

We've carried forward with this notion ever since, that inspiration is something that comes to us from without, an infatuation, a grace, something ethereal and beyond the mundane world. We can see this at work in couture fashion houses to this day. Designers light upon a figure, typically a woman, who epitomizes a certain aesthetic and manner which not only mesmerizes him, it takes him out of his usual frame of reference, lending novel energy, ideas and images around which he can create collections made to build on the mystique he experiences through this divine lady. Such an approach is common, albeit less formalized, in music, literature, poetry, and the gamut of visual and performance arts, where it's almost expected that the creative labourer takes inspiration from someone or something to which they are compelled to devote their work, either directly in various guises of depiction, or indirectly, through mimicking the techniques, styles, or subjects connected to this source. 

Personally, my experience has consistently suggested that deep within each of us, at in fact the cellular level and beyond, within subatomic realms, exist the traces of everything that has ever occurred in history and everyone that has ever lived. Depending on our interests and inclinations, and often more importantly, the dramaturgic demands of our personal narrative, we experience the synchrony of encountering these immortal and ever-repeating themes in the world around us and mistake them for something separate and novel, but in fact, as Joseph Campbell said, the labyrinth is well known. There are only so many stories and roles to be played, for we partake of a finite reality bound in space and time. We seek anew these old wines in new bottles so that we too can play our roles, developing and evolving our being and doing in the process, adding our own inflections and hard-won understandings to the library. 

So, for me, the muse is universal, something available and accessible to me and every human being by dint of simply having a body. The inspiration for every story, every song, every poem, every image, can arise not only according to the old world model of striving, or longing, or looking outside ourselves, but by inviting the muse writ in our unconscious and in our DNA to find us with her gold. The rational mind of which we're so enamoured seeks to obstruct this connection to source, because it's primal, beyond our volitional control, and therefore threatening to the dream of having firm ground beneath our feet. 

The task for the artist, as I see it and choose to live it, is to go more deeply into that personal, yet vastly impersonal well... to step aside from the rational mind, its opinions, wants and wishes, its aims and ambitions, its folly and shortsightedness, so that I can more readily lend expression and form to this eternal spring that has such sense in its non-sense. In this way I can rely on the fact that what I do partakes of an intelligence and purpose that is and will always be beyond me and for which I need take no credit nor responsibility. Its simply what wants to be expressed, not what I want to say. I find freedom in this beyond compare and its my reason for being a creative.

Describe your approach to songwriting?

Its irrational and I'm quite pleased to say so. I like to sit at my computer with GarageBand open without a single motive or expectation. The only thing I need to get started is the knowledge that the sound of my work won't inconvenience anyone and that I have an unlimited period of consecutive time on tap to take the project into a first draft, if not a completed form. I don't do well if I only have time to make a brief start of it. The energy that moves me to make a unique set of choices and decisions one day often seems to abandon me by the time I sit down next, so I've learned to honour the flow and see it through to completion.

I begin with the tools at my disposal. Since I lack the skill or equipment or inclination to create a typical studio setting where instrument parts can be recorded directly, I limit myself to what I can do with what I have, and in my case its simply a Mac laptop, GarageBand, the samples and loops it comes with, and a small midi-controller keyboard that I can use to create new loops and passages via the different virtual instruments the software comes with. 

The first thing for me is either a beat or a loop. I often will pick these at random as I like the constraint of not imposing my choices so exclusively in my work. Getting your way all the time and controlling every detail is a sterile landscape to me. Once I've established a base, I just sit back and listen to it. I will start to hear some instrument in the riff that's not there yet and so will begin assigning instruments to my keyboard until I find a sound that I know is the one. I'll improvise at the keys but not for long. If I don't uncover almost immediately a part that fits, I won't belabour it. I'll move on to something else until I net what the song, even in its still primitive form, seems to demand. Adding the other layers becomes like playing a wigi board. I let my hand randomly reach for other pre-recorded components and audition how they fit with what I've got. You'd be shocked how frequently, and beyond the stats for chance, this method showcases a logic and artistry far beyond what I could ever create by intention alone. 

