This explains a lot…
As someone who has always had the urge to create, whether it be writing or music, I always wonder what makes me different to other people. Take for instance fellow musicians. In the past, through work assignments, you often come into contact with others who say: “Yes, I also play the guitar” and then you ask them if they’ve written or recorded any songs and they shake their head in the negative way. Being someone who likes to encourage people to push themselves forward, I’ve been in such guitarist’s company and explained to them how easy it is to record and offered them my services or knowledge only for them to do nothing. Then you realise that for these people playing the guitar is more of a social pursuit. It’s about getting together with friends, murdering a cover version and then having a beer. More power to them, I say, but it’s not my modus operandi.
For me it is about pushing myself forward. As I’ve bleated on before, I am not a natural musician and it has taken me years of slog to get this bad. I’ve known other folk who are naturals. Music just flows through them and I am both in awe and a little envious of their talents. I remember back at college, I got shafted into writing the play for the school musical (and then the guys that wrote the music tried to take credit for the words as well and said so in the local paper – much to my chagrin). During this time, I came into contact with a couple of the lads who were playing behind the curtain: a drummer and the bass player and they were both naturals. The drummer was the most down-to-earth, natural human being I’d come across at that age and had a natural self-assurance that people of older years tend to have. He gave me a lot of advice about people and myself and it’s those brief encounters that leave an impression. I’d forgotten his name for a while and then the other week it came back to me in a flash. Somehow my memory had dredged it up from the depths (without me even thinking about it) and I found the guy was now a top-class jazz drummer on YouTube and everything. That made me feel very good indeed. I was right – this guy really was a pro, but then you can just tell.
But I digress…the creative impulse is hard to control – or at least I find it hard to control. For me it used to be writing, but there was no challenge in it because I got to the point where I could write a novel in six weeks and what’s the fun in that? Of course, these novels were probably a load of old rot, but I wrote them purely for the excercise and not to get them published. But then I found another creative outlet and it was the music and then I discovered that this really did take effort and every victory was often marred by crashing depressions – moments where you question yourself and wonder why you waste your time producing this stuff? And then there’s the times when you want to give it all up and sell your instruments and the times when you feel that you have a direct line to the muse and the ideas just fall into your lap.
I always say to The Missus that if fate had played a different game, I might have been a cartoonist. For when I was about 10 or 11, I was fanatical about writing and drawing little cartoon strips. Loads of them, mainly sci-fi, I think it was. But then one day, my dear mother told me that she’d found my sketchbook and commended me on my sketching. The book was hidden, in private, because those cartoons where for me. So I tore up the sketchbook and never doodled again, because I felt my private world had been violated. The ability to create also comes with the need to destroy too. It’s two sides of the same coin.
I always wondered what this process was about and now I know. It is all part of the plan, I guess. Oh well, at least the music making keeps the multitude of voices in my head quiet! <---- THAT WAS A JOKE!

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