Tap Into the Lightening.

Finding your "unique" artistic voice. Brain Pickings illuminates the process thru the song-writer and musician Ben Folds. I've never listened to Ben Folds, but I definitely enjoyed the post.

I always think of my own creative process as so homely, homemade, ramshackle, hit or miss, a process of experimenting, playing, trying on things for size, pulling things from the air. Not so much creating things as filtering them thru me, and then putting them back out into the world.

I spent most of last evening watching other musicians on a stage, mostly playing cover songs. There was a bit of magic in the air. Similar but a bit different too with what I am doing with our band. I mean, we all share a musical lexicon, we play the same chords and notes, we have all learned the basics of how a song works.

Still, my songs, the music I make with my band seems so hermetic, unlike anything I heard last night. We use our songs as vehicles to ignite some kind of passion, energy, a certain wildness, that we can't really control. All of our effort is directed to connecting with our band of musicians to be in the moment, to reach some kind of transcendent energy state.

It's kind of crazy thing. The energy business. Catching lightening bugs in a jar and showing them to the neighbor kids, that's good. Kind of captures the process, for sure. Maybe the energy, the lightening is the same, it's how you get there; this sequence of chords, this voice, these fingers on this particular fretboard, in opposition to and in collaboration with a tornado of vibrations.

It's you shooting for the stars, but it's not about you. It's not an ego thing. It's a drop your ego thing to tap into the lightening.