Once the instrument parts seem done, I address structure in the same magico-primitive way. I look at how the shapes appear on my editorial deck and start assembling them into different recurring parts of various lengths, again, not according to some inner vision or strategy, but according to the simple desire to make it look organized and sound variegated enough to fool the listener into thinking its a contrived song with A parts, B parts and sometimes a chorus. When I feel that its got some kind of finished wholeness, that's when I pull out paper and pen and start listening to the music over and over again. I don't think of anything. I don't try to conjure up something personal I want to say or call to mind some experience of vision. That, to me, is like cheating. I want to hear what the song has to say. Sure enough, I begin to make out words that link into lines that become rhyming verses without any effort on my part. If I don't take my time at this point and I rush to record the vocals out of impatience to finish, I often end up with not enough lyric. I've learned the hard way to be patient and see it through, for if I don't and I try go back to it, my ability to tune in to the song to hear its emerging words will have left me. 

Who and/or what are your influences?

I heard quite a bit of folk music growing up, my Father was partial to old school country western with a smattering of late 50s rock like the Ventures and Elvis. Mother forbid the purchase of albums or visits to record stores and though I often tried to sneak in some radio listening under the covers after bedtime, I always got busted for it. I did get a couple of unmentionable records as birthday presents that got endless rotation for a while, but for the most part contemporary music was something taboo, and even though I practically grew up on stage singing for audiences, I left that world behind after high school and didn't return to music until I was in my thirties. 

When I started composing my own work I was at first heavily influenced by classical Indian and Middle Eastern music, particularly those artists doing effective fusion of old world sounds with new world technologies,. Ultimately I decided to steer my own course, turning away from outside influences as much as possible so that I could midwife an authentic sound. I also rarely go to concerts. I find being in a crowd more challenging than being in front of one, and the atmosphere in bars doesn't appeal to me unless I have work to do. Its only been in the last year that I've seen my hang-ups start to soften and relent a little. I began to see music as a kind of common language, and exposure to other artists and live events as an opportunity to get an education in what's possible and how things can be done. 

One of the things I enjoy most is to frequently take inventory of all the things I think I either can't or don't want to do, and then lean into them, to go straight into the heart of what makes me uncomfortable, to face the thing head on until my resistance melts away. 

Where do you feel, think, or intuit your creativity comes from?

The way I fancy it, creativity is an immutable law of life. Everything from plant life, geologic formations, weather patterns, animal behaviours, to the gamut of human enterprises, from sustenance schemes to high civilization to trifles and back, all these reflect a font of creative impulses. Life appears to be innately self-aware and desirous of constant encounter with itself, demanding to be expressed in drama, narrative and idle play, as well as through representations and symbols. When we restrict the fullness of life and reduce it to practical, rational necessity, signs and symptoms readily emerge that all is not well in such an ordered and utilitarian paradise. Creativity is perhaps the sine qua non way we experience a sense of meaning and true spiritual uplift, both individually, tribally and collectively; its how we stage encounter with what lies beyond the obvious.

Why do you play music? What does music have the power to do?

To my mind, every human being has abundant creative potential, tapped or not, but we also seem to be purpose built for expression in some areas and not others. Nature loves limitations. Even more intriguing, these affinities can change during the course of our lives according to the wares of our experience and the facts of aging. 

For me, singing was the very first thing I did as an infant. It was a true, spontaneous expression of inner pleasure, not something fostered in the home environment. This fact alone has made me awfully patient with the journey, feeling that song is something proximate to my core of cores and worthy of further exploration. 

When I returned to music as an adult it had become vastly more complicated for me. As a child, I was given material, opportunities for rehearsal and a regular schedule of performances. I had neither anxiety nor issues of self-worth. I knew what I could do and was ever so happy to do it, even when it meant sucking up more than a little bullying and extra stress at home. Children, of course, are resilient. By mid-life I was carrying a very toxic load of baggage that had to be boxed with just to get out the door. I developed an immediate aversion to the machinery of the music business, yet at the same time felt driven to do whatever I could to secure opportunities for people to hear my work and to acquire more learning experiences with the staging of it. The more difficult this enterprise became, principally because of the uncompromising attitude I took, the more I was forced to really examine myself and the mixed signals I was sending, not only with respect to my music but in all areas. 

In this way, song became a way to dredge up and face everything that wasn't working for me, personally, professionally, and creatively. Not always pleasant, but in the end I saw this as a boon, a way to cut to the chase and put myself on the spot far more effectively than any psychotherapeutic encounter. And that's really why I persist in spite of all the mistakes and bridges set ablaze. Making music and presenting it live continues to have something to teach me, not because it comes easy, but because I struggle with it. Courtesy that struggle, I've learned the good way - the hard way - to not dwell on some finite goal called success. I've kept instead to my enchantment with music's power to transform for the better both my person and my understandings. Its the one thing I'd love to share with as many people as I can, that the profits of facing challenges and leaning into difficulties, rather than evading them, are inestimable.

