Why your best ideas usually start as bad ones | Think Like A Musician — Transcript

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1. 0:01It's a cliché to say that mistakes, imperfections make something special,
2. 0:06but they really, really do.
3. 0:08In art, embrace mistakes.
4. 0:10The mistake is the journey.
5. 0:12And it’s you getting better because your voice probably won’t crack there
6. 0:16the next time— it’s just another moment to pivot from.
7. 0:19So never freak out about making mistakes, is really what it boils down to.
8. 0:24Hey, you! Yes, you. Is there music inside of you?
9. 0:28We’ve recruited working musicians from throughout the industry
10. 0:32to help you hear it, hold it, and share it with this wild and wonderful world.
11. 0:39At least for me, from between the studio and a live situation,
12. 0:44some of the adjustment for me means like letting go
13. 0:48of a type of obsessive perfectionism
14. 0:51about the sound quality and also in performance,
15. 0:59being willing to fall down and get dirty or make mistakes.
16. 1:04My first songs, my early songs are pretty embarrassing,
17. 1:08but I think I was just kind of figuring it out.
18. 1:11And I was really literally just taking the poems that I had written,
19. 1:14which were kind of cryptic and a little bit dark
20. 1:17because I was like a moody adolescent,
21. 1:20and putting them to melodies.
22. 1:22But I hadn’t really learned the importance of song structure.
23. 1:26It started out as a very personal outlet for me.
24. 1:29And then later I sort of learned how to write something that was more accessible,
25. 1:33that people could understand where I was coming from,
26. 1:36and maybe get some catharsis out of that.
27. 1:38You don’t just automatically jump immediately to perfection.
28. 1:43That's what's so great about experimentation.
29. 1:46What I’ve loved about collaborating with other songwriters and musicians
30. 1:49is I hear them come out with some not so great ideas,
31. 1:53some pretty lousy ideas.
32. 1:55And I realized that they will come up with eight lousy ideas or even like 15,
33. 2:00and the 16th or 20th or 30th idea,
34. 2:04suddenly it’s like, that is brilliant!
35. 2:07And the listener will never know of the other 30 lousy ideas that it took
36. 2:12to finally come to a sense of clarity and something locking in.
37. 2:15That’s not right. That’s not right. This is right! There it is.
38. 2:19But you have to be willing to let it come out.
39. 2:22Out of the thousands of songs you write, maybe five might be a hit. Maybe.
40. 2:27You’re really, really lucky as a songwriter
41. 2:29if you get a number one record one time.
42. 2:32You could literally start at any age, you could literally not be able to sing,
43. 2:39but as long as you understand what your thing is,
44. 2:42there is no one type of way to songwrite or to produce
45. 2:46or to do any of these things.
46. 2:47There’s no right way. It’s, what is my way?
47. 2:50And then I find the appropriate people to collaborate with
48. 2:54to make this a well-rounded thing, because that is what our industry is about,
49. 2:58is collaboration.
50. 2:59Mark D. Sanders, he’s a writer in Nashville,
51. 3:01he said to me once, songwriting is like fishing.
52. 3:03He said, you can stand in the water days on end and get nothing.
53. 3:07Or you can stand in the water for four seconds
54. 3:10and catch the biggest fish you’ve ever caught in your entire life.
55. 3:13He goes, it’s not the outcome, it’s that you’re in the water.
56. 3:16So, if you think of songwriting and sessions as a fishing expedition,
57. 3:22you can sit out there for hours and it wasn’t the day for it.
58. 3:26Or you can sit out there for no time and you had a great day.
59. 3:31So it’s very much just like a thing you do every day
60. 3:36for the sake of the great ones that might happen today
61. 3:39and might happen a week from now.
62. 3:40When I was young, I do remember those songs just [snaps].
63. 3:43And there's another and another and another, and it still happens.
64. 3:47But after however many hundreds of songs,
65. 3:50it becomes new you versus old you
66. 3:52saying something that you’ve said from an entirely different perspective.
67. 3:57So as far as locking into a song
68. 4:00and knowing when you’ve found the song’s proper path,
69. 4:04if I was going to, not advise, but opine,
70. 4:08I would say break all the rules.
71. 4:11Run through all the walls and do not conform.
72. 4:15And last but not least, sometimes we don't know our best work.
73. 4:19I’ve put songs away that I’ve years later played for people
74. 4:22and have ended up on records because they had to tell me what it is.
75. 4:27You're going to have to listen to somebody
76. 4:29and you're going to have to take advice from someone.
77. 4:32And if you can find that one person to trust with your process,
78. 4:38you're really lucky to have that person.