A Kandinsky painting. Photo borrowed from here.
On Monday I held the first of twelve artist’s workshops and our group turned out to be a small, intimate one.
Perfect, really. 🙂
All in all, we were five budding artists/creatives at the meetup and today I felt like sharing one of the topics that came up, since I have a budding relationship to this area of creativity myself.
The theme and nature of songwriting.
Now, as a fellow artist said on Monday, most musicians have the songwriting process backwards; they sit down with their guitar or other instrument and try to come up with a song. (Not that there really is any right or wrong way – whatever works is good). 🙂
However, the way she, and I, experience the nature of songs, is that they simply come on their own.
If one is sensitive enough, to this very light and high-vibrational energy , all one has to do is listen.
The song, the melody and the text is already there, but it is the job of the musician to “bring it down to earth”. Otherwise, it will just keep floating around in the ether – which of course is also fine – but not everyone is able to hear it “up there”. 😉
I’ve found that one of the most crippling misconceptions that used to hold me back, was that “writing songs was something difficult” and “something for the few and especially talented”. Which in turn gives art, and the making of it, a certain status which has never been the point of art. Art is not to be “for the few”. It’s for everyone. It is in everyone.
Now, I haven’t had that much experience with songwriting myself, though I’ve always been pulled toward music. I began playing the guitar as twelve or thirteen, quickly decided I didn’t want to continue as I didn’t understand why I had to know everyone else’s songs ; I wanted to write my own and I’d thought that was the point of the lessons. (Of course, knowing a bit more might have been handy now.) Later on, I started singing in a choir, until I started high school and for some reason gave it up.
The experience I have had with the energy of songs, of music, has been on and off during the previous couple of years, since I was 24, actually. Depending on how grounded I was, how receptive I allowed myself to be, I’ve had at least a handful of songs come to me. I just haven’t caught them when they were there.
On Monday, talking to a fellow songwriter about this I said:
“My problem is I don’t know how to get it (the song) out?”
She’d answered: “Well, record it on your phone, sing it, hum it… Whatever works for you”.
Well… Of course!
It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought of this myself; I had. But I had been too scared to actually do it. I had not done it, out of fear. And the voice of fear always take the same route: What will other people say? Oh God, I also have a horrid singing-voice… What am I suppose to do with the songs if they get into reality? Can I really handle the task of bringing them into the world? So I’d put up all of these obstacles, before I’d even hummed a note… I’ll take another route this time… seeing as what I’ve learnt this week is that it’s not about perfection, it’s about action.
It’s about letting art, the creative force, whatever form it takes, take form through you and trust the process.
So it is simple enough really: just do it. You’ll find a way. Or a way will find you. ❤
Have a wonderful weekend!
Charlotte Luxhoej.com 