You're in the Zone
I have given consistent effort to songwriting over the last fifteen years, but the results have tended to be more sporadic. Maybe there’s one new song in March, then nothing for a summer, then six songs in September. It feels like a spigot that turns off and on, yet a spigot you have, at best, limited control over. During those times, ideas flow freely, work begets results, and you feel, every time, like you have figured something out about the mysterious creative process. You feel like this time, you won’t come out of this prolific zone you’ve found yourself in.
Inevitably, you do. The spigot shuts off just as quickly —and mysteriously— as it turned on. I have reflected a lot on this “zone” that tends to appear every so often. Whenever I notice its presence, I study it, look at the current elements of my life at the time, and think of ways I might coax it into sticking around.
I think this “zone” that I’m speaking of might be in the same neighborhood as the “Muse” that has been a trope of musical creation since almost the beginning. Though I love the unexplained elements of music creation, I don’t like anything that places its creation squarely in the hands of some magical power. People are able to make art because they sit down and put in the time it takes to make art. But where does that zone, or muse, or whatever, come from? It's undeniably present, whatever it is.
A lot of people claim that you ought to be active in seeking new experiences to keep this zone present, regularly refreshing your mental palette, and replacing those stagnant waters with fresh mountain rains. Though this is viable, it’s also incomplete. New experiences do not always refresh the waters instantly. Rather, to stick with our metaphor, the new experiences are the snows up in the mountains that take time to trickle down to the rivers below.
The delay is wildly inconsistent. I went to the Black Hills in October 2018, and within three months I had written an album’s worth of songs about it (These Hills Are Gonna Rise). But then take “Carolina Mountain Girl” from that same record: The story that spawned that song occurred in 2012, yet the song was written in 2016, and recorded in 2018.
The “Why” that such a timeline variance poses is the mysterious part. Why does one experience trigger immediate creative output, where another equally-novel experience percolates for years before manifesting into something? Why do some things demand immediate attention, where others are happy enough to sit back and relax, waiting for their time in the sun?
I am urged to lean hard into the mystical sense of songwriting to develop an answer, believing that these songs sat comfortably in the wings of the cosmos awaiting their moment, but then we’re right back to being Muse-adjacent. Yet, had I written “Carolina Mountain Girl” in 2012, it would have been a much different song. As it stands, it’s one of my more well-realized pieces of music. That song knows exactly what it is. That is not remotely true for much of my wider catalog.
But songs emerge when they do because it is when the idea meets the desire meets the work ethic —a convergence of factors that, without all present, makes the opportunity evaporate. It isn’t that “Carolina Mountain Girl” could only emerge in 2016, that was just when all of these elements harmoniously coexisted.
You're now left with a “what” question: What happened to get those elements to manifest? The even bigger question is whether or not that thing that happened is repeatable, and perhaps more importantly, controllable? I have come to think of art creation a bit like being a hitter in baseball. Sometimes you hit a ball 107 mph right at the shortstop. It’s an out, but you can’t walk back to the dugout thinking you failed; it just didn’t break your way. The result was bad; the process was not. The next time you might hit a 42-mph dribbler down the third-base line that turns into a hit. Baseball, and by extension, Life, is weird.
In this way I am able to reconcile how you can be, and not be, in control of your results simultaneously. To quote Forrest Gump: “I don't know if we each have a destiny, or if we're all just floating around accidental—like on a breeze, but I think maybe it's both. Maybe both is happening at the same time.” Why did the 107-mph liner go right at the shortstop? I have no idea. But I do know that if you hit 107-mph line drives every at-bat, you’ll be in the Hall of Fame.
The results aren’t repeatable; they are barely even controllable. But the process is. This is a fact I’ve known about baseball for twenty five years. Why I haven’t thought about it more often in an artistic context, I’m not totally sure.
This whole thing echoes the “Luck is the residue of Design” concept —a quote attributed to MLB player, manager, and executive, Branch Rickey (he was the executive who signed Jackie Robinson, if you’d like a bit of context), but also randomly attributed to the poet, John Milton, so take your pick. Regardless, it serves as a succinct thought that creates space for all these types of inconsistencies.