The other day, I was gorging my way through a heaping stew of internet detritus tailored specifically for me and my addiction centers when I stumbled on a piece of innocuous advice to “work like a lion.”

As a dude, I initially assumed this advice meant that I should get a dozen women to do all the work for me while I sleep 20 hours a day, since that’s my understanding of what male lions do.

But apparently, no. That wasn’t the point being made. The quote comes from one Naval Ravikant, a former entrepreneur-turned-investor-turned-life guru with a fairly cultish following among a certain Silicon Valley set.

Here he is explaining. Basically, he sees himself as a lion, someone who wants to train hard, hunt aggressively when the opportunity arises, and then rest a lot. He believes most of modern work is set up for people to graze like cows, a little bit each day in 9-to-5 doses. In his opinion, that’s not how to get the best of ourselves, creatively and intellectually. Instead, we should go all out in short binges of inspiration, and then rest, reassess, and train up for the next one.

Setting aside for a second the accuracy of his understanding of lions or how cows clearly won out evolutionarily, this isn’t a crazy idea.

Lots of artists and musicians like to work in small binges of inspiration. In his famous letter (nay, fax) to Nirvana, Steve Albini talks about the advantages of getting into a studio for a compressed period of time and banging something out, as opposed to stressing about it for a prolonged period of time. As he says, “If a record takes more than a week to make, somebody’s fucking up.”

That’s often how records have been made historically, and the list of examples are numerous. Bob Dylan made Blood on the Tracks in six total studio days, following a break up and a few of months of painting classes. Bon Iver made For Emma, Forever Ago in a lonely haze of experimentation in a cabin for three months where he hunted his own food. Famously, The Beatles’ Let It Be was largely written and recorded in three well-documented weeks (now compressed into eight hours of footage).

I’ve written about a similar idea before. Specifically, I tend to get obsessed with projects from time to time, and find it really useful to indulge those obsessions while I have them. Last year, I did a five day recording retreat in Iceland, and it was really productive and valuable for the space it allowed me.

That said, I’m not sure about the whole lion metaphor — for me, it’s often more like the idea or project is the lion, and I’m the one being mauled by it. I’ve got no choice but to just let go and let it happen, while I get gored around the savannah by its vigorous intensity.

The better analogy for me would be a slingshot.

Basically, in some moments, there’s a confluence of circumstances that conspires to create a slingshot under tension pointing in the direction you want to go. All you’ve got to do is climb up into it, and you’ll be hurled forward with wild abandon, o’er fields, o’er hedgerows, o’er castle walls, etc.

I love a slingshot. Creativity can feel so effortless in those moments. The key is the relationship between the tension that propels you and the abandon required to take advantage of it. First, the tension: You need ideas, inputs, curiosity, relevance, details mapped out in your brain, some ambitious hint of beauty unrealized floating at the edge of your vision, maybe a big opportunity — all things that build the tension on the stretchy rubber band thingy.

Then, the abandon: After you climb in, whablam! Away you go. This is when you need to let go and let it happen, which may mean ignoring other important stuff on your plate in order to fly. A good slingshot has both things: A build up of creative tension and the ability to give yourself over to it fully.

But the slingshot is not the only way. Whenever I read advice on the internet, my first instinct is to disagree with it because I’m a contrarian (or contrar-IAN, as my wife likes to say). Lucky for me, it often works out well since the opposite of good advice is often also pretty good advice.

In this case, I’ll call the opposite of the slingshot the slog.

Maybe not as romantic or exciting sounding, but the slog is important too. The sloggers are the ones who make it through, no matter what. When I think of a slog, I think of that Norwegian commando in World War II who had to amputate his own toes and then travel like 200 miles across mountains and fjords to make it to safety. That guy knew the value of a little bit each day, day after day, to reach a goal.

In fact, the world is littered with the unfinished arcs of the slingshotters, people and projects that were flung in a certain direction but didn’t land where they intended and just kinda stayed there in crumpled heaps. In other words, unfinished work. The sloggers don’t settle for that shit.

A slog is when you show up to work even when you’re not feeling super-inspired. Sometimes you need to force yourself. Sometimes your creative work feels like a steady job, instead of being struck by a bolt of transcendent lightning. Slogging has tons of advantages: You can compound your growth and progress steadily over time, you have room to try stuff and then consider it before committing to it, you can wrestle with ideas slowly, you can make progress on stuff even when you’re not all aglow with electricity, etc. There’s an embrace of discomfort with the slog.

The flipside is that sometimes the slog can be really punishing. Sometimes you can get lost in the details, lose sight of perspective, and forget where you’re going. Sometimes you’re slogging on the wrong stuff. And sometimes you wind up near death on the Swedish border without your toes. The slog ain’t always easy or exciting.

There are tons of artists who know the value of the slog. Nick Cave describes his creative work as the exact opposite of what Naval describes: “For me, songwriting is essentially an office job: it’s getting up in the morning, sitting down at nine o’clock, and working away at things.” Gradually, steadily, bit by bit, day by day over time.

Some other examples of sloggers off the top of my head include Leonard Cohen, Philip Glass, Stephen King, D’Angelo, etc.

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For me personally, I’ve come to believe that my best creative process has room for both the slingshot and the slog. When I see a slingshot set up, I’ll dive in and let it take me. But also, I’ve probably made a lot more progress in my life by embracing the slog, one foot after another, moving forward step by step, diligently and gradually. Most of my projects involve both. Sometimes one project gets the slingshot, while another gets the slog.

And sometimes the work you do on a slog ends up creating the tension for your next slingshot.

So this week, I challenge you to think about the slingshot and the slog. If you don’t have a slingshot ready, then embrace the slog. Keep going and see what happens. And if you’ve been slogging a long time, then maybe look around and see if there’s a slingshot handy you can use instead.

What do you think? Are you currently in a slingshot or on a slog?

Leave a comment

Wishing you luck in whatever way you like to travel,
Ian

Ian Temple
ian@soundfly.com

Back to School Sale Underway!

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Five Interesting Things

1. Tracking musical influences via MusicEchoes.xyz

Here’s a fun thing — this website from allows you to type in an artist name, and it will surface their stated influences. One reason I like it is because it’s their actual influences, rather than some algorithmic, music-genome-style attempt to distill their influences from their music — so typing in Radiohead pulls up Krzysztof Penderecki rather than U2 or whatever an algorithmic playlist would select. Great way to explore music or accidentally spend 5 hours listening to German experimental band Can because Hauschka mentioned it once.

2. In Defense of Harmonious Obsession

I already shared my piece on obsession above. Well, I was glad to see a more well-researched, expert take on the same topic on ’s substack, “In Defense of Harmonious Obsession.” This take is from of the On Fire substack, and seeks to upset the generally accepted dichotomy in the field of psychology between “harmonious” (good) and “obsessive” (bad) passion by suggesting that you can also have harmonious obsession sometimes. Resonates to me!

3. More evidence that AI is bad for learning

If you read this newsletter, this won’t be news to you, but generative AI isn’t great for learning, especially in the classroom and as currently used. has a good summary of some of the recent research showing how students using AI negatively impacts their learning. Basically, learning requires effort and discomfort. AI prioritizes efficiency and convenience. Those two things are at odds.

4. How to Read Like an Artist

I’m doing this 30 Days of Improvisation course right now with Kiefer. It’s a lesson a day on improvisation for 30 days, which is a lot. It’s pretty easy to get totally overwhelmed by it. I found the principles in this zine / listicle from about how to have a great relationship with reading books to be useful for both how to listen to music and how to learn stuff from a course — basically, don’t be afraid to skim, skip, etc., turn on airplane mode, listen with a pencil, etc. Give it a shot!

5. OPIA Composer Challenge underway!

Composers, you’re invited! The OPIA Discord I moderate has launched a new composer challenge for people interested in neoclassical and electronic music, and the theme is HOPE. You can read the details here, or feel free to join the Discord if you want to take part. The winners will have their tracks featured on the next compilation released by the OPIA label.

“It’s lovely. It’s the sort of music that doesn’t really go anywhere. Your grandfather would have found it frustrating, but I really enjoy it.”

That was my Granny’s response to a tape (yes, cassette tape) I made her of me playing some songs I’d written on the piano in college.

It stuck with me because, well, first of all, “I like it but others wouldn’t” is such a funny backhanded compliment, and I love a backhanded compliment. They feel a little out of style these days, and I feel they’re worth preserving.

But also I didn’t expect that specific comment. I didn’t think of my music as “not going anywhere.” I also didn’t really think of it as going somewhere either. I suppose I hadn’t really considered its whereabouts at all or whether it was going or staying put.

But once she said it, I immediately heard what she was saying. Back then, I was obsessed with Yann Tiersen’s Amélie score, like every other piano-inclined 18 year old in 2003. I loved the way those songs had a simple melody over a looped progression that repeated and grew, and then he’d add new voices in the piano arrangement over time, increasing the intensity until it felt like you were playing the equivalent of five different instruments with your two hands.

So my songs were like that: looped progressions with simple melodies that escalate and evolve a bit. They did “go somewhere” in terms of notes leading to other, different notes and whatnot, but there wasn’t a huge sense of progression, especially harmonically.

And what they definitely didn’t have was a lot of V to I resolutions, which for a certain audience is the only somewhere worth going to, if you know what I mean. When you listen to Bach or Mozart, there are those moments when the harmony seems to tumble downhill like a stream. The IV chord bounces up to the VII, then falls down to the iii, then up to the VI, then down to the ii, then up to the V, and home.

I understand the allure. What a delightfully organized rivulet. What a pleasing babble for this brook to have. It all feels so ordered and mathematical and elegant.

But does a song have to go somewhere like that? I’m not always in the mood for the direct path, and sometimes I don’t even want to go downhill at all. Maybe I want to clamber up some rocks instead, or sit comfortably on a hillock looking up at the sky.

In other words, I want a wider set of options here: Where are all the places a song can go? How? And what journey am I trying to take my audience on, if one at all?

If you think about it for a moment, there are tons of ways for songs to travel. Bach does it through harmonic structure. Bob Dylan does it through lyrical sagas, tales, and love stories. Jazz musicians often do it through improvisation and dissonance. Electronic musicians do it through drops and builds. Phish does it through 45 minute improvised jams. John Cage does it by changing a note every year or two for 600+ years (at least in the case of the organ at Halberstadt).

One of the most obvious ways for a song to go somewhere is through a narrative arc — the building of drama via escalating ladder rungs of tension and escalation that leaves you changed at the end.

When I chatted with Charlie Harding for my podcast episode on epic pop songs, he talked about the “epic” structure of pop music — the way it starts with a verse, then builds through a pre-chorus, then hits the chorus, then maybe repeats but with new elements added as the drama builds, then goes to a bridge which is somewhat unexpected and maybe adds a new twist, before erupting into a final climactic chorus or post-chorus. It’s storytelling gold — a template with natural peaks and valleys, tension and resolution built in. The structure has a ready-made, customizable journey within it that helps you know where to go.

But “songs as stories” can also feel a little too on the nose to me sometimes. Not every song needs to narrate a struggle through rising tension to cathartic resolution. I remember seeing ambient group A Winged Victory for the Sullen performing in a cathedral with a string section in Brooklyn once, and I’m not sure those songs told concrete stories or went anywhere — but I certainly did. My emancipated spirit was bouncing around the rafters among the echoes of the bowed drones in transcendent bliss. Sometimes the journey is a mental one.

There are plenty of other examples of music that seems to not “go anywhere.” In the Jad Abumrad podcast Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, members of Fela’s band talk about what it was like to play the same couple notes on repeat for an hour, with no changes whatsoever — and members of the audience talk about getting lost in a kind of hypnotic trance to the repetitions in the music. One listener calls it “the spiral,” Fela calls it a “swirl.” Both imply a circular journey as opposed to a linear one. There’s still some change happening. It’s not static. Just circular.

My friend has written a lot on how groove-based music is often built on different structural elements than narrative music — particularly rhythm and meter, timbre and mood, syncopation and call-and-response. Not coincidentally, I know he often likes illustrating modern music theory using circles, such as his incredible Groove Pizza or his chord chart circles. It makes sense.

And then, of course, there’s music that combines elements of both: hip-hop tracks with looping samples that still have a chorus, a narrative, and a build to them, or pop songs built on repetitive beats and loops, or minimalist pieces like Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” that is somehow both endlessly repetitive and circular while also taking you on a fairly epic narrative journey through a slowly evolving series of chord changes.

The reason I’m thinking about all this is because I’m working on a song right now, and I’m not quite sure what it is yet or where it’s going. I’m still unwrapping it, trying to discover what it wants to be and if it should go anywhere. Like Amélie herself, the song is an eccentric little number trying to figure out how to be in the world, and I’m trying to shepherd it through its adolescence. It’s a messy time.

This article in essence is me asking myself: Where should it go? I could try to force it into a certain structure — a verse-chorus structure, or an AABA structure, or more of a theme-and-variation-style motivic development. There are so many wonderful models for what a grownup song can be in this world, from musical theater performer (through-composed) to tenured professor (math rock). I often find it helpful to adapt an idea for a song into a template.

But I could also build it in escalating circles, like Fela’s swirls. I can compose looping patterns, adding stuff and taking it away as needed to keep the energy high — let the orchestration and arrangement drive it forward. Music is so fractal in this way. You can zoom out, adding in a variety of new parts and voices to create something big and sweeping, and that can increase a song’s emotional footprint. Or you can do the opposite and zoom in, taking everything else away except for a single voice full of texture and dynamics. In each case, the sonic potential fans out before you with incredible depth.

And then there are also little micro-journeys you can go on along the way, arranging decisions you can make that can bring the landscape of your travels into starker relief. When you repeat something many times in a row, the smallest change can unleash a torrent of energy, like a slight change in the current. Contrasts can hit like a thunderstorm, completely remaking the scene from one of stability to instability.

I think I have an idea now of what I want to do with this piece. I do want to take you on a journey with it. I want us to start somewhere very different from where we end up, so there’s going to be a radical change of some sort within it. Emotionally, I want to move from a place that’s darker to one that’s more hopeful. I want to use repetition to my advantage, but also intersperse elements of surprise that make the path feel unexpected and a little windy. I want one big crashing push that knocks you off course. And I want it to not feel too long — more like a haphazard leap and run through the woods into a clearing than a slow march uphill to the light.

Now, I just need to figure out how to do all that through music.

What’s the point of all this? For one thing, I find it endlessly useful to have analogies that can help guide my composition work, and a “journey” might be a good one. For another, I love the reminder that music can and perhaps should take us somewhere emotionally, even if that looks different for different audiences and with different focal points. And finally, it’s helpful to consider that there are templates I can follow to help move my music along — or abandon if I’d rather do something different. It’s all possible.

In the immortal words of my buddy Kiefer, “It’s music, dude. Do whatever you want.”

As you think about your songs and where they’re going, the most important thing is that it’s a somewhere that matters to you, that makes you feel something meaningful and powerful. Wherever that place is and however you get there, take us with you because it sounds awesome.

After all, my Granny didn’t care where my songs were going, and my Granny knew what she was talking about.

So where are your songs going this week? Do you know? Do you care?

Happy travels,
Ian

Ian Temple
Founder, Soundfly
ian@soundfly.com

30% off Soundfly courses this month

It’s almost back to school time, so I thought I’d kick off my Fall sale a little early this year. Have I told you about Soundfly in a while? Basically, we have 60+ pre-recorded video courses, made with awesome distinctive artists like Kimbra, Com Truise, Son Lux, and others, as well as top educators like Dr. Ethan Hein or even Carnegie Hall.

Sign up this month with the code “BACKTOSCHOOL” for 30% off an annual or monthly subscription.

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Is it possible to be an artist without having a deep relationship with other art and music?

If we’re being truthful, the answer is probably Yes. Every once in a blue moon, I meet an artist who seems to have been birthed in a vacuum, without obvious heroes or years of study. They exist. They’re strange and singular, a product of some cosmic trick played on us by the gods.

But what’s much more common is that I meet an artist doing incredibly interesting things, with a passionate fanbase, and I discover that they have a deeper relationship with other artists, influences, and music than I could ever imagine.

They can list every piece of gear Prince used in Sign o’ the Times off the top of their head. They know every Bud Powell solo by heart. They reach out to bespoke synth manufacturers in Italy to get the same synth used by their favorite band. They spout snippets of obscure philosophy, reference dissident artists from imaginary countries, or rank one-handed piano concertos to taste.

They KNOW stuff. They’ve studied it, often on their own and with great obsession.

I recently hosted a course with the pop artist Betty Who on lyric writing, and in the conversations we’d have, she would whittle off lyrics from any number of artists she loves with total ease. Every concept we discussed, she’d call to mind three examples. The funny part is that I don’t think she even noticed or considered that it might be exceptional to have memorized literally hundreds (maybe thousands) of songs. She just did it as a matter of course.

It’s one of the most profound differences between the true professionals and the rest of us who aspire to be: Have you spent the time to be a student of the greats, to dig into the stuff that inspires you with depth and vigor?

The pianist Kiefer talks about how often he gets a new student who comes to him and asks the relatively banal question “how do I play like Herbie?” or “how do I sound like Robert Glasper?” To which he always replies: “How many Herbie songs have you learned? How many Glasper pieces do you know how to play?” And almost invariably, they look at him blankly. None. They didn’t think to do that.

Sometimes the easiest routes are the hardest to see.

So yeah, I don’t think it’s incredibly controversial to say that in order to be great at something you need to immerse yourself in it — to fall down its labyrinthine passageways in whatever way you can, to wrap the many dimensions of its messy existence around your shoulders like a misty cloak, to get lost in the petty dramas and exhilarating grandeurs of its unique development. You need to learn shit.

But here’s the thing: When I recently brought this up to some musicians in my accountability group, the response was mostly: “Yeah, we know, but our problem isn’t spending time listening to music — it’s that we’re taking in too much.”

It’s true. The content is a deluge. Every time I lift my phone, it’s like raising a firehose to my face and trying desperately to get a sip while waves of high-pressure water unceasingly blast my receptacles.

We’re taking in a lot. It’s just that very little of it is actually sticking with us. It’s not uncommon for people to listen to 8 hours straight of music in today’s day and age without being able to name a single artist they listened to (someone literally told me they did this yesterday).

And even those of us who are more careful with our intake, it’s still a f&*^ton. The problem isn’t that we’re not listening to enough music or digesting enough art, usually. The challenge is that we may be doing it without actually taking anything in.

So how do you deal with that? We artists need creative fodder — but we don’t have much time, we’re swamped with shit, and it’s tough to manage it all. How do you ensure that you’re constantly feeding your artistic vocabulary in a productive way without getting overwhelmed by it all?

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What’s Your Input Persona?

I came up with a concept for my Draft // Echo group last year that’s helped me, and maybe it’ll help you: The Input Persona. Basically, the idea is that you come up iwth a character based on your strengths that guides you in how you learn.

Let me give you an example. Questlove of the Roots is one of the voracious musical archivists of our time. It’s clear in everything he does — whether playing covers at a dime on Jimmy Fallon, producing films and documentaries on important events in music history, or DJing sets filled with obscure funk and soul music. In the Fall, I went to a DJ night he was hosting where he only played obscure live Prince songs — for like 6 hours straight. He knows recorded soul music inside and out.

I’d say his character is an Archivist. The Archivist, in fact. He could be hired by the government to preserve our cultural legacy.

I could never be like Questlove. I don’t know why, but it’s not the way I work. I’ve tried at times to gain a wider breadth of artistic knowledge, but for me, none of it sticks. I can’t remember specific record names or song titles. Maybe with flash cards I could get better, but I’ve got no natural file system the way he does.

That’s because I’m an Educator. That’s my input style. What I love to do and what I’m good at is going absurdly deep on something specific in service of sharing it with someone else.

For example, I recently decided to write an article on Chopin’s Raindrops Prelude. I learned the piece and started to analyze it, but before I knew it, I’d read 3 biographies of Chopin, watched about 12 YouTube videos, listened to multiple podcast episodes, and created a 30 minute podcast episode about it. It felt completely natural and enthralling to me.

Since I realized that’s how I work, I’ve started to lean into that. It’s a big reason I write these newsletters. And when I want to study a topic, I know that the best way to incentivize myself to do it and to ensure I truly digest it is through sharing it with someone else in some way.

There are many types of personas you could take on. Synthwave artist (and Soundfly instructor) Com Truise is a Hacker. He likes to try to go behind the scenes and understand the code behind everything he uses. He loves going down an internet rabbit hole on specific sounds trying to unearth everything about them and how they were made.

Film scorer Cristobal Tapia De Veer sounds like an Anthropologist (based on interviews I’ve read). He talks about how he’ll immerse himself in a particular musical tradition or subculture sometimes for weeks at a time to understand as much as he can about it.

My friend sees herself as a Hunter-Gatherer, which means that she’s someone always on the move, following little traces here and there, enjoying anything that’s edible. As a hunter-gatherer, she can’t afford to be picky, and while she often returns to places that have borne fruit in the past, she can’t be fixated. Always to the next one.

She’s even taken the concept one step further by asking herself: What does a hunter-gatherer do? And then using the answers to that question as creative inspiration throughout her process. For example, “if your environment doesn’t feed you, move on” and “make your own tools.” I can definitely see how those characteristics could be really fun problem-solving tools, constraints, or things to play with when making music.

I’m not sure this concept is groundbreaking — but it has stuck with me. Learning that educating others is one of the most effective ways for me to expand my own learning has guided me a lot over the past couple years. It’s become part of my daily and weekly practice in a variety of ways, from writing these newsletters to making random presentations for my family to showing something to a friend.

