Songwriting & the Zone of Risk
If one of the principal or perhaps the principal charm of music is that of theme and variation, it stands to reason that the original musical or musical-lyrical theme stated must bear a certain fierce originality from which to develop the variations. The fierce originality to which I refer does not mean it’s merely “different” than musical/lyrical themes that came before, but that it bears the stamp of an episode/experience that was original to the composer. The melody-harmony-rhythm-verse may, indeed, be rather similar to much that has come before (that’s normal), but its originality is to be found in the vestiges of the unique experience of the song’s creation.
Each good or great song that is written requires the songwriter to journey outside of the world of pure monetized exchange that, tragically, defines so much of our experience in this society. The songwriter must, in fact, enter into what I call “a zone of risk.” This zone is a place where inspiration may visit us, but to enter it requires sacrifice and a willingness to exist for a time — and, collectively, over the course of one’s life — in realms that are, to some degree, unmoored or unstable. It is precisely this creaking lack of solidity that enables valuable creation to occur.* This is why people who conform to the cool calculus that converts a world of subjects — river subjects, coyote subjects, orangutan subjects, sea urchin subjects, people subjects — into objects to be exploited will always make dismal songwriters.
Understanding that this world is made of subjects with identities, with individual stories and longings and individual will enables the openness and empathy needed to write a song which contains some fierce originality, which retains some of the residue of a journey (however brief) outside of cruelty and into vulnerability (which is not the same as weakness). A person who conforms too strongly to the cult of money and status that defines much Western culture very likely does not for long possess the ability to create something beautiful. However, the journey into risk and love heard in a Thelonious Monk composition, for example, and in the improvisations Monk does upon the composition describe the opposite impulse to America’s sinister and apocalyptic project of mass desacralization.
