On Creative Experimentation
Yesterday I was listening to an interview with Mark Hollis taken in 1998 where he was mostly talking about his creative process. In all the subsequent albums after his pop success, he was experimenting with different processes in the studio. What I’ve found in practice is that those kinds of experiments don’t always work out for the audience; audiences of pop music want to hear songs that are through-composed and completed. Don’t get me wrong—I like experimentation and I think it’s a way to activate your right hemisphere. In our left hemisphere, we tend to be too methodical, but I think there has to be a midpoint where you incorporate both of those things.
While working on Camera Ion, it evolved from the original version which was more of an improvisation on a synthesizer where I was looking for sounds based on the metaphors (or pun) of “camera eye” and “ions”. If thinking in terms of hemispheres, I was in my right hemisphere. In many interviews with creative people, they will say something similar: when they’re experimenting there are happy accidents that arise and you try to incorporate those into a song structure. But I find that those kinds of songs tend to meander too much. I understand that you can create a verse out of anything or anything could be a chorus or bridge, but I like to bring it back to traditional songwriting where there is an actual verse and an actual chorus. My recent experiment on Ion is an exploration of what you can do from both hemispheres as a mapping over a song structure using the same sounds that you had used in the experiments. But in a band situation where the guitar player comes up with a riff, how does that fit in? You want it to be democratic, but democratic music tends to be more watered-down. Democratic music can work in a situation where people are expecting to hear democracy. Rush always wrote as a band—no one was doing all the writing. That worked for them as well as the audience because they were expecting it. But when I listen to that music I don’t hear strong songwriting. That’s what I’m expecting as someone who writes. Ideally, I’d want to find a happy medium between a good song structure and a song that has a sound. All the Talk Talk hits in the 1980s had that sound and that’s what I liked about them. But could he have continued doing that? I think he probably could have. It’s the typical situation where after the first couple of successful songs or albums the artists tend to want to not repeat themselves. I think it’s okay to repeat yourself. The song structure is generative enough to do that—even though it’s just verses and choruses. I think you can still do a lot with that. What I’m starting to realize is that you can work from both the right and left hemispheres. It’s a good way to work.
Apparently, Mark Hollis died in 2019. I didn’t know. He left an interesting legacy and he was an interesting guy. I really liked his approach, even though it didn’t produce hits. We want it to be Art as much as possible.
9/27/2023
[9/27/2025: AI has thrown a curve ball into art-making because it is taking away those unique things that have been unique to music production. Now we have to focus on art direction and curation: the visuals, the video, the social aspects with all the right memes. Not that that didn’t happen in 1981 with MTV. There’s always going to be things that are going to be left out, which is different than things being taken away. You can always use the same old cliche that things are always changing, but what matters is if you have something interesting to do in the adaptations].
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