So... What’s your input persona? Based on what you know about yourself, what’s a good way that you can break through the constant noise and input new material in a way that will inspire and inform your art? Give it a name. Take on the role. And maybe it’ll help.

Leave a comment

Happy listening,
Ian

Ian Temple
Founder, Soundfly
ian@soundfly.com

In Other News…

Kiefer’s 30 Days of Improvisation starts next week.
Kiefer’s intensive course 30 Days of Improvisation starts NEXT WEEK. If you’re a pianist wanting to focus on soloing and improvisation for a month, this is definitely for you. You will learn A LOT. You get a lesson a day for 30 days, 5 group Zoom calls, and a lot of practice activities and exercises. Sign up here with the code “summersale” for 30% off the price.

I’m running my first marathon. Help pressure me to finish.
Not music-related, but I’m running a marathon in memory of my cousin’s son Max Robinson who passed away from leukemia only 5 years old. I’m raising money for Blood Cancer United to help fund treatments into leukemia and care for patients. If you’d like to heap pressure on me, I’d certainly appreciate a donation on my fundraising page here.

New music from friends and acquaintances.

• Alexandros Miaris from the band Electric Litany has re-released a solo work of his that I truly love. It’s called Selected Works for Film and Modular Orchestra, and is peaceful, full, and delicious.

• The band Memorial has a new soft, intimate album on the OPIA label I love so much (and whose Discord I moderate). It’s melancholy and soft, but really gorgeous and will make you smile.

• Another OPIA member (and past member of my Draft // Echo group) Tó Anjo has a short but stunning electronic EP called Worldbuilding, Vol. II that I can’t stop listening to, especially the song “Heavendrop.”

• My friend Kiefer has a groovy new album with Nate Smith, CARRTOONS, and Kenny Beats full of soulful beats and jazzy riffs called FATHERS. Kiefer also has a solo album coming out in September called Memory Bomb, and just dropped the first single here.

Sometimes I’m not sure I fully believe the things I write.

That’s why I write them. It’s a form of pressure-testing. I’m making the case to myself, and at the end of the process, I’ve got a much better idea of what I think.

But there are also times I write things that I want to believe, but I’m not sure I’m all the way there yet.

Someone I know once told me that if you’re not happy with something, you’ve got two options: You can change your circumstances or change your interpretation. (My brother’s response was: “what about changing someone else’s circumstances or interpretation?” which sounds a lot like it could come from a mobster holding a baseball bat: “I’m here to change your interpretation, buddy.”)

The only problem with this framework is that it’s not always easy to change your interpretation of something. Sometimes those interpretations are tied to deep-seated narratives and beliefs you might not even be fully aware of. We all tell ourselves a lot of stories about how the world works. It’s tough to update them.

A few years ago, my group Sontag Shogun published a cover of Thom Yorke’s “Dawn Chorus.” The original is so gorgeous. I love the way that the bass note changes, while the chord on top is on its own separate journey. There are so many tones that work over the bass notes, and Yorke cycles through many of them with his subtle chordal melody. He’s got the major 7th and 6th against the G, the suspended 4th over the D, and a G natural over B moving down to F#. I also love that I still to this day have no idea how many times he plays each chord before changing it. It seems to be different each time.

When we adapted it, we took the bass and this washy, tone-filled harmony and really strung it out in the middle. We buried the chords in these swelling tones that surrounded and subsumed it. We eased a deep low rumble into it. We teased some of the chord tones and extensions. And we tried to make the whole thing soar a bit with some sparkly sound design.

Helped along I’m sure by the popularity of the original, this cover has done well for us, especially the instrumental version. It has a few hundred thousand streams on both Spotify and Apple, and has popped up on thousands of personal playlists. What a nice surprise! It’s easy to get angry at the economics and dynamics of streaming, but this was one of those rare instances where the algorithms worked in our favor.

At some point, I started looking at some of these playlists in the Spotify for Artists app. There were a lot with nonsense names, a number with some version of “calming music,” and then a few more original ones, like “Do I clench my fists?” and “youknowwhatyoudid.”

But the one that always stuck with me the most was called “Why should I live?”

This morning, my wife sent me a Radiolab episode for my run called “The Holy Shiver.” I’m in marathon training right now, so welcoming suggestions. The episode basically asks the question: What’s the deal with goosebumps?

The reporters talk to a bunch of scientists and researchers. They explore the possible evolutionary origins of goosebumps, or at least the very tiny “muscle fibers attached to the base of every hair follicle under the skin.” These muscles would contract in moments of danger, threat, and high arousal, which could be useful for trapping a bit of extra warmth next to the skin or making the hair stand up on end to seem larger to a predator.

But sometimes you get goosebumps without the danger, what researchers call “aesthetic chills.” These are the chills you get when you listen to a piece of music that moves you deeply or you encounter an awe-inspiring natural vista or you feel the presence of some higher power.

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A researcher named Félix Schoeller has been looking into these “aesthetic chills” for the best part of a decade or more. First, he gathered a big database of things that people reported gave them the chills — research discoveries, meaningful conversations, music, big sports comebacks, religious experiences, etc. Then, he started to develop some theories around them.

Schoeller argues that we get aesthetic chills when we encounter something that disrupts our worldview, something that reshapes our understanding of how things work or gets us to see things in a new way. He says it’s when we’ve touched “the limits of our cognition,” or when our brains simply “cannot compute” something we’re experiencing given what we think we know about the world. The chills may be our bodies telling us to pay attention, something important is happening.

In his view, that’s also why different people get goosebumps from different things, since we often come into an experience with our own context and beliefs about what it all means.

Schoeller and his team have demonstrated this in a series of experiments and now created a model that can predict with about 74% accuracy in experimental conditions how to give an individual participant the chills, based on how they answer some questions. They’re now exploring whether this ability to curate a set of experiences that can give someone goosebumps can’t challenge some of the possibly maladaptive stories we tell ourselves and improve mental health outcomes in the process. In other words, maybe giving someone the chills can help them with depression.

It’s not surprising to us musicians that music is one of the more reliable ways to give someone goosebumps. We’ve all been there at some point or other — a listening or playing experience that opened up some stunning realization about the world, maybe not even one we can put into words but we felt it all the same. I can remember the first time hearing Sigur Rós on the floor of my dorm room, or getting lost in a jam with friends, or just walking and looking up at the sky while listening to Jon Hopkins’s “Luminous Beings” and feeling connected to it all.

That might be because music defies so much of reality. It can be stunningly beautiful in a world often filled with ugliness. It can be transcendent in a world filled with mundanity. It can be a source of human connection and collaboration and generosity of spirit in a world too often devoid of such things.

Music offers up this rich emotional lens on what we’re seeing that can change your interpretation better than any mobster with a club.

There are times when I’m making music that I worry that making music is primarily a selfish endeavor. I do it because I love to do it. As a self-employed parent of three and partner with a lot of family responsibilities, there’s a certain guilt that comes along with that. Lord knows making music doesn’t bring in much money. Am I really justified in spending my time on making music? In a world filled with musicians, am I doing my part, contributing to humanity in the best way I can?

But then I go back to that playlist, the one called “Why should I live?”

I don’t know who made it. I don’t know the context behind it. I don’t even know if it’s serious or not. But I do know, as do many of us, what it can feel like to feel so drained by circumstances, by helplessness, by loneliness, by some powerful narrative that has a hold on us that it’s hard to see past it. And I know that music can help you out of that.

The idea that a song we made might have helped induce in someone the chills that helps them change that story is profoundly humbling. And hopeful. There’s a reason music has been with us since the very first humans began looking to the stars and each other for meaning. It’s a powerful force, as the researchers looking at aesthetic chills are discovering.

To be completely honest, I’m not 100% sure I believe what I’m writing here right now. I still have hang ups and guilt sometimes. I worry that I could be doing more to support my family and the world. I worry that making music, especially experimental music, can be hopelessly self-indulgent at times. And I know that music is just one small part of the immensely complex meaning-making machinery inside of each of us.

And yet, I will continue to do it, and to help others do it too.

Because it gives me the chills.

Onwards,
Ian

Ian Temple
Founder, Soundfly
Ian@Soundfly.com

Five Interesting Things

1. I’ve been enjoying my Qobuz experiment. has a nice piece out making me feel even better about it. Better payouts, more human curation, more care to music and listening and artists. It’s not perfect, but I’m happier listening on Qobuz so far than Spotify, so planning for now to keep it. There might finally be a better ethical choice when it comes to streaming…

2. Amanda Petrusich is one of my favorite music journalists, so I always pay attention to what she writes. This piece on the science of grief for The New Yorker was really harrowing and powerful. It’s also a good reminder that you can follow someone closely and read their stuff without having any idea what’s actually going on behind it. “What a bold and miraculous thing—to be alive at all.”

3. I’ve read enough of Brian Eno to write a course on him at this point — and yet I still enjoy hearing him talk about his conception of music, especially since it’s often so different from mine. Yesterday, I spent some time listening to his appearance on Ezra Klein’s podcast, and it was interesting, as always. “Art is grown-up play. It’s a way of imagining things and imagining what they would feel like and imagining how they connect to other things that we know about — and then feeding that knowledge back into our lives and into our relationships.”

4. I saw The Odyssey this week, and enjoyed it! Honestly, I think that managing to pull out a coherent and concise-enough story from the epic poem to make a compelling film was a huge accomplishment in its own right. That said, I do remember from high school loving Odysseus’ mysteriousness and complexity and trickiness, and that all got a little lost. As such, I enjoyed hearing the translator Emily Wilson talk about Homer and translation and words and interpretations on this podcast with Derek Thompson.

5. This week, in my Draft // Echo program, we’re discussing INPUTS — the stuff you take in. It’s always interesting to me that many of the artists I’ve met I really admire have such a deep knowledge of the artists and music they love, whether it’s jazz artists that have transposed hundreds of solos or pop artists who can cite lyrics off with ease. And yet, so many of us feel overwhelmed by inputs or like we don’t have time for it. Do you have an approach to actively incorporating inputs into your creative process? Would love to hear about it.

Leave a comment

Hey all! I’m kicking off another round of Draft // Echo, my program for musicians looking to create some momentum on their music. It’s basically a five week accountability and feedback group. If you feel like you’ve got some musical goals that keep receding ahead of you, I hope you’ll consider joining. Five spots left. Sign up here with the code soundflyweekly for 20% off.

Some 15 years ago, I was in a post-rock band called (the) slowest runner (in all the world) with five of my best friends. It gave me some of the best times in my life, and then blew up spectacularly in a smoking van on the highway outside of Nashville.

This past week, in revisiting some of our old records for a possible re-issue (fingers crossed), I stumbled across an EP I made with just the piano, violin, and cello from the original band and never released. I haven’t listened to these recordings in years, so it was really fun and nostalgic to dive in. And to my surprise, they’re better than they were in my memory. I suppose time has a way of blunting the bite of perfectionism.

Listening back also made me wonder what I’ve forgotten that I used to know about making music, because I don’t really write like this anymore. I’m not sure if I can. What can I learn by trying to talk to the person who wrote and played this stuff? What wisdom does he have to share with me for my creative process now?

An interview with a guy I once knew

I enter the room for our interview. It’s warm and cozy, maybe a little blurry at the edges. The color is faded from the foot traffic of events. A lot’s happened.

The guy sitting across from me is a stranger I once knew, though maybe never as well as I wanted. He’s surprisingly shifty at first — at least until we start talking about something concrete. I remember now how much he used to enjoy being in the background and off-stage. There was this one club in Montréal where I swear he was playing in a closet on the side while the rest of the band filled the stage.

But today, I’m here to talk to him, so talk he must. And he’s excited to talk about this particular music.

“These songs took so long to come into being,” he says. “Like dust settling. They never really had a final shape, not even after we recorded them. Every time we played them it felt like they were still up for grabs — every melody could still be tweaked, every section amended or re-concocted in a slightly new form.”

You can hear it in the music. I wouldn’t call them Franken-songs — it’s not as dramatic as all that — but there is a soap box derby nature to them. It’s as if they’ve been lovingly cobbled together by some kids in the neighborhood from bits and pieces found lying around their dad’s workshop. There’s coherence to them, but it’s a loose one.

In practice, this means the ideas are fast and free-flowing. They’ve got the exuberance and playfulness of people doing something without the full knowledge of how to do it: Why not throw this idea here? What about holding that note for a bit too long? How about a different time signature right here, and then we pass the melody back and forth a few times, and then we play this part faster for some reason? They’re bursting with innocent, unearned confidence.

“All of these songs are written for piano (me), violin (Hunter Jack), and cello (Gillian Jackson). Partly that’s because we’re all friends and those are the instruments we play, partly because we were all in a post-rock band together and regularly found ourselves alone in rehearsals while the others were off f$^&*ing around somewhere.

Musically though, the biggest influence for me was this band Rachel’s, especially their album Music for Egon Schiele. I really wanted to do something like that. I think that’s why I started writing for this set up specifically.”

I haven’t listened to Rachel’s for a long time. They sit in this weird place, somewhere between the minimalist music of Philip Glass and Steve Reich and the neoclassical music of Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds, at least chronologically — and yet, they’re not as known or popular as those artists.

They came up in the alt-rock golden age of the early ‘90s, a time when the market for recorded music was at its peak, when indie labels were seen as cauldrons for musical innovation, and when everyone was looking for the next Nirvana. Despite being a totally different genre, Rachel’s was very much in that vein — the product of colliding art students and classically-trained musicians from Louisville, KY, many of whom played in rock bands at night. They were signed to an imprint of indie label Touch and Go Records, the label that gave us Slint, the Butthole Surfers, and early Yeah Yeah Yeahs. And as part of the whole “bringing classical music into rock venues” thing, they were forerunners of the hugely successful modern neoclassical movement, even if largely unacknowledged.

I used to love Rachel’s. They’re more intricate and complex than lots of the other neoclassical music I listen to, but with moments of modern harmony and a punk ethos to boot. There’s no fancy production to it. There are too many notes and changes in it for heavy reverb tails or washy pads.

I can’t believe I’ve barely listened to them for 15 years. It’s funny how that happens, a band you love so much at one time and place just stay there and don’t travel with you to the next one.

Back to the EP I’m here to talk about. I ask my former self how these songs came about:

“Each of these songs has its own story. “August 1st” we wrote for a friend’s wedding. “Red 14” was a song for the full band we adapted for the trio. “Mouse” was a slog — we couldn’t get it right but kept trying.

“Five Violins” was the first one I think. Hunter and I wrote the structure of it after a band rehearsal. I loved combining the waltz-like melody, which felt sweet and circular, with an aggressive math-rock section in the middle. I believe it’s in 13/8.

When we came up with that pattern, I remember being really psyched because it’s a weird time signature but the rhythmic pattern is such that it doesn’t sound that weird. It sounds fairly normal, maybe even a little martial, but like a marching army that does a little skip following every 3rd step. And then Hunter wails out on the violin to end the section, and it’s really loose and fiddle-y. I love that aspect of his playing, the looseness.”

Listening to this, it feels like something I would never do now, and I’m not sure why. There’s something about writing in odd time signatures that feels naïve, one of those things that novice composers do to show off how complex they can be. It’s a classic symptom of a common beginner’s mistake: privileging technique over musicality.

But there’s also an ebullience and cockiness to it that I now miss. It’s antsy and impatient and searching — qualities that here on my interviewer’s couch 15 years in the future feel a little distant. And it’s so confident in itself, despite having seemingly no right to be. It doesn’t spare a thought for the judgment of others.

“I feel like this music is an untrained person’s idea of what classical music sounds like. That’s not to say we don’t know some classical music, but none of us went to music school or studied this stuff. Mostly we’ve played in rock bands. So for this, we don’t really have any preconceived notions of how to do it.

At the same time, none of us ever wants to play a boring part, so we’re probably over-writing a bit. Sometimes I will come to a writing session with a suggested part for, say, the cello marking the root note of the harmony or for the strings outlining some chords, but invariably we all want to play something more active, more interesting than that.

The idea of fitting melodies in between and against each other is just more exciting. It can also go wrong so much more easily. And I think it’s led to some more idiosyncratic ideas that would have been hard to come up with if one person had written this stuff alone.”

One thing you don’t realize when you’re young is which of your routines won’t last forever. For me now, in my 40s with a family and lots of responsibilities, one of the routines that’s mostly gone is hanging casually with friends making music together. Many of my friends have moved away. Others have families. We all have a little less time. When we get together, it’s usually planned activities. It’s different.

But those casual bored moments messing around with instruments are how much of this music came together. At one point when I was 24 or so, we had 2-3 late night band practices a week, on top of my full-time 9 to whenever job at a consulting firm.

It’s kind of hard to imagine now: What do you do with that much practice time? The answer was so easy back then: We hung out. We jammed and joked and messed around and drank more than was good for us. It’s amazing how valuable wasting time can be for your creativity.

At this point in the interview, I felt the need to text my former bandmate and cellist Gillian to make sure I wasn’t getting taken in here, that my interviewee wasn’t overly romanticizing things. But she mostly agreed with him. I asked her what lessons she would take from her former self, and she replied:

“I think I had more confidence in my creative ideas. I don’t think I was so overwhelmed by the feeling that everything’s been done before. Like, everything was new and exciting and interesting. We cared about moments of discovery instead of striving to be noticed or recognized or make f^&*ing money. I feel like I get stuck in analysis paralysis with everything now.

Music made me feel cool and quieted my chaotic brain and got me laid lol.”

Sex, drugs, friends, and indie chamber music. It’s so simple to say now, but this music was overwhelmingly a byproduct of friends that enjoyed spending time together and playing music with each other and challenging each other to write intricate stuff and sometimes playing it live for other people. One thing I’m curious about is whether that doesn’t happen as much anymore because I’m older and have a family now, or whether it doesn’t happen for anyone anymore because we’re all on our phones and isolated from each other more than ever. I sincerely hope it’s the former.

It also meant this music didn’t have any place to go.

“We’ve always been a little unsure where this music belongs. We started playing it in interludes for our post-rock band slowest runner, a little change of pace from some of our louder, more heavy stuff.

Then it came into its own during this summer tour we were on when the former sheriff’s van we were living in broke down outside of Nashville. We were idiots and forgot to check the oil. We still had a week of shows left, so we decided to split up. Half the band stayed with friends in Nashville waiting for the van to be fixed (didn’t happen) and hoping to re-join the tour (also didn’t happen). Gillian, Hunter, and I kept going, hopping on with another band and opening for them playing these songs as a trio.

There were some really nice moments at those shows. We were able to take audiences by surprise, and I liked offering this quiet chamber-ish palette cleanser before the post-rock excesses of the band that followed us.

Our full band didn’t survive that debacle, but the trio kept going for a bit. We played a couple weddings. I actually proposed to my wife on a drive up to Montréal to play this music at a friend of a friend’s wedding ceremony.

We also started playing these songs at dinner parties and game nights for our friends, and advertised ourselves as an outfit called “Concerts in the Kitchen,” where we’d show up at your house and play quietly in the background for your event. Loved that because the music becomes part of a lovely moment that’s about more than just the music. That was a great feeling.

Truthfully, I haven’t thought about this music in years. I’d almost forgot we’d recorded it. I can’t really remember why we did it, but I’m glad we did. If nothing else, it’s a wonderful keepsake of an amazing time.

And this week, I’m trying to take some lessons from it into my creativity: to be more confident and willing to try unorthodox things, to explore intricate melodies in a way I haven’t for a while, to do stuff I don’t know how to do and compose more outside of the DAW, to have more of a f%&* it attitude, etc.

At the end of our interview, I got up to leave. Obviously, my friend can’t. He’s stuck there, in the past where he belongs, but it’s been nice talking to him. He’s left me all nostalgic and in my feelings so I kept texting with Gillian a bit, and she summed the whole thing up really nicely for me:

“I just had a sweet thought on your original question (“Is there anything your former self could teach us now about creativity and music?”).

It’s love. We all loved each other so f%&*ing much back then. I mean still do, but we spent ALL our time together. We were so in sync like music was a second language for us. Like siblings or something.”

Damn. That’s a lesson worth tapping into: Make music from a place of love. The rest is just notes and noise.

Do you have any old recordings you haven’t revisited in a while? What do you think you could learn from the person who made them? Post them in the comments. I’d love to hear it.

Leave a comment

Yours,
Ian

—
Ian Temple
Founder, Soundfly
ian@soundfly.com

Join my writing group

Set a goal each week. Share it with a group of supportive musicians. Meet up to chat through challenges. Share what you create. Give and receive feedback.

That’s basically how my Draft // Echo program works. The idea is simply that it’s really hard to stay on top of your musical goals when you’re working on your own with no structure. So join some other musicians, focus on your music, and make some serious progress.

You can join with the code soundflyweekly here.

Five Interesting Things

1. “These are all ways to put yourself on the hook. Is there any better place to be?” One of the central ideas behind Draft // Echo is to be “on the hook.” This is an idea from Seth Godin, the idea being that you increase your chances of success by committing to something. I’ve always found this to be true.

2. “I am happiest while pursuing not just a hobby, but a hobby I can get better at.” <— resonates. I was reminded of the “on the hook” idea from Austin Kleon’s typewriter interview with violinist Vijay Gupta here. There’s something about answering questions on the typewriter that makes the answers more poetic.

3. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” — Viktor Frankl, as taken from ’s beautiful reflection on making art in the face of ***all this***. Read the whole thing here.

4. “if you want to see something interesting, you have to see things that you might dislike.” Taken from experimental psychologist ’s part 2 to his popular article the Decline of Deviance. In part 1, he documented that we’ve gotten less weird and edgy in general. In part 2, he tried to tease out why a bit more and replied to some critics.

