Before being the successful novelist and writing the book ‘Eat, Pray, Love’, Elizabeth Gilbert worked as a journalist for GQ and interviewed the famous Tom Waits. I was listening to her on the radio not too long ago as she spoke about the creative process with the famous musician:
‘[Tom Waits] spoke about the creative process, I think, more articulately than anyone I have ever heard. He was talking about how every song has a distinctive identity that it comes into the world with, and it needs to be taken in different ways. He said there are songs that you have to sneak up on like you’re hunting for a rare bird, and there are songs that come fully intact like a dream taken through a straw. There are songs that you find little bits of like pieces of gum you find underneath the desk, and you scrape them off and you put them together and you make something out of it.
And there are songs, he said, that need to be bullied. He said he’s been in the studio working on a song and the whole album is done and this one song won’t give itself over and — everyone’s gotten used to seeing him do things like this — he’ll march up and down the studio talking to the song, saying ‘The rest of the family is in the car! We’re all going on vacation! You’re coming along or not? You’ve got 10 minutes or else you’re getting left behind!’
I just thought this was great! Tom Waits is an excellent storyteller, and has a gift for turning anything into a little gem that will make you smile and think at the same time
But you have to wonder, how does inspiration come to all these artists? Are these songs really some entities that they treat differently according to their ‘personality’? It is a beautiful metaphor, and there is a little more to the story:
‘A melody came to him and because he had no pen and paper and was of course, driving, there was no way for him to record his idea. At first, he became frustrated and angry, but then he looked to the sky and said to the muse:
‘Excuse me. Can you not see that I’m driving? If you’re serious about wanting to exist then I spend eight hours a day in the studio. You’re welcome to come and visit me when I’m sitting at my piano. Otherwise, leave me alone and go bother Leonard Cohen.’
The visit of the muse, such an old and magical idea, I don’t believe it literally exists of course, but who hasn’t had one of these moments of revelation, when we are doing anything involving even the smallest part of creativity, it’s just a funny and poetic idea that inspiration could come from the outside instead of the inside.
I have always wonder why people are more creative than others, why people are more creative at certain periods of their life, why certain brain developmental disabilities make people even more creative (aren’t many autistic people extremely gifted musicians?).
Ha! The mysteries of the brain, or if you prefer, the mysteries of the muse according to Tom Waits.