Does nature have any role to play in your music?

Yes, but by nature I don't just mean the verdant wilds and photogenic critters. When I compose I don't get very far until I surrender, until I feel the floor under my feet, the chair, the table I face (since all of my work to date has been done at a desktop), in short, every grain of the room I'm in. I've never cared to remove myself from wherever I happen to be, whether its a roach-infested hovel or a sonorous, sun-lit cathedral. I don't fancy a chair inert or any less a product of presence than a tree. They're just different forms and degrees of manifestation. Its this awareness of the multiform world, its people, places and things, that's the fundament to what I do and where I go with work. 

Do you have any rituals you do before you perform?

I used to get really high or drunk, now I just relish the opportunity to feel it all, the anxiety, the fear of failure, the excitement, the projections waiting to be recognized as such, but mostly the joy. That kid in me still feels the joy!

How does your music influence your drawings? How do your drawings influence your paintings?

While they're cut from the same cloth and come from the same process - this willful putting aside of the many-headed hydra of mind to make room for the numinous of the unconscious to break surface and be heard - I've definitely profited from exploring the two mediums side by each. 

Drawing taught me the importance of not allowing judgement to interfere with expression. Especially for the novice, when you begin, at first you might become extremely discouraged when your cow doesn't really look much like a cow. The important thing is to give yourself permission to be a work in progress and to trust that in time you will develop a personal style wrought of persistence and allowing. That style may never be exactly representational, your cow may never really look like a real cow even after many years of drawing or painting, but that's not the point. We have cameras for capturing exact likenesses, we don't need art for that. What we're really setting down on paper or canvas is the uniqueness of our hand-eye relationship, our vision, the visible influence of our values and feelings, all of which contribute to an innate and unique aesthetic. If we plant a tomato seed and in time it sends up its first sprout, we don't look down on it in dismay and stomp it out because it looks nothing like a tomato plant. We have patience. We nurture it through its stages until it stands strong and bears fruit. Applying this point of view to my music has taken me out of a sense of a destination and let me rest comfortable in the harness of a more gradual unfolding, a thing governed by its own timetable of peak periods and fallow times. This one awareness has saved me from discouragement on countless occasions.

Music, on the other hand, has taught me the importance of story, drama, and embodiment. No matter how clever the instrumentation or lyric, if it doesn't communicate an experience or tell a story, and even more importantly, if I can't become that experience or story while I'm singing it, the audience simply won't care. They'll tune me out and leave me to the background. In this way I've learned that music performance is as much theater as it is song. To refuse this truth is to do a half-job that produces half-results. This in turn has had an influence on my visual art work. For a time I was content to set little challenges for myself to see if I could stretch my skill of the moment to include something quite unlike anything I'd tried before. The results, though great for my development and learning, didn't quite make for art, no matter how attractive or well-executed. I began to realize that paintings are like songs, in the sense that they must make space for drama, or even just a feeling of a kind, to arise concurrently with the image. Its not enough to just reach for a subject because of the challenge it would pose or because it appeals to my sense of what's beautiful. I learned to be content that my abilities would develop as a matter of course anyway and that the task of tasks was, as with music, to let go of striving and linear ambitions, and instead turn my instrument over to the unconscious and its far more sage directives. In this way I've become more and more successful netting images that move and touch people, and I'm certain this is because I'm not painting anymore from a place of insecurity or desire for praise, but as an act of surrender to the lights and darks within that go beyond ordinary mind.

For the creative person, becoming clear about where ego has a place, as in having a healthy sense of self, respect for our abilities and our tools of the moment, being able to confidently and fluidly interact with the world without neurosis, apology or explanation, these are essential. Simultaneously developing the knack for getting ego out of the way the rest of the time so that we can surrender to that which seeks expression through the uniqueness of our being and doing, rather than hoarding and offering only that which we desire to identify with or achieve, this skill leads to us finding our teachers, our real gifts, in unlimited forms... like following what pleases the eye and tongue in the making of a meal rather than by recipe alone; taking the risk to get lost in order to experience the familiar with new eyes; or questioning the absolutism of our judgements and opinions about both ourselves and the people we meet in service of a more comprehensive, however inconvenient reality... the learning, the discoveries, the quickened unfolding of our inner genius will truly astonish all who have the courage to go deeper, and deeper still, beyond the veil of conventional appearances and the ways of the world...