5. I’m giving Qobuz a spin this month. It’s a streaming service (like Spotify) that makes a big deal about being human-curated (unlike Spotify) and having better artist payouts (unlike Spotify). What I really want from a streaming service these days is a) the ability to keep a library with my favorites, and b) good recommendations for things I might like. So far, I feel like Qobuz is doing a good job at both, but I’ll let you know as I keep going! (This is not an ad, I was not paid for this take, I was recommended Qobuz by a friend and am trying it out).

There are no video recordings of the trio I reference in this article (that I know of), but here’s one of the full band for kicks. Weren’t we young?

Being creative is not a routine act, but it requires a good routine to access.

You wake up and decide, I'm going to be creative today. I'm going to wrestle with life's many dimensions in a way that's impish and playful. I'll make my pleasantries dance in every conversation. I'll whip up worlds of imagination and hilarity for my kids. And when I sit down to create stuff, I'll dive into exciting new territory, pulling forth ideas with delighted abandon.

And then the day begins, with the weight of massed inertia behind it. The clawing urgency of each mundane administrative duty or to-do item calls out for my attention. How do I creatively engage with getting to school when we're already 5 minutes late? With responding to notifications or replying to emails from customers or clients? With digging through the backlog of tasks and to-dos?

In the moment, pragmatism dictates the state of play, and before you know it, you've marched through another day having done your best and found joy in moments and made some incremental progress on your many projects — but without the true creative bursts you were angling for.

Because of course, this is what most of life is, this mostly passive experience of continuing on through the structures of the life you've landed upon. We rely on the default settings because it's too complicated not to within the vast flowing architecture of each day. The world we encounter is a wriggling, thriving mass of subatomic particles and stopping by the grocery store on the way home to pick up milk. Default settings and routines keep us sane.

In some ways, my relationship with the piano feels like a great analogy. I've been playing for 35 years. When I sit down in front of it, there's a default way to engage I've come to know — the familiar patterns and chords, the fingers nestling so easily into their usual shapes. It's so comfortable, a gift for when what's needed is escape and piece of mind and flow. I'm so glad I have this.

But there are other times when that ease can be corrosive. It's that same ease that makes it possible to play constantly and consistently for years without writing anything new or getting better, such that you wake up in a few years to discover you're sitting at a bed of embers rather than the blazing fire you once dreamed of. The embers are still warm, but if you could just drag your lazy carcass away from the heat for a second to gather some more wood from the dark and mysterious forest, well, imagine where you’d be.

The lesson here is this: Your creativity requires tending.

And sometimes it requires force and discipline and practice and an aggressive posture against the endlessly helpful normalcy we rely on each day. To stay creative, in my experience, requires constantly prompting yourself into disrupting your defaults.

Because of this, a big part of the job of being an artist or musician is to craft a series of structures that force you into novelty, into action, into paying attention to your defaults and casting them aside, into not allowing yourself to ever be too settled. What will make you uncomfortable today? What's going to prompt you into trying something new, into forcing a few flavors together you've never experimented with before? What’s going to push you to the edge of your ability with all the ensuing uncertainty that goes along with it?

One of the best ways to do that in my opinion is through collaboration and interaction. It's amazing how often talking with someone else illuminates flaws and opportunities in your narratives. And of course, having to respond to the intrusions of someone else's ideas and wit into your own bubble forces a certain improvisatory creativity all its own. It’s what my friend means when she says “Where two meet, things come alive.”

But there are tons of other ways as well: Using new gear and instruments, interacting with constraints, exploring new lenses, engaging with exciting books and art and music, finding new ways to focus, writing stuff proactively in your head before you sit down at your instrument, etc.

In fact, it’s this architectural impulse toward prompting proactive discomfort that inspired me to come up with my Draft // Echo group. The idea is to create these little five week structured sprints where musicians can come together to be a little more mindful of their creativity. Everyone commits to a clear creative goal or practice each week, with social accountability and sharing and support to get to it. I’m announcing the next session now, to start at the end of July, so feel free to sign up.

As part of it, I’ve also developed my own little “creative curriculum” — a series of topics, tools, and provocations aimed at shaking up one’s process a bit. This framework allows me to shrink the creative process into smaller elements that I can play with to challenge myself. Here’s a high-level summary:

1. Inputs:

This is the stuff you consume, the fuel for your fires. I have this theory that one of the things that separates the best artists from the rest is the amount of dedication they put into their inputs. When I was running a songwriting course with pop artist Betty Who, she could rattle off lyrics to thousands of songs on command. My partner the pianist Kiefer does the same thing with chord progressions, transcribed solos, and jazz standards. It’s really easy to let this sort of active consumption of new influences and inspirations fall by the wayside, especially when you have a busy schedule, but it’s hugely important to creativity.

• So, the first provocation is something like: What are you taking in right now? Who and what are you learning from, and are you being intentional about it? And more importantly, is it a regular part of your process?

2. Ingredients:

This is your vocabulary — the instruments and tools you use, the stylistic traditions you’re drawing from, and the skills you develop. It’s really easy to fall into default mode about our ingredients, to assume they’re constant and limited, when actually we have this vast kitchen piled high with options to cook with, and the possibility of acquiring or creating more at any time. Being intentional about your ingredients opens up all sorts of new creative doors, whether it’s limiting yourself to only one ingredient or coming up with a specific palette for a project or finding a new way to express an old idea.

• The second provocation is: What ingredients do you have available to you, and what specific combination of ingredients will you use to draw out your creativity today? What happens if you change your ingredients?

3. Ideas:

Staring at a blank piece of paper is often the hardest part of the creative process, so what techniques and approaches can you draw on to inspire lots of ideas? To me, this is mostly a structural problem — making sure you’ve got the right set of tools, constraints, prompts, games, and rules handy so that you can shrink the challenge and quiet the super-critical part of your brain. To me, it’s a combination of creating structures that allow you the mental space and flexibility for ideas to bubble up, and coming up with inspiring constraints to help you generate lots of idea “seeds,” as Rick Rubin calls them, in the moment.

• The third provocation is: How can you set up the right structures such that coming up with new ideas is easy, fun, and abundant? What techniques and constraints do you use to generate ideas?

4. Edits:

This is the part of the process where you’re engaging with what you’ve already done to review and modify it — and hopefully make it better. I like thinking of editing as a separate stage of the process than coming up with ideas because, for me, reacting to something is generally easier than coming up with it in the first place. By making this explicit, it allows my initial ideas to be bad, because I know I’m going to edit them later.

To challenge myself, I’ve come up with a few different archetypes of editors based on writers I’ve studied (Vonnegut, King, Kerouac, and Asimov), and I like exploring how their different approaches to editing can unlock different creative impulses within me. I’ve probably gotten more value from re-thinking this stage of my process than anything else on here.

• The fourth provocation is: What type of editor are you? What happens if you change your approach to editing your work?

5. Agitations:

This is maybe the most delicate one, but agitations are the part of the process where you interrogate your work and challenge yourself to make something unique and interesting, something that stands out from the noise. It’s about the pursuit of surprise, depth, and originality — about having something to say. I say it’s delicate because it’s easy for the obsession with originality to halt you in your tracks. Often times, the best way to find your unique sound is simply to trust the process you’re on. That said, there are also ways to push yourself along the way, and I like trying to find the right balance.

• The fifth and final provocation is: What are you doing that’s unique, that stands out, and that feels like it’s adding something new to the world that has to exist?

What do you think? Do any of those concepts feel more relevant to how you approach your creative process? Feel free to play around with them a bit this week, and see if anything opens up for you.

A couple years ago, I did a big study of Renaissance Florence for fun. I was curious how this small-ish Italian city briefly came to be the financial and cultural center of the world.

One of the interesting takeaways that stuck with me was that the city seemed to have just the right amount of instability. There was enough freedom for artists and weirdos and people who thought differently to find space to operate in, but not so much anarchy that they were all killed or scared into silence (for the most part). When that changed, when anarchy ramped up too much or too much order was imposed, it all ended.

I wonder whether in some ways we artists aren’t the same. Too much order and stability, and there’s nowhere for the creativity to come from, for the unexpected to gurgle forth and flood the land in torrents of moving originality. Too much instability and we can’t get anything done, we’re stuck in the mud, wrestling with ourselves and our inner critics, rather than sharing our art with the world, and letting it touch people in ways we might never expect.

So, what’s the right balance for you? And how do you disrupt your default modes to let creativity come through? I’d love to hear about it.

Leave a comment

Yours,
Ian

—
Ian Temple
Founder, Soundfly
ian@soundfly.com

You’re invited to the next session of Draft // Echo

The next session of my program Draft // Echo starts on July 20.

This is a program I developed for people like me — musicians and artists that love a little structure and social pressure to get stuff done. It’s not so much a course, as a writing cohort. We each pick a goal each week, meet up to chat through challenges and share success, give each other feedback along the way, and push ourselves to accomplish some cool creative shit.

Interested? Sign up here. Readers of this newsletter can use the code soundflyweekly for 20% off. Soundfly subscribers get 60% off (email me for the code), and alumni are welcome back anytime, pay what you want.

Hope to see you there!

I’ve tried really hard to avoid talking about this — but there comes a time when that’s no longer possible, when it can’t be held back anymore. And that time is now.

SPORTS.

F&#@ yeah!

I’m a secret sports fan, and this week, I’m going all in.

I say secret because for most of my life it’s felt like there’s been an unspoken barrier between sports and music. Like if you made a Venn Diagram of people who like sports and those who like music, the circles would not overlap or even touch.

It even feels at times like there’s something almost shameful about enjoying sports as a musician — like I’m betraying my people, abandoning our sound baths of A 432 drones and infinite wells of sensitivity to join a frat, crush beers on my head, and then dunk them in some miserable little art nerd’s face. Booyah!!!

Also, this is a newsletter about art and creativity! Ours is a struggle of the mind not the body. Our arena is one of emotions, of intimating and unearthing deep wells of beauty from a subtle look or a passing moment. We’re not trying to defeat or dominate anyone (except maybe conformity and inertia). Our opponents are only ourselves (and occasionally music streaming services). That’s not to say we’re not capable of battering ourselves just as much as any opponent.

Maybe that’s why I’ve tried to withhold any talk of sports in these newsletters, beyond an occasional reference around deliberate practice and skill-building.

But this week that all ends. I’m nailing my colors to the mast. I’m bridging the divide (with apologies in advance to those happy in their circle, separate and aloof).

The reason is that this month has seen the most vibrant sports-related outpouring of goodwill in New York City I can remember. It’s one of those rare moments where sports creeps into every conversation, where it bubbles through every interaction. Sports is genuinely bringing the city together right now, and it’s kinda amazing.

For one thing, there’s the World Cup. Restaurants are suddenly dripping in flags, watch parties spilling out into the streets. A random Tuesday’s business casual attire has been traded in for a panoply of different-colored jerseys. My kid, not generally a sports fan, made a massive “bracket” of all the groups and posted it on the wall, with a movable flag for each country to track their progress. During World Cup time, you get to see the boisterous diversity of backgrounds that makes this city so amazing.

But even more notably, there’s the New York Knicks, the long-suffering basketball franchise who haven’t won a title in 53 years but finally pulled it off, in the most dramatic, remarkable fashion possible.

I’m not a Knicks fan historically, but I gotta say, it’s been amazing to see my city so enamored. The bandwagon has been big and blaring and fun and welcoming, experienced in a thousand impromptu street parties, fireworks, hugs from strangers, etc. It’s been impossible not to hop on board.

The way the Knicks won is genuinely something, and this is where I will bring it back to creativity and music (thank you for your patience). For the entire series of the NBA Finals, they were behind in every game — sometimes by a lot. In Game 4, they were behind by 29 points and still came back to win — the largest ever comeback in an NBA Finals series. In the four games they won, the probability of them winning each game at one point was 8.4%, 27.2%, 0.4%, and 4.6% respectively. It’s a genuinely wild feat of mental fortitude that the Knicks were able to win these games.

The star of this Knicks team was a short (by NBA standards) guard named Jalen Brunson. There’s a lot to admire about Brunson — from the way he’s been written off a thousand times for being too short to the way he steps up in the most clutch moments to the way he passed up millions of dollars to give his team a better chance to win. My wife jokes that my love of sports is actually just the equivalent of gossip for dudes, and there’s a way in which a story like Jalen Brunson’s proves it true.

But the thing I’m taking note of today is his mindset — the specific mindset that allowed them to come back four times to win. It’s a mindset that always treats the score as 0-0.

When the Knicks are far behind in a game, it’s 0-0. When they’re ahead, it’s 0-0. Whatever the situation, you treat each possession as if it’s fresh, disconnected from all that came before it and all to come. You’re not re-litigating the past in your head. You’re not projecting yourself into the future, getting lost in dreams of glory or heartbreak. You default to the moment you’re in, to thinking about specifically how you’re going to handle yourself right now.

There are a number of reasons this type of thinking works. First of all, it takes your attention away from something largely out of your control (the outcome) and focuses it in on things that are largely in your control (your performance or your process).

For musicians, the analogy is obvious. It’s really easy to worry about how your album will perform, what your streaming metrics are, or the number of rejections you’ve gotten from promoters and labels. But those things can become huge distractions from creating great music and art. That’s not to say it’s bad to have specific career goals, but it’s important to not let them encroach on your creativity when you’re in the moment making stuff. Focus on the next note, not how it will be received.

Second of all, when something goes wrong, it’s really common to focus on the negative — the album that didn’t perform as well as you wanted, the day wasted with distractions, the song idea that’s just not quite working the way you want it to. This is related to the psychological concept of loss aversion — the way we tend to feel loss more deeply than gain. We sit with our losses, we let them fester, we revisit them again and again, even when it’s not productive or useful to do so. It’s in our nature.

Starting your day at 0-0 every day is a way to clear the decks. Whatever happened yesterday or with the last song, that’s in the past now. You don’t have to engage with it, if you don’t want to. You can start from scratch.

That’s not to say the baggage isn’t real. Sometimes your ideas really do suck, and nothing comes easy. Sometimes the grind is absolutely brutal. Sometimes you play a show to an empty crowd or release a song that falls flat. The challenge is that trying to be creative with all that weight around your neck becomes like trying to run through a gelatinous gloop. It’s so much work, so much effort.

And finally, a 0-0 mindset helps us avoid the trap of tying our identity to our outcomes. When the Knicks were down 29, they could have easily decided that they were a worse team than their opponents. In fact, that’s what the evidence indicated and what many of the pundits were saying (and still say, despite the win).

But that’s not what Brunson and the Knicks did. They didn’t think about the scale of the challenge — they shrunk it. It’s not about winning the title in that moment or proving that you’re actually a good team. It’s simply about scoring the next basket.

There’s some interesting research that shows that when people tie their self-worth to achievement, they’re much less resilient in the face of setbacks and frustration. It works if you always succeed, but the moment you fall short, it’s really easy to suddenly think you’re worthless.

And that feels hugely important for us as musicians because, well, a lot of us tie our self-worth to our musical achievements. I’m convinced that the musician who never feels imposter syndrome doesn’t exist, at least I’ve never met them. It’s so common to tell yourself you’re not actually good enough or your ideas aren’t good enough. The simple act of putting your creativity out there for others to judge requires huge amounts of vulnerability, opening yourself up to the idea that maybe you’re just not that good at this.

But what if it’s 0-0 every time? What if all that matters is what you do next — the melody you write, the song you put together, the show you play? What if you stick to the moment in front of you and what you’ll do with it?

So yeah, that’s my attitude today. It’s 0-0. I have no songs, no streams, no sales, no past disappointments to overcome. All I have is a miraculous brain, a bursting curiosity, and an excitement to so something I love. It’s hard to imagine what could stop me.

That’s it. Sports talk over. Back to minor major sevenths and the rest, and please pardon the interruption.

Go Knicks,
Ian

—
Ian Temple
Founder, Soundfly
ian@soundfly.com

Tracking down the most epic pop songs of all time

My latest episode of How to Make Epic Music is out, and I took a deep dive into the history of epic pop music, from The Beatles to Donna Summer to Celine Dion. If you haven’t yet, take a listen here or on Spotify.

Five Interesting Things

1. My friend released her own version of the Sontag Shogun track “in cloudy states” this past week, with etheral vocals and lyrics and a new arrangement. We made the stems for that track available in hopes someone might keep it going, and I’m so glad Ewa did! Give it a listen here.

2. Ted Gioia with a great reminder of why you shouldn’t tie your worth to outcomes:

3. I’m enjoying my free trial of Cantilever, an app of highly curated albums. This is exactly the sort of thing I want, especially when done by someone with similar tastes as mine — a recommendation for something to listen to, done with care and detail. Hoping I continue to use it going forward!

4. People who know me know that I love the course we made with Ryan Lott of Son Lux about creating your own virtual instruments. Well, Son Lux has a new album on the way, and I couldn’t be more excited for it! Here’s the first track.

5. If you need something to listen to, dive into the playlist of epic pop music I made for the latest podcast episode. Honestly… it’s really enjoyable. Full of melodrama and larger-than-life pop songs.

Welcome to episode three of How to Make Epic Music! If you enjoy it, please consider subscribing and supporting my work. Special thank you to Chris Dalla Riva for publishing this piece on his wonderful Can’t Get Much Higher substack, and to Chris for taking the time to chat with me about it, as well as Charlie Harding of the unmissable Switched on Pop podcast.

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As always, you can listen to the audio version complete with audio edits and an original score above, read the full thing below, or you can find it on Spotify if you prefer.

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Can pop music be epic?

To most people, the answer to this question is probably obvious: “Mamma mia, mamma mia, mamma mia, let me go!”

Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” hit number 9 in the charts in 1976 and then number 2 in 1992 after the release of the film Wayne’s World, categorically proving the answer is “Yes!” That was certainly ’s answer when I asked him:

 The quintessential example would have to be ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ by Queen. That’s like quintessential epicness. It’s longer. It has a tremendous amount of dynamic range. There’s the whole operatic section in the middle. You got the big old guitar solo. You got the ballad. If I’m thinking just epicness, especially in the pop sphere, that would be the song I would go to immediately.

So, yes. The answer is yes. There is nothing more needed here. There is definitely no need to call up experts, to chat about it with everyone I know, or to spend a couple dozen hours listening to every pop hit since 1965 just to make sure.

Right? Riiiiight?

OK, here’s the thing: I wasn’t convinced.

My background lies more in epic music than pop. My idea of a good time is listening to an Icelandic band bowing a distorted guitar behind a wailing falsetto, ideally with an orchestra behind them. Give me 24 hours straight of drone music or an opera with a counter-tenor wailing over an ostinato for four hours. I want hard-won emotional peaks that crack you wide open, and to experience the results of human endeavor taken far beyond what’s reasonable.

From this vantage point, pop music seems a little anti-epic. At the risk of oversimplifying things:

• Epic music is long. Pop music is short.

• Epic music often complex. Pop music is often simple.

• Epic music often has slow builds and rewards patience. Pop music needs to grab your attention in the first couple seconds.

• Epic music often isn’t commercially viable. Pop is all about the money.

• Epic music offers a grand sweeping narrative arc. Pop music often has slightly nonsensical lyrics, like five good-looking dudes singing “I want it that way” without anyone anywhere including themselves or the person who wrote the song having any idea which way they’re talking about.

But… is any of that actually true?

Welcome to Episode 3 of How to Make Epic Music, my series exploring artists and music that take things too far. In episode one, we talked about the insistence focus of Chopin. In episode two, we dissected the surprising discipline of the jam band Phish. And today, we’re talking about pop music, at least the epic parts of it. Let’s dive in.

Once again, I bit off more than I can chew so this will be a two-parter. This is Part 1: the grand sweep of epic pop music through history. Part 2 will follow.

Is pop music anti-epic?

“ Pop is such a difficult word to define, right? Because at any one moment it can be a genre or sound. It can be the thing which is at the top of the charts. It can be just in the popular zeitgeist.  There are a lot of songs that are enormous in conversation and culture that actually don’t achieve huge commercial success.”

That’s Charlie Harding, the co-host of the amazing, long-running podcast Switched on Pop and also a professor of songwriting at NYU and Berklee. I needed help with this topic, and Charlie has literally written the book on pop music. And at the start of our conversation, he did validate my question a bit:

Harding: “ I like to think about pop music going back to one of the great songwriters of pop music Irving Berlin.”

Irving Berlin, one of the great American songwriters of all time. Wrote some 1,250 songs in the first half of the 20th century, including dozens of hits, standards, and classics, like “God Bless America,” “Cheek to Cheek,” and “White Christmas.”

Harding: “ He had a set of rules for songwriting published in a magazine, and he basically says to write a great pop song you have to write something that everybody can sing. Part of pop music is an intention more than it is a genre. It is: Do you want this song to be sung by many people?

Irving Berlin says, in order for it to be sung by many people, there are some particular rules to follow, like the words have to be sonorous. Some words don’t sing well. My favorite example is a 30 Rock episode in which Jenna Maroney’s character is in a film called The Rural Juror. The joke of the episode is nobody can understand what she’s saying ‘cause rural is a mouthy word and doesn’t sing well.”

Some of the other rules in Berlin’s list:

• The melody should be within the range of an average singer.

• The title should appear frequently in the lyrics so it’s more memorable.

• Songs should be sexless, available to men or women, and should deal with ideas, emotions, or objects familiar to everyone.

• They also need to contain “heart interest,” should be simple, and should endeavor to be original.

Basically, make songs that are singable, accessible, and marketable.

