Repetition v. the Road Not Taken
Many musicians and bands are hit with the criticism that all of their songs sound the same. I used to complain about this too, and it was always a band that was easy to hate. For a millennial, the easiest target has always been Nickelback. You wouldn't dare say that all of Leonard Cohen's songs sound the same, or the Beatles, or Bob Dylan. No, it has to be the sort of act where no one will really challenge you. Nickelback has always been everyone's safe space of hate, which is odd for a band that has sold fifty million albums.
You might say people don't criticize those other musicians because all of their songs don't in fact sound like one another. However, in those cases, their careers are over. And the one who is still going (Dylan) has been doing it for sixty years, so we have a viable sample that's long enough to illustrate the point: If you create long enough, variation will just happen. My gut tells me that if Nickelback goes for six decades, their songs will not all sound the same.
"All songs" is always shortsighted. If by "all songs" you mean the dozen or so that find their way onto mainstream playlists and radio, then, yes, it's likely those songs have significant sonic and conceptual overlap. It's the same musicians, the same songwriters, the same vocalists, and they're all trying to keep their careers going with what got them there in the first place.
Nonetheless, the charge of repetition is such a pointed criticism. With one fell swoop of judgment, you can strip away an artist's entire worth and fully dismiss them by simply saying they could have released that one song in 2004 and called it a day. All of their work since is disposable and without significant artistic, or cultural, value. You're telling them that ever since that moment they were successfully artistic, they haven't been.
But is it really so bad if all of your art sounds or looks similar? No artist sets out with the goal of being repetitive, yet we all are. Art critic, David Sylvester, once said this about the plight of the artist in our culture:
Artists must be allowed to go through bad periods! They must be allowed to do bad work! They must be allowed to get in a mess! They must be allowed to have dud experiments! They must also be allowed to have periods where they repeat themselves in a rather aimless, fruitless way before they can pick up and go on. The kind of attention that they get now, the kind of atmosphere of excitement which attends today the creation of works of art, the way that everything is done too much in the public eye, it’s really too much. The pressures are of a kind which are anti-creative.
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of that quote from Sylvester is that he said it to the BBC in 1969. If it was true fifty seven years ago --before the internet, before social media, before cell phones-- then imagine how true it is in 2026.
There is a romanticism about sailing off into new artistic waters every time you sit down to work, but a holy vigil is held when you drop anchor in a single spot too. It's the choice between walking the trail you've never walked or becoming intimately acquainted with one you already have. No matter the artist or their medium, there was a time when that artist sat somewhere, likely alone, and did their work. And while there are exceptions, my hunch is that the vast, vast, vast majority of them did it for no other reason than because they wanted to. They might be geniuses or amateurs; they might be humble or insufferable; they might think they're the greatest creative who ever lived, they might take themselves too seriously, they may think the work they're doing is going to give them love and money and attention. But in the moment, most art is created in a lonely environment where nothing is guaranteed. It's you and the thing you're working on. As Jack White would later sing...
Well, you're in your little room
and you're working on something good
But if it's really good
you're gonna need a bigger room
And when you're in the bigger room
You might not know what to do
You have to think of how you got started
sitting in your little room
When you strip it all back to that quiet moment, you realize how stupid the worry of repeating yourself really is. The final accounting is always going to tell the same thing for all of us: You will default to what you know, but as long as you keep working, you will occasionally move away from what you know. The result will be a body of work that has embarrassingly obvious repetitions, the wells you drew water from over and over and over, but also those moments when you didn't feel like drawing from those familiar wells. You might go right back to the familiar on the next song, story, or brushstroke, but you will have those moments of creative rebellion -- sometimes by accident, or sometimes just because you were bored that day.
These journals hover around the same ideas; I see them listed in my archives and realize that I'm preoccupied with the same crap. Maybe there's a new metaphor here and there, but it's the same crap. It's interesting crap, but it's plenty repetitive.
Same goes for my songs. Do you know how many of my songs use some combination of Eminor, Cmaj7, Dmaj7, and B7? Depending on how generous you were feeling, "Streetcorner Rainstorm," "Reginald," "The Girls You Sang to Sleep," "The One That Isn't Burned," and "Rift" could be accused of being the same song. They use the same chords, the same progressions of those chords, and even some of the same very specific variations.
Do you know why I draw from this well so much? Because I like it. I like the way those chords sound; I like working in those vocal ranges; I like how often they fit with ideas in my songs. I'm not specifically trying to be repetitive, I just don't care if I am. I know that if I keep working, the outliers will come. Eventually, a day will come when I have just enough resistance as my fingers reach for those chords. I'll say "Man, you use those chords so much. Let's do something else today." That's all it takes.
Maybe Nickelback's songs do all sound the same. Candidly, I have no idea; my concept of Nickelback is tied to about five songs from more than 15 years ago. They might be one of the most versatile bands by now and I would have no idea, and I doubt anyone would suddenly start giving them credit for it if they were.
Breaking down the word "repetition," you get "re" and "petition." That you're "asking" for something each time you reach down into that familiar well feels important. I'll turn to Robert Frost and perhaps his best known poem, but perhaps also his most misinterpreted:
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
This poem is often used for its closing couplet:
I took the one less traveled by
and that has made all the difference.
The lesson often attached to this poem is that it is a celebration of going down the less-traveled paths throughout our lives, rebelling against comfort zones and what is familiar. But if we back up the quote a few lines, the narrator tells us something very different:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
He's not telling us this in celebration; he's telling us with a sigh. Years and years from now, he will tell people that he took the road less traveled, and while he acknowledges that such a choice "has made all the difference," it's clear that this difference has not been particularly positive. Constantly pursuing that new, less-traveled path comes at a cost. It's not a romantic choice to take that path; that path is just really, really challenging, and not always in ways that are good for you. At the very least, the sigh suggests he's disappointed at what he left behind at that fork in the road. He's "sorry I could not travel both." At the worst, the sigh suggests he thinks he made the wrong decision.
Embedded in that explanation is that sometimes what is worn and familiar is good for you. It's not always so bad to take the easier road; the hard road isn't good just because it's hard, and the easy road isn't bad just because it's easy.
The narrator's desire to travel down both roads is a perfect illustration of this entire discourse. It isn't that we always want the comfort over the challenge, or the challenge over the comfort, but it's that we don't want one at the expense of the other. But ultimately, the narrator, after some intensive deliberation, does choose one.
Contrast that with Sylvia Plath's fig tree in The Bell Jar, whose narrator is unable to make the decision:
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
Frost shows that the fear Esther Greenwood --the narrator of The Bell Jar-- feels about "choosing one meant losing all the rest" is absolutely justified. There is no looking at the bright side; you do lose things when you make a decision. Despite different (in)actions, both narrators arrive at the same conclusion: Do something.
I see another Em, Cmaj7, and Dmaj7 song ("Rivers Rise") on the upcoming record and I take heart; repetitions inherently mean we are doing something. Whether it's a road less traveled doesn't matter; it's that you're on the road at all -- And that has made all the difference. Even for Nickelback.
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