This is me, taking a break. On a fence. As you do.
Hugh is also on a break, but I made him take this photo of me anyway.
It was a slow day in the studio, the kind of day when writing a melody or arranging a bridge feels like grabbing at a plume of smoke with your bare hands. You feel as though you know how it should sound and what it should say but nothing you do comes close.
In creative pursuits especially, the mythology of 'inspiration' can dictate whether it is a good day in the studio... or not. It is tempting, when things aren't working out, to say you are "feeling uninspired", call it quits, take a nap and eat a sandwich.
You're just not feeling it.
Nothing is coming to you.
The Inspiration Fairy has forsaken you for some other would-be genius. The traitor.
Much as I would advocate a nap as a solution for many of life's problems, this is not one of those times. The biggest lesson to learn in making is that you make a lot of "bad" stuff before you come out with something half decent... let alone the act of creative brilliance that you were aiming for. This is still a fairly new revelation for me, but Hugh has it down. He perseveres, turning a song over and over in his head long after I've given it up for dead for the day, ripped my headphones off and run out into the sunshine.
On this particular day I think a break did us both good. We came back firing and worked out a perfect solution to our arrangement problem. You could say that the Inspiration Fairy finally came to the party... but I prefer to think that sometimes you just need to hustle- the good ideas only come when all the bad ones have been exhausted.
G