Harding: “If you think about the rules of Irving Berlin, in some ways they are kind of anti-epic. They’re very populist, and I think they very much still apply to songs by Max Martin and all the great Swedish pop songwriters. There’s a preference for singable words, even over the intelligibility of the lyric, repeatable melodies that people can sing, not too many giant leaps, etc. If your song is too acrobatic, people can’t sing along with you.

So pop music is meant to be sung by the populace. In that way, its epicness might be more about its reach than in every part of its melodic structure.”

Check out Switched on Pop

This is an important anchoring thought: Perhaps more than anything else, pop music is an intention — the intention to be popular, to reach what Irving Berlin calls the crowd.

And this often dictates the choices that go into the music. It pushes certain aspects of the songwriting away from anything too weird or surprising that could turn people off and toward things that most people will find accessible. An anti-epic pressure, if you will.

But Berlin also hints at competing pressures, like the pressure to stand out, to be memorable, and to move people emotionally. If we focus on that side of the equation, I expect that’s where we might find the more epic pop music.

After all, can’t epic music also be popular?

Digging for pop epics

The logical next step was to go to the archives, to go panning for epic music among the pop pantheon greats. Luckily, the website The Pudding has created this great visualizer of every top 5 pop song on the US Billboard charts from the 1950s til 2015, which seemed like a good subset to start with.1 If there are epic songs among the hits, then that could help us learn more.

Using The Pudding’s data, I began listening to as many songs as I could, mostly number ones, gathering the ones I thought were epic-ish, and rating them according to a rubric I made up. Specifically, I graded every song I listened to according to how it performed along five parameters on a scale from 1 to 5:

• Scale: Does it feel big and expansive?

• Journey: Does it give the sense of a grand narrative with a massive build, strong contrasts, or multiple movements?

• Stakes: Does it feel like it matters, like something important is happening or being expressed?

• Commitment: Does the artist go all in, further than expected?

• Pay Off: Does it drive compellingly toward a big resolution and nail the landing?

I then averaged out the scores for each category to give each song an epic grade. A song with a 5 on each parameter is a perfect 5 in epicness. Here are the results.

In the first hour of listening, this seemed like a great idea. By hour 10, I was convinced every pop song was in fact epic. By hour 30, I decided none of them were. And by hour 60, my corporeal form had dissipated and slipped out of space and time.

But I had learned a lot about epic pop music along the way.

Here’s a playlist of some of the top ranked songs:

What I learned

The most obvious conclusion is that there has in fact been a lot of epic pop music at the top of the charts. I included almost 300 songs on my list, and I’m sure there are lots of others that slipped through my fingers.

Of those, 231 reached number one on the charts. If we estimate that there were around 900 total number one hits in that time frame, then we can say that about a quarter of all number one songs are at least somewhat epic. This is fairly subjective — but that’s not a bad haul!

There are so many undeniably epic moments in here. The chord punches that kick off “Eye of the Tiger.” The driving, desperate intensity of “Lose Yourself.” The orchestral intro to K-Ci and JoJo’s “All My Life.” Are those actual cannon shots in Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”? (Sadly, no, but not for lack of trying from the songwriter Jim Steinman). How did I even question this?

Then, there are the divas. In almost any era, there’s one epic music formula that finds its way onto the charts: a diva with an orchestra singing a power ballad. Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Barbra Streisand, Adele, Diana Ross, Alicia Keys, Taylor Swift, etc. Almost 20% of the songs on the list could be categorized as some version of this.

This formula produced so many number ones it made me wonder if epic songs aren’t actually the most successful type of pop song in history.

American Idol clearly seemed to think so. When the show first aired in 2002, tasked with finding and launching new chart-topping pop stars, what did the big money producers bet on? What did the audiences vote for? You guessed it. Divas singing over orchestras. Kelly Clarkson, Fantasia, Carrie Underwood, even Clay Aiken and Taylor Hicks — all had hits with power ballads and orchestras.

Another thing that jumped out to me was how many of the epic hits were tied to films in some way. About 13% of the songs on my list were tied to a movie or TV show in some way — themes like the “Chariots of Fire” or a bizarre disco version of the “Star Wars Theme” that somehow hit number one in 1977, as well as soundtrack songs, like “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic and “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” from Armageddon. It makes sense: Movie music tends to be more dramatic by default, and being in a movie or TV show is a great way for a song to filter through the culture.

A great example of this happening recently is Kate Bush’s epic tune “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” which peaked at number 30 when it was first released, but hit number 3 a couple years ago when it was used in the TV series Stranger Things.

So we’ve got some good rules of thumb to start with: If you want to make an epic song and have it be a hit, get yourself a diva, an orchestra, and a hit film.

Where the “epicness” comes from

While listening, I tried my best to figure out where in each song the “epicness” was coming from. For instance, if a song swells to a massive orchestral build, then I’d give it a mark for having an epic arrangement. If it lasted 8 minutes with multiple distinct movements, I gave it a mark for having an epic structure. That sort of thing. Here’s what I found:

Basically, it’s more common to make a song sound epic through the arrangement, the production, and the performance than through the harmony, structure, and lyrics. That makes sense, since the arrangement, production, and performance are all elements that can be made epic within common pop structures and chord progressions.

Let’s talk more about the arrangements for a second. There are a few ways we see epicness play out in arrangements: big dynamic contrasts between highs and lows, lots of voices, melodies, or complexity, and of course the use of orchestras and choirs to expand the sense of scale and depth.

Take Diana Ross’s version of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” The verse is so quiet that she’s practically whispering it in your ear, but the chorus is absolutely soaring, especially at the end with the punchy rhythms, howling vocals, and orchestral climax. She basically took a nice, mellow R&B number and made it something you roar at your enemies as you trample them underfoot. I gave it a 5.

Or “All You Need Is Love” by the Beatles (4.8 rating), a seemingly simple song with the weirdest arrangement imaginable. Why are there so many horns playing fanfares? And why is everyone playing a different song underneath the actual song at the end? How many people are actually on this song? (Apparently, around 35, including a 13-piece orchestra, Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, and a few others).

It’s notable that almost a third of the epic songs on the charts that I tracked had an orchestra in them. A choir is arguably even more epic. A good example might be Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” (4.8), one of my favorite epic songs on the list.

Fun fact #1: The choir for “Like a Prayer” was arranged and conducted by Andraé Crouch, who also did the choir on Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Middle,” another song on the list (4.6).

Fun fact #2: The guitar intro to “Like a Prayer” was played by Prince. Who knew?

Fun fact #3: My sister-in-law just told me that her college friends have a tradition of taking off their shirts whenever this song comes on, which I think undisputedly proves its epic pedigree.

Different eras, different types of epic

In general, I’ve come to believe you can learn a lot about an era by exclusively looking at its most epic songs.

• In the 1960s, the epic songs were psychedelic and explored epic song structures.

• The 1970s liked long, multi-movement songs influenced by prog rock, schmaltzy ballads, and disco tunes with endless beats.

• The 1980s saw samples, effects, synths, and massive-sounding drums come to the fore, at least until the end of the era when hair metal-fuelled arena rock took over for a few years.

• The 1990s is the heyday of diva-driven power ballads.

• The ‘00s saw a proliferation of anthemic club hits designed to get fists pumping on the dance floor.

Here’s a list of the top five epic songs in each era, according to my ratings:

Interestingly, there are a couple specific producers and songwriters who appear on this list a few times: Giorgio Moroder the synth and disco pioneer, Jim Steinman the theatrical songwriter for people like Meatloaf and Bonnie Tyler, David Foster the dramatic producer of fanfares and power ballads, and of course Dr. Luke the anthemic pop producer in the ‘00s. These are clearly people specifically interested in a certain epic sound, and their efforts are part of the reason that epic music keeps coming back on the charts.

The rise of epic-style production

Starting in the late ‘70s / early ‘80s, you begin to hear a lot more epic production. Partly, that’s because you no longer needed to hire an orchestra and choir to create a massive sense of scale. You could get a similar effect through a huge synth sound and reverb, and artists absolutely did.

Take “Flashdance… What a Feeling” by Irene Cara. Listen to the layers of synth textures and melodies. There are pads that sound very similar to a string section and melodies that sound like horns, all washed in reverb and given stereo width for an extra big feel.

But that’s not all. The ‘80s is also famous for its massive drum sounds, most prominently the gated reverb used on tracks like Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight.” Producers started dialing up the compression and reverb to the limit but then adding what’s called a gate so that the effects are only heard above a certain threshold of sound, creating this massive booming sound that then cuts off abruptly. Like it’s recorded in a cathedral but the door keeps closing after each hit.

Chris Dalla Riva agreed that the ‘80s feels like an inflection point in epic pop music:

“I think there’s another way that pop music can lean into epicness and that’s through melodrama. The big melodramatic ballad became very popular in the ‘80s. Pop singles got a little longer throughout the ‘70s and I believed they topped out in the ‘80s, so I think that by the ‘80s, you have a combination of these very dramatic production techniques along with slightly longer pop songs that make it possible to have these big, epic ballads.”

Read more by Chris Dalla Riva

After the ‘80s, production became one of the dominant ways to add a dash of epic to a pop song. This is even more true in the ‘00s when anthemic pop came to the fore, influenced by EDM and dance music. The charts start to feature a lot of songs with big synth textures, driving beats, and choruses designed for pumping your fist on the dance floor. I think of Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger” with its driving, rhythmic synths and soaring chorus, or Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” with its driving, rhythmic synths and soaring chorus, or Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” with its driving, rhythmic synths and soaring chorus.

What about structure?

There aren’t a ton of structurally epic pop hits on the list. There are definitely some exceptions, like Paul & Linda McCartney’s slapdash ditty “Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey” or The Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” which is built on one long unchanging bassline for 7 minutes. But to a large degree, most of the songs on our list adhere to the generally accepted pop music formula of verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge, etc. The interesting thing is how much epicness you can still generate within that structure.

I put this to Charlie Harding, and he made a very good point: Maybe there’s actually something inherently epic about the structure of pop music.

“ Most pop songs follow a sort of epic-like structure. They often begin small, with an intro that will grab your attention. They build through the verse and pre-chorus indicating change. The chorus is a moment of catharsis. And then you go through that entire process all over again, except the next chorus is going to be even bigger than it was before.

Then, you’ll go through the development phase. A great bridge or even a down chorus in the sort of final act of a song, its job is to say: ‘Whoa, things have changed. Things are different. You’re gonna see the chorus in a new perspective.’ And when you arrive at the final chorus, it’s the most epic moment of the song.

So you have gone through this journey from a very small insular world in the intro to the third chorus, by which time you should be experiencing the most overwhelming emotions and catharsis and joy or sadness, or whatever emotion you’re supposed to be feeling in its biggest way.”

So in some ways pop music is inherently epic.

Epic music stays with us

Let’s end with a pop saga, an epic pop story if you will about how epic music can echo down the decades.

The year was 1967. The Summer of Love. Hundreds of thousands of people descended on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s, Hendrix lit a guitar on fire on stage at the Monterey Pop Festival, and a sunshine pop band with a few number one hits called the Association needed a new song.

The Association was a little bit of an unusual pop band, the sort you can only find in the ‘60s. Eccentric, counter-culture, a little psychedelic, with ornate vocal harmonies and somewhat baroque-ish arrangements. They have a “Requiem for the Masses” that I’d classify as cathedral pop. Their hit song “Windy” from 1967 is a great early example of an epic pop song (I gave it a 4 on my scale). It’s happy but also psychedelic, with a harpsichord, flute, and intricate backing vocals.

Their new producer asked a budding songwriter called Jimmy Webb to write them a pop song with classical elements in it, a reliable path to epicness. Webb wrote a “cantata,” an operatic multi-movement piece sung over symphonic orchestration and choir, called “MacArthur Park.” The Association declined it so it was instead recorded by a prestigious actor named Richard Harris, fresh off his epic musical film Camelot and looking to kickstart his singing career.

Released in 1968, this 7 minute piece of puffed up baroque melodrama actually hit number 2 in the charts at a time when most radio hits were more like 3 minutes long. It was a weird pop hit. It’s dramatic and through-composed, more like a film score. It feels romantic, conservative, and saccharine, at a time when that was not the hip thing to do. Discordantly, the song below it on the charts in June 1968 contained the lyrics “yummy yummy yummy I got love in my tummy.”

“MacArthur Park” was mostly forgotten about, an epic little footnote in the history of pop, until a synth-obsessed producer also interested in making epic music named Giorgio Moroder heard it while driving in LA and thought it would make the perfect cover for a new disco artist he was working with named Donna Summer.2

Moroder and Summer decided this long, slightly absurd ballad could be longer, more absurd, and a dance hit. They took the slow intro and slowed it down even more. They added a choir to the intro, except it’s actually just Moroder’s voice recorded to tape, layered, and pitched. They added a maniacal cackle as Summer breaks out into a fast-paced disco beat. It retains all the orchestral lushness, but adds some weird synths, congas, a pulsing bass, stuttered horns, and a catchy synth lead. Then, they released the whole thing as a 17 minute medley, with a shorter single version that hit number one on the charts.

In my survey of epic pop music, there are only a couple songs that get a 5 — the perfect epic score. “MacArthur Park” is one of them. But then twenty years later there’s another.

The story of this song starts in the late 1980s with an over-the-top songwriter named Jim Steinman and a larger-than-life artist named Meatloaf, whose theatrical album Bat Out of Hell from 1977 had remained on the UK best-selling album charts for almost a decade. In the late ‘80s they were working on the follow up album Bat Out of Hell II.

By the way, what song do they warm up with during those recording sessions? “MacArthur Park,” of course.

But there was one song that Steinman had written that he was adamant Meatloaf couldn’t have, a song inspired by Emily Brontë’s gothic romance novel Wuthering Heights. In fact, Steinman was so determined he sued Meatloaf to stop him using it.3

That’s because Steinman wanted this song to have a female lead. A few years later, he found that female singer, the French-Canadian mega-diva Celine Dion.

And so Celine recorded and released “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” in 1996. More than 7 minutes long, it’s dazzlingly overwrought. It starts out with haunting wind and thunder sound effects behind pretty piano and verbed out electric guitar. It builds from there, tumbling in and out of multiple romance-drenched movements, through sleighbells, choir voices, and what sounds like more cannon shots. And then of course there’s this moment:

Remember what Irving Berlin said at the beginning? A good pop song needs to be singable by anyone?

I’m not sure anyone’s able to do what Celine does here. And yet, that hasn’t stopped us from trying. A pop song is for the populace, and that includes me occasionally mangling Celine in the shower. Haven’t we all?

I’m telling this story both because I think it’s a good insight into a few of the most epic songs on my list — and also there’s a way in which epic music echoes down the years, maybe even more than other songs, inspiring us to ever greater heights. The drama, the theatricality, the exuberance.

“MacArthur Park” recently made a bit of a comeback when the Donna Summer version was used by Olympic figure skater Alysa Liu for her gold medal performance. It was also performed live in 2011 by Donna Summer at a concert arranged and produced by David Foster, the legendary producer behind another 5 on epic pop scale: Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.” And so the tradition continues.

Last note: There is one other pop album that drew on Wuthering Heights — Charli xcx’s recent album of the same name, an album with orchestral instruments, and dramatic arrangements, and big production, and diva-ish vocals, and tied to a hit film. Charli xcx’s “Wuthering Heights” has so many of the epic-making elements we discussed. And so the next generation of epic pop music is born, which we’ll get into more in Part 2.

Epic music makes us feel big things. So does pop music.

One of the reasons I struggled to get my head around epic pop music at the outset of this project is because there’s a way in which epic music self-consciously breaks the mold, while I assumed pop music was the opposite.

And yet, it’s more complex than that. Pop music is in dialogue with the mold, playing with an audience’s expectations to reach people and move them. I can’t imagine two songs that demonstrate that more clearly and ambitiously than “MacArthur Park” and “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” in every way.

“ Pop music is just a matter of: Where do you want it to be heard? Do you want it to be heard on the radio or do you want it to be heard in a rarefied institution, in a museum?”

Charlie Harding again. He points out that sure, modern pop music isn’t usually intended to promote nationalism and grandeur like Wagner or Tchaikovsky. Instead, it’s a reflection of our times, where the journey is personal, where artists are sharing what they’re going through in ways that the rest of us can relate to.

“ Pop music can make us feel big, epic feelings. Or it can make us feel quiet, small plaintiff feelings. When I look at a great work that is considered epic, there’s a feeling of awe, and I think awe can be experienced in a enormous vista with the most beautiful sunset or staring into a raindrop on a leaf. Musically, I think we can experience the feeling of epicness in all kinds of modes of expression.

Pop songs give us the ability to experience those emotions as individuals in a fuller way.”

Ultimately, epic music is just music that makes us feel part of something bigger than ourselves, like our emotions are tied into the endless tide of history and humanity before and after us.

Sometimes the music that does that goes under the radar. But other times, it’s exactly the song that everyone else is also listening to right now.

And when we all feel connected like that, it’s a beautiful, and I’d argue epic, thing.

So… how do you make epic (pop) music?

Write a song that people can sing, and then look for ways to make it stand out. Make it tell a story in some way, and get a diva to bring it to life. Consider adding an orchestra, a choir, and some huge ‘80s drums. Embrace melodrama and a sense of theatricality. And most importantly, make music that reaches people and moves them in some profound way by tapping into something deeply human.

Do all that, and you might just have a hit on your hands.

For the next episode, I’m going to be diving into a few more recent pop albums that are redefining what epic pop can be.

Epic Notes

Most epic pop song of all-time (in my opinion):
Donna Summers’ “MacArthur Park”

2nd most epic pop song:
Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”

Weirdest epic pop song to reach #1:
Stars on 45’s “Medley” from 1981. I have no idea how this reached number 1. The ‘80s was weird.

Favorite epic pop song for karaoke:
Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is”

Epic pop song I have personally listened to the most:
Prince’s “Purple Rain”

Most epic pop music NOT included:
The gangsta rap songs of the ‘90s, like Tupac and Biggie. It just didn’t hit the top 5 in the charts, so I didn’t really include it but some of that stuff is both enduringly popular and very epic. Charlie made the excellent point that rap music shares a lineage with the sort of verse of the Homeric epics. Something to explore in the future!

A huge thank you to Charlie Harding. His podcast Switched on Pop is a can’t-miss for music lovers.

Explore Switched on Pop

Thanks also to Chris Dalla Riva for supporting this slightly absurd effort and sharing it in his publication.

Check out Can't Get Much Higher

Also to my wife, my family, and everyone else who shared their lists of favorite epic pop songs with me.

What’s the best gift you can give someone?

If you answered the new 8,000+ piece Minas Tirith Lego set just announced, then we’re going to get along just fine. That’s objectively the right answer.

But sadly that’s not what I’m talking about today. I’m talking about something a little lamer, but hopefully more meaningful.

The answer is your attention. Your undistracted, unmediated, undiminished attention, the sort of attention that crosses chasms and connects you at your core. Attention is both a form of love and allows love to grow. It’s your very own spotlight, one that you can turn on anyone at any time to give them a stage and make them shine. It pierces darkness and uncertainty to open up space and clarity.

Have you ever had one of those conversations with someone where one of you is not fully listening or paying attention? It’s so weird and off-putting, far beyond what it seems like it should be, like some social systems somewhere are malfunctioning. Like we’re not actually the same species anymore. I thought I knew how to talk to people, but am I doing this wrong? Are you? What’s happening here?

I feel like we should normalize hard resets in those moments. I could imagine a simultaneous face slap working, though a bit violent. Maybe two spins, a chest bump, and a loud “HAH” would do the trick. I don’t know, just riffing here.

The problem is that we don’t actually have that much attention to give — even before considering all the juiced up, brain-hacking content algorithms grasping at our eyes in competitive desperation.

Giving attention can be hard! It takes an alert mind. And humility. And confidence, quieting your inner voices and anxieties. And the ability to focus, even when the caffeine is wearing off. And time of course. And a whole bunch of other stuff, each one of them operating according to its own scarcity rules. Sometimes you’re tired. Sometimes there’s really important stuff happening off-screen. Sometimes you’re bored. Sometimes an app has hijacked your dopamine centers for profit. Sometimes… you’re a walking bag of sentient meat whose instincts and actions are firing in ways you don’t expect and can’t fully control.

As artists, authors, and musicians, this is what we’re asking for every day. We’re asking for people’s attention.

It’s a lot. Think of what we’re competing with. For one thing, there are the millions of other artists, authors, and musicians out there also asking for people’s attention at the same time. Every time someone listens to one of my songs, they could actually be listening to Radiohead or Chopin or Green Day instead. How am I meant to compete with Whitney f&*$ing Houston? Her voice is a soundstorm, a rolling tornado of beauty that hoovers up all in its path, that rips the roofs off houses and changes people forever. If you listen to Sontag Shogun instead of Whitney Houston, I have questions about your sanity. And yet, shockingly, people make that questionable choice every single day.

But there’s more. It’s not just the competition with other artists. When you ask for someone’s attention, you may be taking it away from their friends and family, from sharing a quiet, affirming moment with their partner or seeing their child experience moments and milestones they’ll never experience again.

Or you could be taking them from projects they’re working on that could alter history. The time they spend with you could be time spent discovering a new subatomic particle that allows accessible space travel or something. I’m not a scientist but it seems like a possibility. Or sitting in stillness, which is more than capable of matching and surpassing any possible meaning you can offer.

When you stop and think for a second, there’s something awe-inspiring about this, that we get to experience a life so endlessly competitive for and worthy of our attention.

But for us artists, it’s also a responsibility. It gets at one of the core tensions of being an artist: We make art because we feel called to do it from somewhere within ourselves, because it offers us a form of meaning and excitement and beauty to do so. And yet, we also do it in service of other people, to offer them the same sort of meaning and excitement and beauty we might find in it. And for that, we need to earn it.

This week, my friend (and pop artist) Betty Who made a point in class that challenged and resonated with me. She was writing a new song on camera, always a difficult thing to do. She’d come up with a chorus she liked but that also felt a little overly sentimental. So when she began working on the verse, she decided she needed to earn it more. She needed a verse that would earn people’s attention so that the chorus felt meaningful and (unstated but implied) didn’t waste their time.

What a beautiful sentiment. What a wonderful reminder that we’re not ever entitled to someone’s attention. After all, it’s one of the most precious things we all have to give. If we want to be worthy of it, we need to earn it in some way, to make the efforts, insights, and entertainments that will reward it with joy, realization, and meaning.

How do you actually do that? Practically speaking, there are as many possible answers as there are fish in the sea. You can become a virtuoso and do something no one else can do. You can crash through barriers people didn’t even know were there, add the accordion to your thrash metal band or transform the human voice into something unexpected. You can surprise people or reach them with the exact thing they needed to hear in the moment they needed to hear it (my goal frequently with this newsletter). You can hide easter eggs in your work or offer the level of exquisite detail that transports them to another world, away from the pains and practicalities of this one.

One person who took this responsibility very seriously was Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown. He knew his artists faced even greater obstacles for attention than white artists at the time, that they needed to earn it even more. Because of that, they would have meetings where they ran songs and records through what he calls the hot dog test — that is, if someone were down to their last dollar, would they spend it on this record or on a hot dog? If for anyone in the group the answer was the hot dog, that record wouldn’t get released, or would go back into production.

Gordy was specifically making hits, and I’m not advocating that every song needs to grab your attention in the first 15 seconds like he did. Lord knows there’s enough garbage on Instagram trying that. For me, it’s more about the mindset — about not taking people’s attention for granted, about trusting your instincts for what will move someone, and then pursuing that.

But really, for me, it comes down to care. It’s putting the sort of care and consideration into your work that makes it clear you understand the stakes of what you’re asking. That you understand that every time someone turns their spotlight your direction, they’re giving you a gift and the most loving and respectful thing you can do in response is to make it deeply worth their while.

If you do that, you’re not only honoring their gift. You’re giving it back to them. And that’s a beautiful thing.

Have a great weekend,
Ian

—
Ian Temple
Founder, Soundfly
ian@soundfly.com

Interesting Things

1. RIP Sonny Rollins. I can still remember being 16 years old and listening to him with Thelonious Monk for the first time while traveling on my own. It was the sort of music you could dive into all the way and take years to find your way out of. It was as big as the entire world somehow. I loved it. shared this really cool little animation of a Sonny Rollins interview that’s worth a watch.

2. My friend referenced me in this little piece he wrote about how AI for learning needs to look drastically different than AI for other things. I agree. Learning requires effort, exploration, and inefficiency. AI too often short circuits that stuff. But I also feel an AI with different constraints and parameters maybe could support that stuff in pinpointed ways. It’s just something I’m curious about.

3. My friend the amazing Tyler Gilmore (aka BlankFor.ms) has a new album out called Shards with Jason Moran and Marcus Gilmore — and was featured on the cover of Downbeat magazine this month! What a cool thing. Listen to the new album here — experimental jazz at its best.

4. My little brother won an Emmy!!! He makes documentary films through his company Optimist, and he was a producer on an amazing documentary called Champions of the Golden Valley about skiers in Afghanistan. You can stream the whole thing for free here on the Olympics website. Yay!

I am so close to being done with another episode of How to Make Epic Music! For this one, I listened to hundreds of songs, had a couple great conversations, and have edited a lot of music and audio. I hope you’ll love it! In preparation, please go back and listen to my episodes on Chopin and Phish. I’m very proud of them, and hope you enjoy them too!

Hi all,

I'm writing today in defense of waste.

On the surface, that sounds bonkers. After all, the modern world is practically swimming in waste, and not in a good way. There are giant garbage patches swimming around the ocean, and I think they may be becoming sentient. On trash day here in Brooklyn, the sidewalk is literally piled high with waste — the daily trappings of modern American life, shown in stark relief by what we throw away. At least the rats love it.

I call the little plastic toys and tchotchkes that seem to magnetically attach themselves to my kids "CPJ" (cheap plastic junk). CPJ appears in our house with the ominous inevitability of a natural disaster.

"Waste not, want not," that's the famous proverb, the idea being that if you don't waste anything, then you'll have all that you need. A dollar saved is a dollar earned.

In this way, waste can take on a moral dimension, a vice of the highest order with thrift as its virtuous cousin. I feel this sometimes. There’s a very specific type of joy achieved upon receiving a hard-won deal or discount, even when the cost of obtaining it was obviously higher than the amount saved (at least in terms of time spent). As a parent, there are moments when I subconsciously don the persona of someone who lived through The War (doesn’t matter which one) — my kids not eating the entirety of their dinner becomes a high crime, while letting the shower run too long is a troubling decadence.

And then there’s time, its teasing scarcity a constant pressure. On a daily basis, it never seems like there’s enough of it. What if I’m not using it wisely? What if I’m wasting it? I will say that collectively, the amount of time we spend on screens or phones as a society these days can feel like a tragic loss. That’s because wasting time can feel like the worst crime of all — the discarding of a miraculous and sacred gift, the careless jettisoning of some beautiful ambition, the passing moments in my kids’ lives that we’ll never get back.

The thought alone is enough to ground you.

But now comes the flipside: Waste is an absolutely essential part of many processes, including the creative process. There are many, many situations where waste is not the problem, it's the solution.

Think of the process behind drug discovery and development. Researchers start with thousands of possible molecular compounds that they throw at various targets in a lab. Most of them go nowhere, but some show promise and enter a grueling path of clinical trials that can take a decade to run. Even then many don't succeed. Basically, you test 10,000 compounds to develop 20 hopefuls over the course of a decade to produce a single drug that might benefit someone. Waste is a requirement for success.

As artists, we may need to embrace the waste. Take Pablo Picasso, one of the art world's most notorious wasters. Throughout his life, he produced a voluminous amount of drawings, sketches, and throw-aways on anything he could find: a scribble on a menu, a sketch on top of a magazine photo, a crumbled up notecard, a doodle on a napkin, etc. He was always drawing, and many of these sketches ended up being transformed through time and practice into some of his most famous works (Guernica being the most celebrated).

I actually just scrolled through an online auction site, and discovered you can buy a Picasso sketch for like $300. So not quite a dime a dozen, but surprisingly accessible.

Maybe my favorite example of waste is evolution. We organisms get to experience gajillions of mutations, most of which are useless and disappear — wasteful byproducts of nature's birthing cauldron. But some aren't. Some are brilliant, and help spawn new species with a better chance of survival. Our flourishing arises on the backs of a billion failed experiments.

Our brains work in a somewhat similar way, according to neuroscientists. When we do new things, our brains generate new neural pathways. Over time, the neural connections we use a lot are strengthened, while the ones we don't fade away. According to some research, the most creative people are always forging new pathways and connections, which helps their brains be more flexible and adaptable. In other words, creative people waste a lot of time doing things that might not seem immediately productive — but allow for greater creativity in the long run.

This is one of the big risks of AI. Because chatbots are so smart these days, they get us answers without allowing us to engage in the wasteful process of trying to find them ourselves. There are times when that can be helpful — but there are costs, particularly to our mental agility and cognitive development. Learning and growth require waste and inefficiency. A machine that bulldozes all that will accidentally take out our growth with it, unnecessary bycatch endangered by its hyper-efficient trawling.

So what are the takeaways? And what are the conditions in which wastefulness can be important?

Well, first of all, it's a process thing, more than a material thing. As artists, we need to be unafraid to engage in a process that leads to lots of dead-ends. That's the cost of producing something highly creative and meaningful. Don't put too much pressure on yourself.

Second, it's a mindset. We live in a culture that elevates efficiency — but as artists, it's our job to reclaim our time for, well, f#$^ing about a bit. Follow hunches. Develop ideas you're unsure of. Try some new techniques. Take a course. And do all this unapologetically.

Third, even when we're super-busy or focused, we need to find time for playful exploration, for sticking our grubby little hands into opaque boxes and feeling around to see what's inside. Consider curiosity the training program for a creative mind, because that's literally what's happening in your brain.

Fourth, there are moments when waste may be more valuable than others — like the start of something. If you're not sure exactly what you're doing yet, you may need to waste some time figuring it out. Once you know, you can engage your efficiency systems more. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

One final example of beautiful waste: Conversations. When we talk to each other, we duck and swerve, we alternately follow and lead, we bat and parry, often with no real idea of where things are going to go. We waste energy, words, and time.

And yet, as I've written about before, the best ideas often emerge through conversation. And so does human connection. And long memorable nights spent plumbing the soul. And falling in love. And getting to discover the person your child is becoming. And so many of the things that give life its magic.

So that's where I'll wrap. Waste can suck. CPJ is terrible. Don't waste your life — but do let some waste into your life. Your creativity will reward you for it.

Yours, in pensive reflection,
Ian

Ian Temple
founder, Soundfly
ian@soundfly.com

Benihana.

Do you know it? The theatrical Japanese teppanyaki restaurant chain where chefs juggle knives, toss shrimp tails in their hats, and light a volcano of stacked onions on fire in front of you?

When I was a kid, there was nothing better than going to Benihana. It was THE birthday spot of note. A table there was a rare, ostentatious event — the onion volcano considered a culinary masterpiece. We would get so into it, the spectacle, with its mix of skillful dash, pantomime danger, and deliciousness. I felt sophisticated there for some reason. Also, highly entertained.

The very first Benihana was a jazz café called Ellington founded in 1937 in Tokyo by a guy named Yunosuke Aoki, but it was destroyed in the Tokyo firebombing of 1945. Aoki opened another café in 1947, then a restaurant in the space above it, and then a new style of restaurant across the street serving up Western-influenced foods cooked on a griddle — what we now call a teppanyaki or hibachi. Apparently, this original Benihana only closed last December.

The enterprise was called Benihana in reference to a “safflower,” an exceptionally porcupine-ish flower that looks a little like a firework microseconds after it’s exploded, the tentacles branching out excitedly from the center. It’s prickly and elaborate. The family legend says that Aoki was walking through the rubble after the war when he saw a lone safflower poking defiantly through the wreckage, and felt inspired by the image.

It was Aoki’s son Rocky who brought the concept to the US. Rocky was a total wildcard, combining his dad’s ambition with a high tolerance for risk. He got his start as a rock bassist before becoming a professional wrestler, then a professional offshore speedboat racer who almost died in a massive crash under the Golden Gate Bridge, before founding a successful softcore porn magazine called Genesis. He belongs in a Miami Vice episode.

Rocky opened the first US-based Benihana in New York City with money he earned from driving ice cream trucks around Harlem. He grew the whole thing into a massive chain, only to be forced to give up control following a guilty plea for insider trading. I’m guessing Rocky is where most of the spectacle came from.

Can you imagine all the things that can happen at a Benihana — this Cirque du Soleil of restaurants?

There’s the obvious stuff — the enraptured faces of children and tourists lapping up onion volcanoes and flying shrimp tails, the hipsters attending ironically but enjoying it despite themselves, the businesspeople celebrating someone’s work milestone. There are the chefs, many of whom I’m sure trained for something else, something more meaningful, stuck tossing knives in the air night after night like thespians singing Frozen on a Disney cruise line. There are the myriad little personal sagas for whom Benihana can play a climactic role: a birthday celebration, a last night out before leaving town, a date night intended to impress.

There’s danger too. Apparently, there have been staff brawls at Benihana, complete with flying plates and cutlery, expertly thrown I expect. One time, a man hurt his neck so badly dodging a shrimp tail he required neck surgery, while the actress Tori Spelling got severe burns after tripping and falling on the grill. I’m not sure Rocky intended to democratize flame outs, but he did.

There’s even a skateboarding maneuver called the Benihana that’s widely ridiculed for its absurdity, difficulty, and the way skateboarders who do it often fly out of the half pipe completely.

Pause. I’ve gone too deep. Where am I? Why am I even telling you this?

First of all, I shouldn’t have to answer that question. This is legit fascinating, an excellent use of Wikipedia. Isn’t that reason enough?

But also, I’m practicing. Specifically, I’m practicing the association game — where you pick a random word from scratch and let your mind run with wherever it takes you.

Right now, we’re in Week 2 of the songwriting course I’m running with pop artist Betty Who (I’m sure we’ll run it again soon if you’re interested). This week, Betty shared a demo video in which she wrote a song from scratch. I love these things. We all do so many things we don’t even realize when in focus mode, so watching an artist in flow can unearth the most amazing little nuggets of inspiration.

Without giving too much away, my favorite part of this demo video is the way that Betty starts with a single concept suggested by a fan (“New Year’s Eve”), and then unconsciously draws out a whole bunch of associations from it. What happens on New Year’s Eve? What might someone feel? What scenarios can be painted? It’s the night you dream about the year ahead, or bid a fierce goodbye to the one that just passed. It might be the last chance for something, or the chance for a sneak peek of something new.

Betty starts playing with these associations, trying different ones on as lyric ideas until she finds something compelling, and then uses that to write her song.

I could do the same thing with Benihana, which was the first word that came to mind today. I could tell some of the stories that happen there, or translate the feelings it gives me into poetry, or pivot into the rich ideas and imagery from its origin story: the war, the resilience, the recklessness. I could even write about a nervous skateboarder trying to impress a girl with a fanciful trick he can’t quite master.

That’s what I love about associations. Benihana (or whatever) is just the trigger to launch your imagination, and if your mind is loose and open and not too critical, you can wind up discovering things and places and ideas you never expected. Or writing an article like this.

You can also do something similar with notes and melodies. In my audio essay about Chopin’s Raindrops Prelude, I talked about the Herbie Hancock-inspired free improvisation exercise I do where I play a single note repeatedly before gradually building chords and melodies off it with no preconceptions as to what they’ll be. It’s the same thing, a steady game of melodic and harmonic association, one idea after another, until I discover things I like.

You can do the same thing with a melody. What does it make you think of? If you hum it, where do you naturally take it next? This is one way to develop a melodic idea. Just start singing or playing and then let yourself react to what you’re coming up with.

The thing is that this sort of association is not always easy. Our perfectionism might flare up. We might be too critical. We might feel that we’re wasting time. We might feel like we’re not coming up with anything good.

That’s why I also think it’s important to practice it sometimes, with no real intention behind what we’re doing other than cultivating an expansive mind. I love turning little moments into exercises — and this week’s Betty Who demo video seemed like a perfect chance to do so: Write a word, and then write as many associations as you can from it. Hence, Benihana.

So much of our creativity in the moment is dependent on the stuff we do before and after that moment to support our ability to be creative. Practicing associations could be part of that, the enabling work around your creativity that supports you in the moments you need it.

I actually do remember going to Benihana once not too long after I moved to New York City, about 20 years ago. I took my girlfriend at the time and maybe a coworker or two as well. It felt silly and special — I was doing the thing my childhood self would have wanted my adult self to do. And it was expensive! A big deal for a young professional newly unleashed on the big city! A big night out!

What I had maybe only the faintest of ideas of at that time was that the girlfriend who came with me would go on to become my wife, that we’d build a family together, a home, a life with three wonderful kids, and that 20 years later, we’d sit across from each other giggling about the time I took her to Benihana and how absurd it was that I loved it so much.

All sorts of things can happen in a Benihana, if you let your mind go there.

Happy imagining,
Ian

—
Ian Temple
Founder, Soundfly
ian@soundfly.com

Other stuff you might enjoy:

I wrote this piece on fire coral for a community-sourced magazine using a similar free association process, and it’s one of my favorite pieces still.

If you haven’t listened to my episode on Chopin yet, may I recommend it again? It gets into some free association stuff — and also I’ve just had a lot of people tell me recently they enjoyed it, which makes me smile.

My wonderful friend made the excellent point on last week’s newsletter in the comments that tricking yourself is a way to quiet your ego, to get out of your own way. I think the association game can do the same thing, a way to de-pressurize the process. I’m for it.

Anyone want to meet up at Benihana sometime?

About halfway through ’s Soundfly course, she starts talking about some of the characters she plays in her songs.

There’s the Brat, playful and teasing, maybe even a little scornful. The Brat is abounding in attitude. She tends to have a high-pitched, nasal-y voice and likes to sing call-and-response with the lead vocal.

There’s the Angel, ethereal and uplifting, with a rounder tone, calling her to be good, and the Demon, ugly-sounding and potentially heavily effected in some way, pushing her to court danger.

Sometimes she even summons a whole Girl Gang, an imaginary posse of different voices backing her up. They have confidence and swagger. They’re in her corner, hyping her up. You can hear the Girl Gang throughout Kimbra’s albums, like the voices shouting “Heeyyyy!” in the background of the verse on her song “Recovery.”

Inventing characters, channeling characters, singing as characters — it’s something artists have done for decades. Bowie has Ziggy Stardust. Beyoncé has Sasha Fierce. Björk has the elven high priestess Glamwing (OK, I made that one up, but I feel like it could be true). On her album folklore, Taylor Swift wrote from the perspective of a teenage boy named James, as well as the girlfriend he cheated on (Betty), and the girl he cheated with (Augustine).

This morning, I was listening to an episode of the excellent podcast Tape Notes with the Norwegian artist Aurora and the Chemical Brothers’ Tom Rowland. They have a new project called TOMORA, and were talking about how it came to be.

At one point Aurora talks about how her first step when approaching a new song is often to find the character in it. Is this song sung by someone waking up early? Why and what does that say about them and what they’re singing about?

At another point Tom talks about how he likes to make a beat in Ableton Live, and then resample it and pretend that he stumbled across it on some old record. He does this because it makes it easier for him to chop it up and mangle it, since he’s not treating it as some precious thing he slaved over but rather a thing he found and can do what he’d like with.

There’s a way in which all these stories share a similar theme: Each of these artists is tricking themselves into finding a new perspective.

When I say it like that, it somehow sounds wrong. Aren’t we meant to be authentically ourselves at all times? Isn’t the act of artistic expression itself a personal struggle to pull out the deepest parts of yourself and empty them out onto the page or into song? How can we do that if we’re pretending to be someone else or tricking ourselves?

In my opinion, one of the hardest parts of being any sort of artist is the pressure we put on ourselves and on our work. As artists, we want to be gardeners, but instead we act like undertakers. We plant little seeds but then heap so much dirt on them that we make a cemetery rather than a forest.

It’s because we’re ambitious (shovel). We want to create meaningful, impactful things (shovel). We have high expectations (shovel) and good taste (shovel) and impatience (shovel), and our work keeps defiantly disappointing us (shovel) or falling short of our vision (shovel). And then of course, while we’re shoveling, the world in its casual indifference joins in until we’ve accidentally buried ourselves completely. We just wanted to grow something pretty, and now we’re choking on worm guts underground.

We all need ways to curtail the pressure, to ease the intensity of it all. We need to chill the f&$* out, but that’s easier said than done. After all, you know what absolutely categorically unequivocally never works when trying to calm someone down? Telling them to calm down.

To me, that’s where tricks come in.

As I was writing this, I realized just how many ways I trick myself in my creative process.

Most obviously, I pretend there’s an important deadline every single Monday. This has become a core part of my creative work. Every week, I’ve got seven days to produce something, and it’s due on Monday, or the client is going to be pissed (spoiler: there is no client). It’s amazing how helpful that structure is for me, even though it’s entirely made up.

Other examples: When I’m practicing a piano piece, I often pretend there are people in the room to increase the stakes of what I’m playing. When I’m in the editing stage of composing or producing a new track, I prefer to pretend I’m remixing someone else’s work rather than just editing my own. I’ve created characters in my head that I’ve labeled and talk to sometimes: “Thank you, Critic, for all you do. I know you’re trying to help, but also you know how the Kid is. If we don’t let him bash around and play for a bit, he’s going to throw a tantrum and sulk all week, even if what he makes isn’t really up to your standards.” < That’s me suspending judgment.

When I was learning how to do graphic design, a friend gave me some advice. He said, whenever doing a project for a client, always come up with three options. The reason is less because multiple options increases your chance for success, and more because if you’ve done three options, you’re less likely to be defensive and overly precious about any single one of them. You’ve tricked yourself into seeing multiple possible avenues, which then makes you more flexible to feedback and iteration. I now do that same thing with production by doing “Save as” so I can create a new version of the same idea in a low pressure way.

It’s almost like we’re in a high-volatility relationship with our work (and through it, ourselves). We love each other but we can also be so bitingly cruel. We need to bring in mediators occasionally who can push us back from the edge and help us find a better way forward. Tricking ourselves is a form of mediation, a way to hide the trail, to confound the ego a bit, and to let go.

There is something I love specifically about the idea of using characters. Maybe it comes back to how much I love fiction and storytelling. It’s this massive act of imagination that when done well uses make-believe to teach us about reality.

And coming up with the details can be so fun. I can imagine a girl named Jenny. I can give her a job, let’s say a failed-actress-turned-hair stylist, and a setting, an intergalactic strip mall in the middle of an exploded star system. I can make things happen, like she gets accidentally turned into a superhero after being hit by a blaster in an alien drive-by, and create tension, like that she isn’t sure what to do with her new powers.

And the wild thing is that even with something as outlandish and seemingly foreign as that, I can also still find parts of myself in her experience. I can resonate with how she’s wrestling with the lack of control in her life, about the way she experienced disappointment, and about how overwhelming this new opportunity thrust on her is. Because to misquote Walt Whitman (as channeled through a beautiful song by Ólafur Arnalds), we contain multitudes.

This morning, I tried on a character for the first time while playing piano. I played a song of mine that I’ve played a gazillion times before, but this time I played it as someone going through an unwanted break up. It was amazing how parts of the song took on a slightly different meaning with this added lens on them. Harmonies took on regret. The melody slowed slightly, not wanting to let go. The high notes became reaching and desperate. And the whole thing felt new and exciting because of it.

Give it a shot. Trick yourself a bit. Let me know what happens.

Happy pretending,
Ian

Ian Temple
Founder, Soundfly
ian@soundfly.com

Five Interesting Things

1. I mentioned my “weekly creative rhythm” above. I’ve been inviting people to join on the Soundfly Discord group. If you’re a subscriber and want to try it, check in on Discord on Monday morning, we’ll set a goal together, and then the week after share how each other did. (If you’re a subscriber without Discord access, ping me!)

2. “Playing in free-form requires more discipline than almost anything else. To avoid anything one must have a detailed knowledge of it.” That’s jazz drummer Elvin Jones from this collection of direct quotes compiled by Norman Grossman and shared by the substack.

3. “In having to write them, I learned how to think, I learned to think hard about something and then most importantly how to articulate what I thought about it.” Ryan Holiday talks about how writing is not only about good communication but also teaching you how to think. I agree. In fact, I think it’s more than that. It’s forcing you to be explicit in your thinking so you know what you actually mean. I wrote about it in my piece “Put it in words.”

4. “You should always be on a quest.” Hard agree. That’s how this piece by Chris Dalla Riva starts in which he describes his quest to listen to an album a day for 365 days. Excellent idea.

5. This:

One job of a good therapist is to help unearth the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works, often unconsciously, and decide if they’re helping or hurting us.

Humans are relentless pattern recognizers, perhaps one of our defining features. We see things and immediately want to insert them into narratives, categories, or trends so we can understand them. These become the stories we use to explain the world — a helpful way to not down tools in the face of the universe’s pounding complexity.

But that doesn’t mean the patterns we see are accurate. If we’re talking foundational stories, one of mine is that human thinking is relentlessly faulty, filtered as it is through a patched together mush machine (the brain) that’s been constructed piecemeal over millennia by a relentless flood of new evolutionary feature requests. Reality filtered through our perception is no longer actually reality, more of an approximated simulacrum, a series of internal Lego builds using only the bricks we have available. Still impressive, often practical, but not always load-bearing.

That said, sometimes you find a pattern or story that really does seem to work for you. I’d like to tell you about one of mine. I don’t know if it’s fully accurate. I probably do need to examine it from time to time, since at best it’s built on a pop science understanding of how the world works. But I’ve found it to be extremely helpful all the same, so I’m keeping it.

This story began when I was young, as a cope. I wanted to learn guitar, so I asked my parents to sign me up for a guitar lesson. I did it, and afterwards, I remember my dad asking something along the lines of: “Well, what did the teacher say? Do you have any affinity for it? Does he think you’re musical?”

Totally fair question, especially if you’re the one about to drop a bunch of money on classes. But the reason I remember it is that I’ve always had this sneaking suspicion that the answer to that question was (and remains) No.

Nowadays, that’s kind of an absurd thing to say. I’ve released multiple albums, scored films, scored podcasts, toured the world, and played shows for hundreds maybe even thousands of people. If you asked a random friend of mine about me, they would likely describe me as a musician in the same breathe as a father and a friend. Music is a huge part of my life and identity.

But music never came easily for me. My guitar playing has barely progressed since 7th grade. My singing is atrocious. I’ve got a totally untrained friend who can whip a gorgeous melody out at a moment’s notice without thought in a way I can only admire. As a pianist, my fingers have always seemed like plodding, lazy toads, doing their stumbly best to play the chords and melodies I demand of them, while many of my friends’ hands seamlessly glide across the same keys with the ease of a dove. None of that was helped by the hand accident I’ve written about before.

Beyond that, no one else in my extended family is particularly musical, at least in terms of playing instruments or singing. My dad used to play a mean “Für Elise” on piano, my mom loves musical theater, and my older brother helped me sign up for one of those BMG music clubs where you got 21 CDs for the price of one back in the day (for which I’m endlessly grateful), and that’s about the extent of it.

But I loved playing music and wanted to play, so I developed a story to support it. I told myself natural ability doesn’t matter. It’s all about how much effort you put in.

Over time, I’ve realized the truth is more complicated than that, but that story offered me huge value for a long time. Namely, it made it so I worked hard and didn’t give up. It also made playing piano feel like a little rebellion against the natural order of things. Sticking it to the Man by playing scales. Hell yeah.

When I started working in education, I was able to update that story a bit by reading about how people learn. The book that stuck with me the most was probably Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by K. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool.

What Ericsson describes in it is an approach to learning that he calls deliberate practice — the idea that people become experts not primarily through natural gifts but through pursuing specific practice techniques consistently over time. In particular, Ericsson says that all effective practice techniques share the same general principles, regardless of field, by building on the natural adaptability of the brain.

Right away, you can probably see the connection to my story. Here’s one of the foremost researchers in the field of expertise validating my high school belief that natural musicality doesn’t matter as much as effort. But Ericsson also complicates and illuminates that picture. For one thing, not all effort is equal, and effort alone won’t lead to expertise.

Here’s the high level summary: Most of us reach an acceptable level of performance on some skill and stop improving from there. We’ve learned how to ride a bike or shoot hoops well enough to do it casually with friends, and that’s cool. It’s become automatic, including the mistakes we make. Doing it more just deepens those same grooves.

The best performers break past that point by developing highly specific goals, pursuing them with focus, getting feedback, and incrementally pushing themselves outside their comfort zone. In other words, they isolate specific elements of the task at hand they struggle with, and then push themselves to work on them repeatedly over time until they’ve mastered them, and then move on to the next one.

An example Ericsson gives is of a golfer who wants to improve their handicap at golf. That’s too vague a goal. Instead, they would need to figure out what part of golf is holding them back — driving, putting, approach shots, etc. — and then isolate and challenge themselves relentlessly to improve that aspect of the game. They would do thousands of putts from distances that challenged them. Or work to improve their drive, getting feedback on their swing until they can reach the green quicker.

The reason this works has to do with the new story that I tell myself, at least insofar as I understand it. It goes something like this: Because the brain is adaptable, you can train it in ways remarkably similar to how we train muscles. Experts call this “neuroplasticity.” It means the brain’s structure and functions are not hardwired and fixed, but respond to how we use them over time, editing connections and networks to make the ones we use a lot more efficient and let others we don’t fade into the background.

When you engage in deliberate practice, you’re curating your brain’s wiring, but it only works gradually over time. Your brain responds like a muscle that you’re strengthening. You have to put in the reps and keep making it more challenging to build up the parts of the brain that will support what you’re trying to do.

This story is optimistic because it means we are not working against natural limits as much as we might think we are. But it’s also brutally honest in the way it acknowledges that doing so takes a lot of focused, deliberate work over time, and most of the time we probably won’t put that work in because we don’t want to or it’s not worth it. And that’s fine too.

This story underpins how I think about learning music. If I want to improve at piano, I need to isolate specific aspects of my playing and work them. Right now, I’m working on the rhythm and time feel of my playing, so there’s a lot of practicing to beats and focusing on my rhythm. If I want to improve at mixing, I need to isolate aspects of mixing and practice with some way to get feedback.

But it also underpins a lot of other aspects my life. It underpins how I think about exercise. If I want to train for a marathon, I need to work on my distance incrementally and find ways to support my body in doing so. It underpins how I think about creativity. If I’m not stretching my brain with new varied inputs of all sorts and drawing on them regularly, I can’t expect to have novel and interesting ideas when I want them. I’ll get stuck in a rut. It underpins how I think about parenting, about how teaching my kids good behavior requires a focused and steady application of feedback over time.

It also means giving myself a break sometimes. It’s unreasonable to expect perfection from myself in certain areas if I’m not pursuing a deliberate strategy to improve in those areas. Not as good as my buddies at singing melodies? Well, have I put in the time and effort and disciplined practice to make it so? Do I want to? The answer is No, so it’s all good.

But the greatest value of this story I tell myself is in living the life I want to live. Because it means that with focused application and practice, I can take on many aspects of my life and bend them in the direction I want. Yes, this sounds cliché and overcooked. But it’s also extremely practical.

My wife has mastered one of the most important skills in life. It’s one of the things I admire most about her. The skill I’m talking about? Laughter. She can laugh at almost anything. Her laugh fills a room. It’s always threatening to burst forth, even at inappropriate times like when she’s meant to be disciplining one of our kids but is cry-laughing instead. And it turns out life is a lot better with a lot of laughter in it.

One thing I’ve noticed through my time with her is that… well, I can actually laugh more too if I work on it. I’m certainly not at her level of expertise yet, but maybe with a few more years of practice, I’ll get there.

And that’s a skill worth practicing.

Yours,
Ian

—
Ian Temple
Founder, Soundfly
ian@soundfly.com

Some Interesting Things

1. Songwriting course with Betty Who starts next week! Last chance to join is NOW.

2. If you haven’t seen it yet, the choreography in the back half of this video for this song “Storm” by French artist GENER8ION tis absolutely stunning. It’s done by ballet choreographer Damien Jalet, who has worked with Marina Abramovich, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and others.

3. I really enjoyed the podcast “60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s” where this music journalist Rob Harvilla goes on extended absurdist tangents to try to understand some of the most important songs from the ‘90s. Now, he’s back with the 2000s, and I enjoyed episode 1 on The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside,” which includes the host scouring the internet and emailing professors to try to find horny poems by great poets in history.

4. A couple friends with some songs you should listen to:

1. “Field of Coincidence” by TRELLIS is maximalist ambient synth music.

2. “When My Lover Is Across the Ocean” by Cloud Circuit is recited poetry and tape.

3. ”slowly” by Maximilian Konrad is a beautiful and atmospheric solo piano piece.

5. I listened to more than 300 pop songs in the past two weeks for the next episode of How to Make Epic Music. It’s going to be wild, I promise! If you haven’t listened to my episode on Chopin or Phish yet, please do so:

One week left to join Betty Who’s songwriting course! Use the code SPRINGISHERE for 25% off. If you’re a songwriter looking for some accountability and insight, we’d love to have you.

—

Hi all,

I’m way too deep in the world of researching orchestral pop hits, power ballads, and various other types of epic music this week to write something new. I wrote about obsession recently, and that’s where I am right now: One track mind, can’t focus on anything else.

It’s a fun place to be! Come on in, the water’s warm!

That said, here are a few quick thoughts for a Spring Friday:

“The side quest is where a lot of the value is”

One thing I love about a side quest is that it has to earn its keep.

When you’re focused on a specific goal, side quests can be ignored easily, and probably should be most of the time. But then every so often, you discover or learn something unexpected that totally takes over your brain, and it becomes this vast area of growth or study or development. I love that, and fully believe we should honor those tangents when they earn their place in your mind and heart.

The quote above is from my partner Kiefer, an amazing Grammy-winning jazz pianist who I help create courses with for pianists. During a lesson in the course we’re running right now, Kiefer was teaching people a certain chord progression, but halfway through he realized that the way he was playing it — using triad pairs — was distinct and worth talking about. The upshot is that learning about the triad pairs ended up being way more important for my playing than the specific chord progression, since it’s something I can translate to a lot of different situations.

That’s why I think, like an Arthurian knight in pursuit of romantic glory, we should always have our eyes open to possible interesting side quests. It might lead to a new project, a new song, or a whole new album.

So… what side quests are asking for your attention right now? Which ones feel compelling and vast? Don your armor and head out into the unknown!

“Sound is kinda touch at a distance”

This quote is from psychologist Anne Fernald, and discovered in an old Radiolab episode about how they think about sound. What a beautiful idea.

And it’s also true. Music is emotional and interpretive, but sound is deeply physical. It’s made up of waves, and your ears are old-timey mechanical devices able to convert those into signals for your brain.

When you listen to music, you are being physically impacted by the movements of the musicians you’re listening to, but at a remove in terms of distance and time. What an incredible connection. It’s time travel and teleportation all in one.

One concrete result of that is that our ears are also able to interpret space very literally in recorded music. If something is recorded from far away, our ears hear it as far away. If something is recorded on the left side of the stage, we hear it on the left. Recordings have physicality in them. The best engineers, producers, and mixers are able to work with these spatial parameters to create clarity, depth, and fullness in a song.

That’s something I’ve been spending a lot of time on recently in my own production journey in two concrete ways: Being more deliberate in how I record a sound in terms of space, and being more extreme in how I pan sounds around the recorded space in the mix. It’s such a fun dimension of mixing!

Listeners, I challenge you this week to spend some time asking yourself where in space the specific parts of a song are. Are they right in front of you? To the sides? 20 feet away? Leaning out the third story window?

“I just saw it go up, and I was astonished that it didn’t come back down again.”

Oprah.

Apparently, that’s where Prince’s guitar went following his legendary Rock & Roll Hall of Fame performance where he burned up the stage for three minutes before tossing his guitar high in the air and strutting off. If you’ve ever seen the video (below), you know the mystery. The guitar never comes back down. The quote above is from the drummer that night Steve Ferrone, who agrees it never came down.

As ever with Prince, sometimes the truth is weirder than the mystery. In this case, per Prince’s explicit instructions, his guitar tech positioned himself carefully in the front row, caught the guitar, and then HANDED IT TO OPRAH, who stood awkwardly holding it for the rest of the show. Because those were Prince’s instructions.

This week marked 10 years since Prince’s passing. I tend to listen to music that sounds like glaciers and make music that’s slow, emotional, and textural — and yet, Prince still remains one of my biggest artistic inspirations. He was just so relentlessly creative and independent. He had a creator’s wanderlust, dipping into ideas with the fervent busy-ness of a bee collecting nectar. It’s also full of impatience and imperfections and weird experiments that I love.

And his music makes me smile like almost no one else’s can. My methods might be different, but ultimately I’d like to accomplish the same end goal.

Here’s Prince’s wild performance at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for your viewing pleasure. The guitarist smiling throughout is George Harrison’s son. The magic starts around 3:25.

I hope you have a wonderful week!

Ian

—
Ian Temple
Founder, Soundfly
ian@soundfly.com

Spring sale continues!

Over the course of the past decade, we made some 60+ courses with some amazing artists and on topics we were interested in. They range from beginner piano to advanced mixing, from sound design with Son Lux to vocal arrangement with Kimbra. I would love if you got value from them!

Use the code SPRINGISHERE for 20% off a monthly or annual subscription and get access to all of them.

“I must open a bookshop.” — Yeongju from Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop

Many of the musicians and artists I know are facing very similar challenges right now. There are the challenges around making shit — how to defeat writer’s block, how to make a better mix, how to write a great song, etc.

Those challenges feel hard but largely straightforward. If you want a better mix, you pay someone or learn how to be a better mixer. Yes, it will take time and money, but there’s a comforting certainty to it. If you apply yourself to it with diligence over time, you’ll probably overcome it.

The more difficult challenges revolve around how to matter in people’s lives.

To be clear, that’s not the reason most of us make art. We make it because we’ve fallen in love with acts of wizardry, with spinning something out of nothing, with the sense of losing oneself in an act of creation. Because doing it makes us happier (sometimes), healthier (on occasion), and better off (usually). Or because we can’t not.

But in a life with a myriad of possible pathways, I don’t think it’s too much to also want our work to matter to someone, to impact them, to move them, to touch them in some hidden, ineffable way that affects their life.

Unfortunately, “how to matter to people” has none of the certainty of the other challenges I described. In other words, we can apply ourselves with diligence over time and still not manage it.

In today’s day and age, most people listen to and discover music on streaming services or social media, so it makes sense that most of the advice on how to matter to people ends up being about how to reach people via those formats.

And yet, we all know at this point that streaming is a bottomless dumping ground for the world’s music. It has reduced the dollar value of music down to zero and flattened the listener experience into undifferentiated gloop where one can sub out artists for AI without many noticing. It’s very good at hiding the humans.

Having your music on there can be exciting and cool, especially when you’re starting out. Someone could put your song on a playlist with David Bowie! But then you realize over time that you’ve been ushered into a galaxy-sized warehouse, and told to add your tiny speck of space debris to the orbit of an asteroid some 2 billion light years away from Earth. You’re lost in the void of the night sky. Some will tell you that you can be a planet or star if you just post lots of singles with a hook in the first 8 seconds. It might work for some, but prioritizing what the algorithm wants over artistic considerations is a path to mediocre art, and I don’t think making mediocre art is how you matter to people.

Given that, people will tell you to invest in building your social media audience instead. That’s how to get labels, promoters, and bookers to notice you.

That part is true. Promoters do like numbers. And yet, at the same time, there are lots of well-documented stories of artists with a gazillion followers online who can’t sell a ticket to a show. I’ve worked with a few of them — people who painstakingly built audiences that either aren’t actually that interested in what they do, or that they can’t reach because the capricious Gods of the algorithm have turned against them. This week, there was a lot of discussion around the agency chaotic good that uses fake fan accounts and bots to generate buzz for new artists. It’s shitty, but I don’t entirely blame them. If it helps them matter to real people in the long-term, maybe that’s OK. But if that’s what it takes, well, it doesn’t really make me want to play.

This isn’t new. All of this is the well-documented story of what’s happened since music met the Internet. Scale is essentially cost-free. You can theoretically reach anyone anytime anywhere for almost nothing.

And sometimes you do, and it’s awesome! One of my tracks, an instrumental cover of Thom Yorke’s “Dawn Chorus,” just reached half a million listeners on Spotify and Apple Music, and I have no idea how it happened. By chance, it fell into the right corner of the machine, and the cogs picked it up and started churning it through the system. I’m not sure many of those listeners have become fans, but I made the music to be listened to, so it’s pretty gratifying to hit Internet scale and have a lot of people listen to it.

Internet scale can be really cool in that way. You pull numbers, sometimes more than the population of a small European country (I see you, Iceland). It can be totally unexpected.

But it can’t be relied on in my experience, and thinking only in terms of Internet scale will drive you crazy. For example, in Internet scale, 100 listens of a song feels very disappointing, whereas in a room full of 100 people, the place would be bumping.

That’s why I think it’s better to think like a local bookshop.

Because local bookshops matter a lot to people. Heck, they matter a lot to me. When I was in Montréal in December with time to myself for the first time in months, I spent most of it browsing and chatting with people at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly. When my family visited Rome last year, our first stop was a bookshop — in fact, it usually is whenever we visit a new city. Maybe that’s partly because a bookshop is a great place to walk to when you want an excuse to walk.

I’m not alone in this. In fact, the number of independent bookshops in the US has shot up in the past decade, and is up 70% since 2020 according to the American Bookseller Association. In the early ‘00s many assumed that the combination of lower prices and convenience offered online by Amazon would kill independent bookshops forever. And it did for a while. But it turns out people want to start bookshops despite really low margins and people want to visit them despite higher prices because they bring people meaning and make communities better. Local bookshops are undergoing a renaissance, and it’s awesome.

I recently finished the book Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-reum. It's a story about an ambitious woman named Yeongju who quit her job to open a bookshop, leaving her husband and alienating her family in the process. Running the bookshop is grueling and hard. But over time, the bookshop brings together a community of people who love and care about things, about books, about words, about brewing the perfect coffee, about people, and about how we spend a day. As the author Hwang Bo-reum writes in the Author’s Note, “I wanted to write… stories of people who find their own pace and direction. How others judge where they stand - be it high or low, good or bad - doesn’t matter to them.”

Yeongju makes the bookshop a beautiful place for people to hang out. She learns people’s names and invites them in. She selects the books not based on bestsellers but based on books she loves — and leaves little notes on them about why she loves them. She invites authors to come speak, and hosts reading circles and film screenings. She hires someone who discovers an almost ritualistic love for brewing coffee and someone else who can talk about books expansively.

It’s a work of fiction, but the bookshops in my neighborhood all do similar things. The Community Bookstore nearby is full of interesting and unusual reads, marked with personal notes from the staff. Books Are Magic has great author talks. Powerhouse Books has a great haunted house at Halloween.

So what would it mean to act like a local bookshop as a musician?

Leave a comment

It means remembering why you’re doing this. The inflated expectations promised by Internet scale can be blinding. You’ve chosen a low-margin, high-effort endeavor because you love it and because it moves people. Let that reminder drive you.

It means learning people’s names who listen and follow you, and treating each one like a member of your community — and creating time for them. It means offering special deals and items for your regulars and finding ways to build connection or allow for connection between others using what you offer as a platform. It means making yourself available to people.

It means thinking less about how many people you can reach efficiently and thinking more about how you can make this experience more magical for the ones you do.

Maybe most of all, it means never letting humans become numbers or letting numbers lose their humanity — trying to imagine an actual face and backstory for every single “listener” number you rack up online. According to Apple Music, 7 people are listening to my band Sontag Shogun right now. I imagine that one of them is in the car on the way to visit an old friend, while another is cleaning the house after a really tough couple days. Two of them have it on in the background while working, and two are on a run. The final one is a teenager learning about experimental music for the first time, and eager to have something a little unknown to show off to their friends. It’s awesome.

There’s risk in this message. The risk is that you might see this as telling you to do more, to add author’s talks and reading clubs to your already full music-making and social posting schedule. That’s not what I’m saying.

I hope instead the big takeaway is, in a world where it can sometimes feel like reaching Internet scale is the only valid measure of success, it can be helpful to think like a local bookshop and serve your neighborhood instead.

What do you think it would mean to act like a local bookshop?

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading,
Ian

Shout out to my friends Max and Hildur at OPIA for recommending Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop and to the amazing artist who posted something earlier this week that helped me develop this idea further.

—
Ian Temple
Soundfly
ian@soundfly.com

NEW: Weekly Goals & Accountability

One way I’m trying to serve my community is by doing a bit more to help people stay on track. To do that, I’m going to be kicking off a weekly accountability practice for subscribers.

Basically, I’ll be checking in on the Soundfly Discord on Monday mornings with two things and inviting others to do the same:

• Reflecting on my creative goals from last week and how they went

• Setting creative goals for this coming week.

Join me and check in on your goals. Then, once a month, we’ll do a Zoom hang to chat about the creative process, listen to music, and help each other out. If this is something you’re interested in being part of, subscribe to my Substack or on Soundfly.com.

Subscribe now

Current Courses & Discounts

A lot of stuff underway! Check it out if you’re interested in any courses I’m running right now:

Kiefer’s 30 Days of Harmony.

30 days, 30 lessons, starting next week. This is our second time running this course, taught by jazz / neosoul artist Kiefer. If you want to get better at playing interesting chord progressions on piano, feel free to join with the code “soundfly” for 25% off. Learn more here.

Betty Who’s Art of Songwriting Course.

This is pop artist Betty Who’s first songwriting course, and I’m excited! She has infectious, catchy songs with a lot of energy. If you’re looking for some structure and expert insight to improve your songwriting, I highly recommend joining. Use the discount code SPRINGISHERE for 25% off the price. Check it out here.

Soundfly Spring discount.

60+ video courses on things like production, composing, theory, songwriting, etc. and taught by artists like Ryan Lott, Kimbra, Com Truise, RJD2, and others. Get 20% off with the code SPRINGISHERE. Sign up here.

Subscribe now

It’s Spring Break for my kids! Which means I’m putting all Soundfly courses on sale. There’s a new live songwriting course with Betty Who (details below), and 20% off a Soundfly subscription this month, which gives you access to 60+ courses on production, composing, theory, and more. Use the code SPRINGISHERE to access it. Enjoy!

There are so many ways to get hit in life.

There’s the No Look, where someone with an inexplicably firm shoulder smashes into you on their way past. Common in crowded subways.

There’s the Mobster Special, a classic — baseball bat to the kneecaps. One to avoid for sure.

There’s the “This Isn’t My Body, Is It?,” where you bash yourself clumsily into furniture as if you’ve just woken up from a 10,000 year cryogenics experiment.

There’s more. The Windmill, usually delivered by a sibling. The Kamikaze Pigeon, which any New Yorker has experienced or gotten uncomfortably close to experiencing on numerous occasions. My wife scarily got the Car Door Special last year, and it was not fun. In fact, anything involving cars should really be out of bounds.

In high school, my buddies and I used to wear these foam toy Hulk gloves and lay into each other with them. Eye rolls, yes, but it felt like a pretty harmless exorcism of our excess adolescent testosterone. The hits were generally pillowy, with one exception: One of the gloves in each pair had a little plastic noise-making box in the wrist so that it would “roar” upon impact, which added a pretty comical sound layer to the occasion but also increased the chances of a fight ending in a bloody nose. As I said, there are lots of ways to get hit.

And yet, we all know that the worst hits (at least, aside from cars) are often emotional. Break ups, personal losses, dashed dreams. Those hits come with the force of a billion neural connections jolting through your system, the memories of a thousand prior personal fears and failures and anxieties, the hurt developed over millennia of aching, desperate, daring attempts at survival for oneself and one’s family. Emotions are an evolutionary conspiracy designed to lay you out.

We all take hits sometimes. It’s part of every journey, every career, every relationship. We risk getting hit every time we get out of bed. Actually, if you live in a place that gets earthquakes and have a painting hanging over your bed, it’s a risk in bed too. That’s called the Quake Paint Shake, rare but forceful.

There’s a way in which choosing to be an artist is like seeing all this, and then deciding you want more of it — looking at the slugfest, and saying: “You can do better than that.”

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Part of that might be that artists tend to be more sensitive than most. I don’t usually like generalizations, but I’m open to this one. To make meaningful art, we have to open ourselves up to the world, with its litany of swinging fists. That makes us more vulnerable. And it’s easy to accidentally get your sense of self-worth tangled up in the lines as you cast your work out there.

This was a week of ups and downs for me on my personal journey, as it probably was for millions of artists all over the world. I made some music (woohoo!). I got a bunch of rejections (nerts!). I published some projects I’m proud of (hell yeah!). Some of them didn’t land as I’d hoped (sigh). I experienced moments of profound edification from the joy of whispering new things magically into existence — and other moments of gnawing hopelessness that any of it is worthwhile and that it’s all just self-indulgent mush.

So, basically, a normal week for an artist.

Sometimes in life, success is clear: Graduate high school. Get a diploma. Find a job. Do a good job at that job. Make some money. Buy a home. Easier said than done maybe, but at least you know what you’re out to achieve. I used to work a 9-to-5 in an office, and I liked the structure and clarity of it (even if other parts were terrible). I didn’t have to invent my job at the same time as doing it. And it’s generally easier to walk up a hill if you can see how the path reaches the top.

One of the challenges of being an artist is having to operate more on the edge of a sort of wobbly, foggy, muddy trench. You’re scrambling up the side but not sure how far up it goes or what’s up there, and you’re constantly sliding back down. There’s a lot of freedom, but it’s undoubtedly messier. And unfortunately, it can be harder to roll with the punches if you’re unsure where you’re going or why or what will make it all worth the pain along the way.

Do I want to make a living off my art and music? Is that success? That’s a tough path. Music is so competitive, and there’s a lot of sacrifice and luck involved. Even many of the most successful artists are drawing on a wide array of fragile income streams. The realist in me calls me a chump for even entertaining the idea. And yet, the idea continues to taunt almost every musician I know, including me.

But would that even be rewarding? Last week, when researching the band Phish for my podcast, I was struck by the way they lost their way at the height of their supposed success — something that’s all too common in the annals of the music industry. By 2003, they were selling out massive festivals but addicted to drugs, angry at each other, and not having fun anymore. At least they made it through. Many didn’t.

So what are we doing here? We’re making lots of sacrifices for our music. Personally speaking, I often stay up late working on it. I spend a lot of money on it. I miss out on time with my kids and other stuff I could be doing. We’re investing such huge parts of ourselves in our craft. For what? Some streaming numbers? A nice review now and then? A couple vinyl sales? The chance to repeatedly get knocked down in novel ways?

With so many ways to get hit, it’s no surprise that we all end up a little punch drunk from time to time. That’s when we’re most vulnerable to the setbacks, when we lose sight of why we’re sacrificing so much to make art and why it matters.

On Tuesday, I went to a show at a small record shop on the Lower East Side. There were about 20 people in the room. The performers were a singer named Jackie West, a guitarist, and an experimental musician (my friend Jesse Perlstein). For an hour, they led us on this beautiful sonic journey through songs and field recordings, into deep wells of emotion and back out again. Afterwards, we all hung out, and it was a lovely, joyful evening.

If you asked most of us what we wanted to be when we grew up as kids, I’m not sure playing an obscure show for no money and few people would be most people’s answer. But… I don’t know, maybe it should be.

Because music has never fit comfortably into our systems and structures. It’s a tough job. It’s often more than a hobby. It takes huge amounts of effort, not commensurate with the rewards most of the time.

But it also propels and adorns so much of what’s good in life. It brings good people together to laugh and dance and have fun. It helps us grow. It tickles our brain and catches our falls. It makes the mundane shimmer with meaning. It electrifies and excites and offers reflection and meaning. It teaches us to take our time and engage creatively with the stuff around us. It brings joy, like it did on Tuesday night.

There’s no way to be an artist without taking the hits that come with it. My friend Rushab Nandha keeps a note of label rejections he’s received as motivation. Another friend Timo of Ceremony Shadows has published bad reviews on social media, turning them into a way to connect more deeply with their fans.

For me, I like to come back to why I make art and music to begin with, to find my north star and anchor myself to it. That gives me resilience.

One way I do that is by picturing myself on a small rocky island off the coast trying to build a lighthouse, ideally with some friends, sometimes on my own. It’s a fun and playful project — imagining what the building will look like, trying to combine the materials I have at hand to make something cool, and learning how it will work as I go. There’s a lot of fiddling and learning and experimenting, something you’d dream about doing as a kid. If I succeed and manage to illuminate the way to shore for someone passing by, well then it’s even more meaningful. But if it doesn’t, it’s still a fun project to work on that will leave this part of the coast slightly better off than I found it.

And if we all do that, it’s a hell of a lot of light in the world.

What about you? How do you deal with rejection and failure in your creative life? Is it something you think about or try to ignore and plow through? Feel free to reply and let me know, or put it in the comments.

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Thanks for reading,
Ian

PS. For more in this vein, read about the time I lost my pinkie, or how I deal with the demon on my shoulder who tells me to stop making new music.

Ian Temple
Soundfly
ian@soundfly.com

New: The Art of Songwriting With Betty Who

Betty Who is known for anthemic pop songs full of energy and authenticity. I’m very excited to be running a course with her on how she approaches songwriting. It will include demos of her writing a song and weekly lectures from Betty Who, with Q&A.

If you’re looking for some structure and insight to help with your songwriting, check it out! Use the code SPRINGISHERE for 25% off, and don’t hesitate to email me if you’ve got questions.

Five Interesting Things

1. “A life surrounded by good people is a successful life. It might not be success as defined by society, but thanks to the people around you, each day is a successful day.” — Hwang Bo-reum, Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop. Just finished this book. It was a fun read on the nature of how we choose to spend our lives.

2. “What made these kids push through such cringe-inducing incompetence and keep going? The safety net of having other kids on their side. It inspired them to not only persevere and get better but also to keep taking risks in pursuit of their own distinctive sound.” — shout out to for this find, an essay in the NYTimes on why you should start a band and how playing music with others is another path to resilience.

3. I highly recommend Jackie West’s new album Silent Century (who I saw Tuesday night). Lovely folk music with a classic feel.

4. “I have long suspected that artists (and, yes, that includes you, writers) are the closest things we have to wizards.” Beautiful article about musicians as wizards and aging and other stuff here from that resonated with me in a number of ways. Also, I always like beautiful writing.

5. A fun article here from visualizing time in music through the use of “georhythms,” basically polyrhythmic divisions of time into shapes. It reminded me of ’s Groove Pizza app where you can make beats using shapes on a pizza. Enjoy!

Here’s the audio, including me trying my best to play a long, convoluted song on the piano. If you have trouble downloading this, go here instead. If you want to listen on Spotify, go here.

12.29.94.

7.31.13.

8.17.96.

12.31.95.

To most of us, these numbers are meaningless. To the more perceptive of you, you might have already figured out they’re dates.

But to a certain subset of the population, these numbers are immediately recognizable and near-sacred.

Mine is 8.3.03. It was 2 am on a Sunday morning. I found myself unexpectedly camped out in Maine with some friends on a former Cold War Strategic Air Base known for housing the kinds of airplanes that carried nukes. But on this occasion, we were instead surrounded by an impromptu interactive city 60,000 strong that was one of the biggest population centers in Maine for the weekend.

We were standing below an old flight tower watching as colors and smoke exploded off the top while dancers performed suspended down the sides, hundreds of feet off the ground — all while a band that had already played for some 4 hours earlier that day and would play for 5 more the next played an entirely improvised (and unannounced) jam on top of the tower.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about yet, I’m hesitant to even tell you.

For a variety of reasons, some fair, some not, this specific band gets a bad wrap in the music world. When I say their name, it’s almost guaranteed that certain associations will jump to mind, and probably not good ones. Smelly crowds of drugged out hippies. Self-indulgent jamming. Nonsensical songs that most people don’t really get. To the uninitiated, this group and people who listen to them have become something of a punchline.

But this band is so undeniably epic. Since their start in 1983, they’ve played more than 2,000 shows without ever repeating a setlist. They once played 13 shows in a row night after night without ever repeating a single song. To see in the new millennium in 1999, they played 8 hours straight from midnight til sunrise, the largest concert on earth that night. They’ve hosted multi-day festivals, played while jumping on trampolines, and rode giant hot dogs into stadiums.

Basically, they’re one of the most creatively independent and successful acts in modern music without ever having had a hit and while being written off by vast parts of the listening population. I can put numbers on that. Since 1980, they’re actually the 33rd highest grossing live band, one step above Lady Gaga. They’re 12th highest in terms of ticket sales.

Welcome to Episode 2 of How to Make Epic Music, the series where I explore artists and songs that push the limits of musical propriety and common sense. My name is Ian Temple, and today, we’re talking about the band Phish, and specifically the unbridled, unrivalled, and uncontainable world of a live Phish jam.

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A small request to start…

Phish inspires strong opinions. We’ll get into it, but the fans can be kinda intense, the haters scornful. I’ll admit to being a bit of an outsider. I used to listen to Phish in high school, then didn’t listen much for about 20 years before going to a show this past New Year’s and loving it. I’ve only ever been to a handful of shows, but the thing is, that small handful of shows stand out in my memory way more than most.

Because Phish do extraordinary things on stage. They are the rarest of things, a truly unique act and one so at odds with the modern world of quick hits, algorithms, social media, corporate acts, and streaming. And I think the general disdain they receive in many parts, as well as the somewhat justified connotation of drug use, is causing some people to miss all that. As Amanda Petrusich wrote in The New Yorker last year, “Phish requires commitment — a subversive idea in our era of miniscule attention spans.”

So I’m asking you to suspend your preconceptions here, because whatever else it is, Phish offers a great story with a lot to learn. And they’re undeniably epic. So let’s dive in, starting with the music.

Long songs with strange structures

Phish has a number of different types of songs. They have traditional songs with verses and choruses, folk and pop songs, rock songs built on guitar riffs, etc. But they’re perhaps most famous for songs that are through-composed, meaning there’s no obvious structure beyond going from one idea to the next. There aren’t usually big sectional repeats.

Through-composed songs pop up in prog-rock, in musical theater sometimes, and definitely in experimental music.

The way Phish’s through-composed songs tend to work is that the first half is very intricately composed, every member of the band doing something totally unique that fits together really tightly, while the second half often gives way to a looser jam. In fact, the band has said that playing the intricate first part prepares them to be in sync for the second, more jammy part at the end.

An example of a through-composed song is “The Divided Sky” off Phish’s very first record Junta from 1989 and a mainstay of live shows to this day. This song is kinda weird. And long. On the record it’s a tidy 12 minutes, but live it can go 20+ minutes.

It starts with a nice major chord idea, then has a simple, slightly absurd chant, before embarking on a weird atonal section, meaning there’s no obvious key center. This is classic Phish. There’s a chromatic walk up to build tension. There’s some whole tone nonsense. The whole section plays as a palindrome, forward, then backward, then forward again. You feel like you’re totally lost as a listener right up until it resolves in triumph.

In the audio above, I try to actually play this song on the piano. It’s… not easy.

Regardless, there are a number of patterns here that are very common to Phish songs: The through-composed structure, the way it oscillates between moments of tension and moments of release, the number of pretty hook-like melodies, the way each badn member has their own unique part separate from the others, even the slight absurdity of it all. Then, as already mentioned, it ends in a jam.

The jam is where things can really open up live. “Divided Sky” is usually what’s called a Type I jam by fans, where the band continues to improvise within the chord progression of the song. A Type II jam on the other hand can go anywhere. We’ll get to that.

The whole song ends in a slightly slapstick manner, with a little chromatic walk up and a musical theater-ish button on the end.

But there’s more to it than that

Writing songs like this is certainly part of what makes Phish epic, musically speaking. But let’s go deeper.

The story starts in Vermont, in 1983, at the University of Vermont. Guitarist Trey Anastasio met drummer Jon Fishman and bassist Mike Gordon and they began jamming together and playing some shows. They met the fourth member keyboardist Page McConnell in 1986. Trey and Jon promptly joined Page at the alternative school he was attending called Goddard, which allowed them to study whatever they wanted. Jon majored in drums, Page’s thesis focused on improvisation, and Trey… well, Trey’s thesis was a prog-rock concept album about a retired colonel who falls through an imaginary door into a fantastical world called Gamehendge populated by a people called the Lizards who follow the teachings of a book called the Helping Friendly Book that gets stolen by a power-hungry tyrant named Wilson.

Welcome to the world of Phish!

Actually, the songs and story in Trey’s thesis would go on to feature heavily in Phish’s lore and live shows. The entire prog-rock opera has been played live on four legendary occasions (with a fifth that’s considered cusp-y) — although individual songs from it like Divided Sky are more common.

A few traits common to the members of Phish: One, humor. They’re all described as funny and light-hearted, with an expansive sense of the absurd. Two, self-discipline — they all take the music quite seriously. Three, they’re all musical omnivores, with a wide array of influences.

“Phish has command over so many different grooves and spaces. They can be funky. They can be shredded metal. They can be calypso, they can be folky. They just inhabit all these spaces so readily.” That’s Fred Kosak, the guitarist and singer of the band Stillhouse Junkies. Fred’s one of the best musicians I know, and an avid Phish fan. “I think the last 5 years I’ve seen about 20 shows or so, which is a lot for me, not a lot by Phish standards.”

I asked Fred why he liked Phish. “Uniqueness is such a hard thing. If somebody was like, what kind of band are they? Some people would call them a rock band, but like that’s a stretch. What is Reba? I don’t even know. Is it prog? Not really. It’s kind of jazz. It’s not really jazz. I can’t think of too many bands that I really could not describe using terms like musical terms.”

There are a few influences that often come up with Phish: King Crimson for the long compositions, Frank Zappa for the surrealism, the Grateful Dead for the improvised jams and hippy vibes, Jimi Hendrix for the rock experimentation, Schoenberg for the atonal elements. But honestly, evoking influences almost feels too limiting.

Fred says: “If Phish were a person, they would be the kind of person I would like to hang out with because they’re not trying to copy anybody. They’re not self-conscious. They’re not worried about what anybody thinks. They’re like: We think this is cool. We’re going to get as good at it as we can.”

The corollary to all this is that they have experienced a lot of hate over the years, in part because they do things so unapologetically their own way. They don’t tone it down or try to reach new audiences. They have had some absolutely terrible reviews over the years, like this one in Vice: “Phish has been a band for 30 years now and they’ve sucked the entire time.” Their audiences are also not the most diverse crowds you’ve ever encountered.

As my bandmate in Sontag Shogun (and an exceptional solo artist) Jeremy Young says, “I’m exactly what a Phish fan is. I’m sort of like a suburban, white, middle class person who grew up with a certain amount of music in the landscape, looking around and being like, yeah, this is good, but do I identify with this? And then you find a band like Phish and they’re a traveling circus of weirdos making really high quality music, but not taking things too seriously, and the crowd is living this free life or whatever. I hate to say it, but it’s the music of privilege. I think a lot of young people that were not sure what to do with their privilege could find something in that.”

It’s perhaps unsurprising that’s turned some people off over the years.

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Primarily a live band

It’s impossible to understand Phish’s success or allure without understanding that they are primarily a live band and always have been. They didn’t even release a studio album until 6 years into their existence, and their 2nd most successful album is A Live One. It’s quite possibly their most defining characteristic that every single show is unique, a one-off spectacle never to be repeated.

“No bands do that.” That’s Jeremy Young again. I called him up because he has one of the widest breadths of musical knowledge of anyone I know. He says even in jazz, there’s usually a vague structure people are improvising around. But with Phish: “It’s like: ‘let’s play the first half of this song. Then we’re going to do some nonverbal gestures on stage to each other and pop ourselves with a rubber chicken and then start another song right in the middle of that and then play that for 25 minutes and then come back for one minute and finish the first.’ It doesn’t make any sense.”

This relentless on-stage experimentation and risk-taking is what got people coming back and bringing friends in the band’s early days. It started in the ‘80s at local clubs in Burlington, like Nectar’s. It moved to literal farms where they’d invite fans by mailing them postcards with directions.

When they tried to expand beyond Vermont, promoters wouldn’t pick them up, so they ended up just renting out venues themselves — and their fans would bus in to attend. This led to them controlling every part of their shows, from the lights to the sound to the production to the backdrops, which in the early days were painted by the bassist Mike’s mom.

Phish are often compared to the Grateful Dead for their scene, but as Trey pointed out in The New Yorker last year, they’re actually more similar to the punk scene in some ways: the DIY approach, the “beg-forgiveness-rather-than-ask-permission” ethos, the willingness to do a lot with a little. (There’s a nice quote in that New Yorker piece from Fugazi frontman Ian McKaye about how much he admires Phish’s approach.)

Along these same lines, the band has always had an obsessive dedication to the fans, way above what would make sense for commercial considerations. That dedication plays out in the music, but also in how they chose to develop their career. They allowed fans to tape and trade their shows from the get-go. They were one of the first to offer direct downloads of live recordings and an online community. They innovated epic multi-day festivals, with art, games, carnivals, rides, and lots of surprises, that ended up inspiring modern festivals like Bonnaroo. After one of them, their team actually went through the lost and found and tried to return each item to its owner. They even once brought the ashes of a hardcore fan who died with them on tour, at the request of his bereaved father.

That’s probably why by 1996, they couldn’t get a song on the radio but they could sell 70,000 tickets to a weekend festival. In fact, that specific festival called the Clifford Ball was the biggest concert in North America that year.

As Jeremy says: “Back then, nobody was doing what they do. And even today nobody does what they do, which is play basically three hours across two sets and then come back for an encore that could last anywhere between ten minutes and a half an hour or 40 minutes. They basically play an entire other set as an encore.”

“What is an epic band or an epic musical experience? Somebody that commands the stage and just fully fills it. It’s just four guys on a stage and then there are insane lights, the sound is enveloping, and they use their songwriting and their understanding of a grand narrative to fill an entire space. It’s like a band that is much bigger than the sum of its parts. That’s epic. That’s crazy epic.”

The discipline of an athlete

If there’s one thing I think outsiders miss about Phish, it’s this: They approach performing with the discipline and ambition of an elite athlete.

There are lots of stories of them rehearsing for hours at a time: 8 hours, 10 hours, 12 hours straight. They devised games to help them get better at listening and responding to one another. For instance, they would practice blindfolded. Or play with a set of rules, like every time the jam gets faster it needs to get quieter and vice-versa. They even hired trainers to go on tour with them, to help them work on discreet skills like how to be a barbershop quartet.

One of the famous games from the early days was called “including your own hey.” The details on how it worked are a little hazy, but the basic idea is this: One member starts a little riff and says “hey.” Then another joins with another “hey,” finding a gap for their own part. Then another, and so on — each member finding their own specific spot in the groove. Then, when everyone’s in, the first person changes their riff and the whole thing continues.

Apparently, there was another version of the same game called “Get out of my hey hole.”

“Think about a conversation.” Fred Kosak again. “Think about three other people, and you sit down at a coffee shop and you start to talk and think of how many different forms that could take. And then think of a version where you get up and feel like, ‘you know what? That was a really enjoyable hour, and I learned a lot, and I got to say what I wanted to say.’ It’s an improbable thing! Somebody is going to want to dominate the conversation. Somebody’s going to want to tell a story. It’s a bit of a high wire act where you have to be listening and choosing your moment to assert yourself but not be too assertive. And all of that is happening non-verbally.”

In some ways Phish’s innovation was to decide to work on this, as a skill like any other, to work on their patience to let the conversation evolve over time and their ability to listen and respond to each other in the moment.

The secret language

A consequence of this intense discipline and listening to each other is that they were able to develop a specific language to communicate musically. There might be a specific guitar line that indicates a change is about to come or that the jam should move on. Or Trey would play the riff from The Simpsons Theme song, and no matter where the band was in a song or in a jam, the other members of the band would respond and also go into The Simpsons Theme song live, and then go back into what they were playing before.

Here’s Jeremy again: “If you know anything as a fan, you can go into the show expecting the unexpected. Something is going to happen that’s going to surprise you. It can be kind of small — and usually the small stuff is like some of the fan favorite stuff, like when they bust out little trampolines in the middle of the 20 minute song called ‘You Enjoy Myself.’”

“Why is that epic? Your attention is so crucial to making this relationship work between band and fan. You have to give the band all of your attention. But then when you give it to them, they make good on that promise.”

In the era fans call Phish 1.0, in the early 1990s, they made parts of this secret language explicit to fans. So for instance, they’d play a chromatic descending scale and everyone in the crowd was expected to fall down — which must have been absolutely wild for people in the audience who didn’t know it was coming, especially the intoxicated ones.

Over time, the language has grown more organically and expanded, so that it’s not unusual at Phish shows to suddenly hear the entire audience engage in a ritualistic “hey!” or randomly clap three times at a specific moment.

Fred says: “So much of Phish is context. You can go to a show with none of that context and be like ‘damn that band is good.’ But the deeper you get into the context, you can never be too nerdy, you can never go too deep. And the band knows and is paying attention.”

“There was a moment last summer where the encore was this song ‘46 days,’ and then somebody noticed that the next show was 46 days later. They do shit like that, and the band leaves us all guessing. But that’s part of why the fandom is so deep. You’re never going to out-phish Phish. They’re always going to be one step ahead of you as far as like these references and constantly surprising fans.”

The epic peaks of a Phish jam

OK, so we have this band of four members working really hard to be great improvisers and obsessed with the fan experience. All of that is pretty epic, but it’s not why I wanted to do this episode. I learned most of this stuff during research.

Instead, what’s most epic about Phish to me is those rare, unplanned moments during a jam where everything comes together, often unexpectedly. You might be deep into a Type II jam, a jam where they’ve left the song structure completely behind. The band itself is experimenting and listening and poking and prodding, trying to figure out where to go. It feels risky and dangerous, and sometimes it doesn’t work out.

But then suddenly it all locks in. All four members sync up, and the crowd electrifies. There’s often a sense of leaving your body. As Fred puts it: “It’s this incredibly, complex organism, this thing that can at any moment move in any direction. And on an ON night, it’s kind of flowing in this totally unimpeded, organic way. Everybody is in this flow state that we all have read and watched plenty of things on. You can really sense when that’s happening.”

That might sound like the effect of the drugs, but these days, in the era fans are calling Phish 3.0 which started after the band returned from their hiatus in 2009 or so, there are actually a lot of sober people around, including Trey himself. I was pleasantly surprised on a recent deep dive down a Phish Reddit rabbithole to read all the stories of people who have given up drugs or sobered up — and for whom Phish’s music hits as hard as ever.

Definitionally, the word “epic” refers to an epic poem, like The Odyssey. It’s a long, difficult journey. And sometimes, that’s what a Phish jam can seem like too, a fellowship embarking on what theorist Joseph Campbell calls Hero’s Journey.

In fact, if we take Campbell’s theory and apply it, there’s the Call to Adventure when the song ends and the jam begins. There’s the Crossing of the Threshold, when they leave the song structure behind and embark into the unknown. There’s the Tests and the Ordeal, the moments in the jam where you’re not quite sure if it’s all going to work, where you worry the band is lost and that things are too dissonant. And then there’s the Resurrection when it all comes back together in ecstatic glory.

For me, these peak moments are often led by Trey, the guitarist. All four members of the fellowship are critical, but Trey is the leader. It’s his searing, soaring, wailing guitar tones that often push the band further than you thought possible.

There’s a famous jam from 2013 that’s now referred to as the “Tahoe Tweezer” in the lore. This jam starts with one of their more absurd lyrical songs: “Won’t you step into the freezer / Seize her with a tweezer.” None of it makes sense. There’s a moment where they mimic an evil uncle stuck in a freezer maybe? The jam starts with a funky section. Then, there’s a spaced out section. There’s this glitchy electro section.

And then about 25 minutes in, the band stumbles on this happy major key riff a little reminiscent of the Allman Brothers’ song “Revival.” You can kinda hear them working out together that they’re going to stop. One by one they start joining the stop. And then gradually the audience starts responding to the pause with a “Woo!”

The band then starts moving the stop around harmonically. It builds and builds and builds… until finally Trey soars in on a massive guitar note leading into a giant resolution, and the jam takes off again. It’s this giddy moment of release where the entire stadium, band, fans, everyone realizes for a brief moment they’re all on the exact same page.

It’s the feeling of letting go completely, of something risky coming together and being worth the risk. Like four happy dudes from Vermont starting an off-kilter band with undefinable songs about silly things like Lizard people who get put down by promoters and labels and reviewers constantly and yet lay it all on the line every single night for their audience, and it all pays off.

What’s the most epic part of it all

In doing research for this piece, I ended up watching Phish’s Tiny Desk Concert on NPR from last year. I was a little skeptical. How’s this going to work? Phish out of their context. A mainstream stage. No massive Chris Kuroda light show. No time for massive jams. No diehards in the audience for the secret language cues.

And yet, it’s really fun! They play a few short newer songs, then a few short versions of old classics. They bring mini-trampolines. They do some choreographed jumping. They end by walking off the stage and into the crowd singing and giving out high fives. And then they come back and play two mini-encores.

Here’s a smattering of the comments:

• “I’ve actively avoided Phish my entire life for no real good reason, so I guess it’s time to finally give them a listen.”

• “These dudes just radiate joy and share it freely with others. Truly a gift.”

• “I’ve always been aware of Phish but I never really listened to their stuff. This is just so delightful and feels so good.”

• “Daaaannng. I now understand that one guy in all our lives that won’t stop talking about Phish. I’m now going to turn into that guy.”

It turns out that when you strip away the production, the arenas, the massive jams, the huge audiences and light shows and everything else, what are you left with?

Joy. The joy of four guys who love making music together and love sharing it with others. What else really matters?

That’s pretty epic.

So… how do you make epic music?

The biggest lessons I’m taking from Phish are: First of all, ignore the haters. Find people you love making music with, and then work at it together until you get really good at doing what you want to do. Don’t be afraid to take risks, to leave structure behind, and to listen deeply to each other while doing it.

I think personally, the things that have settled most deeply into my creative practice is the excitement of playing something differently every time you play it, and not being afraid to launch into an improvised piece of music with no structure and no idea where it will take you.

And if you should be so lucky as to come together in a precious, unrepeatable moment of ego-less musical connection with other people, well, then appreciate it. Because that is truly a beautiful moment.

Epic Notes

Weirdest Phish Fact: Trey was suspended from UVM in the ‘80s for stealing a severed hand and a heart from the anatomy lab on campus and mailing them to a friend with the message, “I gotta hand it to you kid, you’ve got heart.”

Personal Favorite Phish Jam: Hmmm… it’s gotta be “Reba.” The jam on that song has always felt particularly meaningful to me. Maybe 10.31.94.

Interviewees:

• Fred Kosak of the Stillhouse Junkies. Listen to them on Spotify, Apple, etc.

• Jeremy Young of Sontag Shogun or solo act. Listen to his solo stuff on Bandcamp.

Main Sources:

• Phish: The Biography by Parke Puterbaugh.

• Phish.net, reddit.com/r/phish on Reddit, Phish.in, and other Phish fan forums.

• “Anatomy of a Jam” YouTube channel

• “After 40 years, Phish isn’t seeking resolution” by Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker.

Hey all,

I’m deep in a few creative projects right now, so this is a little shorter than usual. But it’s also a great time to become a Soundfly subscriber, support my work, and get access to like 60+ online courses! Use the code SPRINGISHERE for 20% off if you join now.

Most weeks, I try to make these letters as creative as possible. I want to inspire, challenge, and maybe even write something that’s moving to those who read them. I want to give my brain a work out and stretch myself as a writer, while hopefully writing something that’s emotionally powerful to the audience.

But this week, when I sat down to write, I couldn’t generate any power. My creative fuel cells looked like a tank of Astrophage that had been infected with Taumoeba. (I just finished Project Hail Mary, and it’s a really fun book. Going to see the movie later. If you haven’t read it, basically the Astrophage are fuel, and when they get eaten, they turn into gloopy, smelly sludge.)

I was reminded in the process that we can only do about four hours of intense, demanding creative work a day. After that, our brains are too tired to maintain the same rate of focus, and the quality of our work suffers.

Tons of artists and authors have talked about this limit, and structured their lives accordingly. Stephen King writes about it in On Writing, his must-read memoir focused on the creative process. Thomas Mann, Toni Morrison, Igor Stravinsky — those are just a few of the names that come up on a quick Google search for artists who built their days around short bursts of intense creative focus, often in the mornings, followed by less demanding tasks in the other hours. The author Cal Newport refers to this as “deep work,” and posits we can only average about 3-4 hours a day before cognitive fatigue sets in. The psychologist K. Anders Ericsson saw this pattern repeated in many of the domain experts he studied when developing his deliberate practice concept for becoming an expert.

I’ve found this to be true personally as well. There are times when I can pull a 10 hour day of creative work, especially if I switch my focus around, if I’ve gotten lots of sleep, if I take long breaks, if I’m working with others — but the average is closer to four.

At first, this limitation seemed too constraining and a little disappointing. As I wrote about last week, I often get a little obsessed with something and want to spend all my time on it. It can be a bummer to face up to your limits.

But what I’ve come to realize over time is that not every hour spent on creative work needs to be spent on the highest gear. I’m gradually realizing that I can structure my time in a way that supports these deep creative bursts, while still getting a lot done in the other moments. Here are a few of them:

First, I’ve actually found it freeing to create a clearer boundary between “deep, creative work” mode and “other stuff” mode. Knowing that my deep, creative work has a bit of a hard stop to it helps me protect the time I set aside for it.

Second, I’ve realized I can use systems and structures to help decrease my cognitive load on a daily basis and open up more time for truly creative work.

For example, I’m working on a new album right now. When I open a new track to work on it, if I’ve already created a bunch of effects racks and templates specifically designed for this album, it means that I’m starting from second base and the whole album will sound more coherent. For every track that has piano on it, I can just pre-load the settings I created for the entire project, and then tweak them as needed.

That’s just one example. When I was making weekly YouTube videos, the more we could systematize the process — scripting, review, storyboarding, review, editing, review — the more we could focus on the ways we could add creativity and originality to each piece, since we didn’t have to expend any creative effort thinking about the process. I’ve included a few of my favorites from that time below this article in case you’re looking for something fun.

This newsletter is also an example. I have a kind of template in my mind for the types of articles I can write when I’m not up to my creative best, and this is one of them.

Third, I’ve found that I can do some really creative work after my brain is already fried as long as I don’t care too much about the quality of it. That sounds counter-intuitive, but what I mean is that Tired Mode™ is great for a lot of things: for generating off-the-wall ideas, for trying stuff, for putting ideas down, for taking risks, etc.

That’s why I still like to work on music in the evenings. I rarely produce something final in that time — but I’m able to practice things, prepare, produce drafts, and do a lot of other stuff for which quality isn’t the benchmark. I’ll then go back and edit it the next day.

And finally, I’ve found that I can do a lot of creative thinking to prepare for those periods of deep focus in my head in quiet moments between them. This has always been an important part of my creative process, but has become more deliberate in the past year. I can develop articles in my mind while walking to pick up the kids. I can write the B section of a song in my head on the subway.

In fact, this is necessary. When we’re in deep work mode, our Executive Control Network is activated, which tends to prioritize focus and productivity over openness and unexpected connections. When we look up from deep work mode, our Default Mode Network is activated, which tends to allow for more creative connections, for ideas to bubble up unexpectedly, for your mind to wander. This is an oversimplification, but a useful one so I’m going to run with it.

What about you? Do you ever run up against a cognitive limit to your ability to be creative and focused? What do you do about it? I’d love to hear it.

Leave a comment

Have a great weekend,
Ian

Ian Temple
CEO, Soundfly
ian@soundfly.com

Three of my favorite YouTube videos from the archive

A couple years ago, we made a lot of YouTube videos, supported by the amazing people on my team John Hull, Sam Amos, Martin Fowler, Mahea Lee, Jeremy Young, and Carter Lee. I was recently revisiting a few of my favorites, and here they are:

1. A deep analysis of Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name.” Oh man, I still love this song, and I loved learning about the music theory of this song — the way it basically cycles through every mode of D.

2. We spent so long on this one, but I know it gets used in film scoring programs and schools, so that’s really gratifying. It’s tough to try to summarize 100+ years in like 15 minutes.

3. This was one of the first things we worked on at Soundfly, pioneered visually by Jeremy with a script written by an amazing Australian composer and educator named Tim Hansen. I still love this. Visually, it’s so creative and enjoyable.

I’m stuck.

Not stuck in place. Not stuck in terms of ideas. It’s more like there’s a setting somewhere inside me that’s been switched on, but it’s now a little busted and won’t turn off. There’s a conductor in my brain, and he got stuck at a specific part, baton raised mid-wave, and the confused orchestra is left playing the same note forever. The poor wind players. Their circular breathing is getting increasingly desperate.

This is what obsession sometimes feels like to me. It’s this state of being where all your mental attention is being relentlessly drawn to a specific thing’s hyperbolic demands.

Right now, specifically for me, that’s the next How to Make Epic Music episode. I’m thinking about it constantly. I’m struggling to work on other things. I’m re-writing sentences and plotting out audio in my head at the dinner table. It’s really fun and creatively satisfying — but also I find myself getting annoyed when something comes up that forces me away from it, like, you know, drinking a glass of water or being present in the moment.

Herein lies the double-edged sword of obsession. Being obsessed with a project can breed immersion and flow. When I’m obsessed with an idea, I read everything I can about it. When I’m obsessed with a song I’m working on, I’ll stay up late working on it without getting tired. It can be endlessly fertile territory, a fount of creative fuel that means I’m working on something challenging and interesting. The way obsession elbows its way into the room, it’s too big a personality to allow space for doubt, insecurity, or ego, who cower before its enthusiasms.

Obsession is the ultimate answer as to why someone makes art or music despite the many callous rejections and indifferences of society and the array of obstacles to doing so. As Rilke would say, it’s because you have to! It’s the demonic little idea inside you that’s pummeling the walls to get out, the Athena that simply has to be released from Zeus’ throbbing temple for the god not to fry the world with lightning.

In my creative process, obsession can act like a massive space telescope. It allows me to focus in on and map out a specific part of the night’s sky, and invariably this tiny slice of space ends up so full of foreign bodies as to engage and engulf all my faculties. If one planet can be as rich as ours, then imagine what’s out there in one small section of infinity? In other words, I love what sustained attention can uncover.

There’s a flip side of course. If my telescope is only focused on one specific part of the sky, it might miss the meteor shower in another part. I see this very clearly with my 8 year old son who inherited my tendency to obsession (don’t you love how your kids can serve as a mirror on your own tendencies?). It’s virtually impossible to get him to focus on something outside his current interest, including such things as putting on clothes, participating in group activities, or learning something his teachers want him to learn. But we push because sadly, there are times in life when you do need to think about things other than what kind of Viking you would be or how Hannibal’s forces were arranged at Cannae or the shape of archipelagos.

Obsession is great for projects, for flow, for curiosity, for productivity, even for discovery. It’s terrible for breadth, for receptivity, for wholeness, for presence, for relationships. That last one is the kicker. When I’m obsessed with something, I tend to not be the most responsive to others, or if I am, I’m only giving them half my attention. They are surely worthy of more. It can feel a bit like a superpower that exacts a price every time you deploy it.

And of course, sometimes you get obsessed with the wrong things: Replaying a conversation in your mind again and again, struggling to move on from a negative, or imagining all the things that could go wrong in a situation, rather than what could go right. I had someone recently suggest that sticking your hands into an ice-drawer can physically jog your brain out of an obsessive narrative, a sort of reset shock to the system. I tried it once, and I’m into it. At the very least, the absurdity of your partner coming home to find you with your hands in the ice maker should do the trick.

So how should artists think about obsession? Honestly, for many of us, it might not be a choice. Being a creative sometimes necessitates toppling into an unhealthy obsession with your work. Our work has gravity, and that gravity pulls us in. And I’m not convinced that’s always bad. It leaves us electric with purpose, willing and able to charge ahead undaunted by commercial and practical considerations. That can be beautiful! Especially if we can use its gravity to settle into a healthy orbit.

But obviously, too much, too narrow, too deep, and too often can hollow out your art, your relationships, your perspective, and your life. When an obsession prevents you from drinking water, you’ve probably come in too hot and crashed into the planet. (Relatedly, I’ve written about dealing with healthy and unhealthy perfectionism in the past.)

While doing a little research on this topic, I stumbled upon this article in The Marginalian about the sci-fi writer Octavia Butler, with the following quote:

Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.

Persistence, adaptability, and positivity — a welcome rubric for how to ensure an obsession is generative and supportive, rather than parasitic. In the same article, the author prints a short poem Butler wrote on the same concept:

Love quiets fear.
And a sweet and powerful
Positive obsession
Blunts pain,
Diverts rage,
And engages each of us
In the greatest,
The most intense
Of our chosen struggles.

An obsession is defined by what you’re obsessed with and how you approach it. Let it bias toward art, love, beauty, relationships, and the endlessly surprising details of life itself, rather than perfectionism and self-criticism. And if you find yourself a little obsessive about your work, you could feel guilty about that — or you could consider how lucky you are to care so deeply about what you’re doing.

I’ll take the latter approach, and I hope my son does as well.

Obsessively yours,
Ian

Ian Temple
Founder, Soundfly
ian@soundfly.com

Support My Work

I’m hard at work on the next episode of How to Make Epic Music. I’m having so much fun making this series, but also putting a lot of time and care into it. No AI writing or music or whatever — 100% hand-crafted human creativity.

If you enjoy my weekly essays or Episode 1 of the series, please consider supporting me! This is a one-man show, and your support means the world. I’m opening up the discount again before Episode 2 drops…

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Five Interesting Things

1. New course out!!! It’s a Basic Harmony course for pianists, by my friend and course partner Kiefer. Best of all, this one is mostly free ($10 for the 2nd half to test your commitment). It’s a mini-course but there’s enough here to keep you busy for half a year or more. Check it out.

2. Poetry. Speaking of The Marginalian, I’m loving these little hand drawn cards of birds with collage poetry on them made by Maria Popova. Today’s card:

   “have great patience
   with all attempts at changing
   for patience is respect
   bestowed on the present
   and a kindness to time.”

3. Listening. Congratulations to on a beautiful new EP called Terra, out now and sincerely worth a listen. Drum & Lace uses all sorts of synths, pedals, field recordings, and drum machines along with her voice to craft these beautiful, lush soundscapes, some of my favorite electronic music. She discusses the inspiration and equipment behind the EP here.

4. Reading. How much can you learn about the culture from song requests at a piano bar? That’s the question and set out to answer with an impressive amount of data to back it up. Honestly, how Jesse kept track of the data on these requests as they were happening is impressive.

5. Reminder. That’s all I got this week… although, if you haven’t already, please go check out my deep dive into Chopin, his Raindrops prelude, and what makes it so epic here. Skim it! Put on the playlist! Download the audio and listen on your run! All the options!