A basic principle regarding ideas and creativity is that every new idea is a connection of two or more old ideas. It’s not the parts that are new, but the connection, the glue, the path or even the bridge.

This gives that coming up with new ideas is a matter of coming up with new connections. This is a simple, banal insight, yet I believe profound – I find that it opens up for limitless possibilities. It also frees you from the difficulty in coming up with something new – you just need to come up with a new connection. I find that perspective both fun and liberating.

A technique presented by Jeff Tweedy is to pick ten interesting nouns and ten interesting verbs and then build interesting sentences by connecting them. This can lead to a lot of nonsens, but also poetic images that can convey or hint at meaning you’re not sure of yourself.

Today, I made a variation on this. I selected a list of random, interesting words and forced myself to tell my story through them. Since these weren’t words I would usually reach for to describe the events/places/memories it forced me to look for alternative, metaphorical meanings.

As always, 90 percent of everything is crap. But if you do the work and write ten times as many words than you need for a song, you might gather a full song of something decent or even interesting.

January:

I got a good start this year. Songwriting started inspired/efficient with a few new songs. I finished/passed my Electronic Music Production course with a good grade and got my first “university points” since year 2000. Jamuary didn’t work out as intended. It went better, I started producing real songs instead of jams. My ambitious goal one song/week is a bit difficult when it comes to recording analog/acoustic instruments and vocals as well as writing a lyric. But I will keep trying. I’m almost finished with my two songs from the last two weeks. Even better I have a plan forward with a theme/concept for an EP. Today I’m also handing in my first VCV-rack assignment. Understanding Control Voltage in a modular synth will be great for my understanding and patching other synths.

Plans for February:

Stay healthy! Keep going! Write a few new songs and record them. Do my VCV-rack course. Go skiing. Start swimming again, hopefully.

March:

Stay healthy. Keep going. Release EP.

It arrived out of the blue. I don’t remember the context or where I listened to it the first time, probably at work, but I remember feeling very moved by it. Frank Ocean named his first mixtape/album Nostalgia, ultra – but I don’t think I’ve heard of any nostalgia that matches the weight of Bowie’s Where are we now – with a man lost in time, reminiscing the times gone by, walking the dead in Berlin.

To me it reads as a love letter to the past. There might be an apology within. I still get goosebumps every time from how grand it sounds. And the weight with which it seems to deliver this insight that this was the life I was given, this was the choices I made, this is what I left behind.

In May 2018 we left the kids with their grandparents and drove to Berlin for a weekend. In my head Where are we now was already playing as the soundtrack when we checked in at the Michelberger Hotel. When our room was presented for us we were blown away to find we had been upgraded and got the hotel’s most impressive suite.

Looking through the leaflets there was a map of Berlin’s with Michelberger’s own recommendations of cool cafés, bars and clubs etc.

Printed on the map was the full lyric to Where are we now? Bam! It almost made me cry. So I decided to see if I could get that the strange boombox on the floor working. And I had the song playing on repeat in this spacious suite with the spring light sifting through the thin, veil-like curtains.

It’s quite a memory of a perfect trip. I love Berlin.

(The sound was incredible too. I later checked to find that the funky boombox was from an Austrian boutique hifi-maker and had pricetag of … €3000?)

I love skiing films, especially free-riding. I just can’t help imagining being the guy/girl. The playfulness. Flying, with such ease.

Not crazy about the music in this film, but at least it’s not some kind of rawk. I want my skiing films to be soulful and sensual, not adrenalin-fueled male agression.

I took a walk this morning and got the idea to make an EP with a theme. Allowing myself to dive into the nostalgia surrounding a period of 4-5 months when I was 20. I would like to make a 4-song EP. Two songs are written, one will be recorded and finished Sunday at midight. Two other songs need to be written.

I’m writing this here to make a promise. So that I can be held accountable. My plan will be to keep recording one song per week. How about a release in Mid March?

Considering my desire to write down these nuggets of wisdom on the creative process I really should put them all to use, shouldn’t I. However, time and time again I find that when recording songs I get more traditional then I would like to be. As I lay down a guitar track, a dummy vocal, some bass guitar…etc. I too often find myself more in the middle of the road than I’m comfortable with.

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I started baking bread ten years ago. I had seen my sister-in-law create magic. She took yeast, flour, water and salt – and made gold. Freshly baked bread without a recipe. It seemed like alchemy, and the skill was all ”in her hands”. She just know when the dough felt right.

Learning this, baking without a recipe seemed to me to be the essence of baking. An act of liberty, free from rules and formulas. Yes, in a way to me it seemed like baking as an art. Taking a risk on stage.

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So there I am lost. Great. It’s pretty cool to arrive at something you never could have planned. A new texture, an eerie soundscape ,a strange rhythm, a great sounding chord progression – but since I started out in a foreign tuning on my guitar I’ve got no idea what the chords are. (I simply don’t have that good an ear.)

I find it very inspiring to get lost this way. What is this, where am I? How do I make sense of it all. Just like in the old Greek myth I need to find my way out of the labyrinth, find the Ariadne thread. For me, the goal is always a song. A composition. So in order to achieve this I need to build a bridge back to the familiar.

What I’ve found is that I seem to have a musical compass if I sing or play guitar. I can fool around for a while, but pretty soon I will settle on some kind of melodic path that ties it all together. All my memories of other music help me on the way, filling in the gaps, making the intervals homely. In a way, I guess it’s my taste that is my compass.

But the tools for getting home is most often voice or guitar in standard tuning, the instruments I know best. Recognizing this, I recently had the idea to think of my equipment/instruments as belonging to either one of two camps: tools for getting lost or tools for getting home.

The principle and creative strategy that seems true to me is this: It’s better for me to start songs with a tool that lets me get lost. Once I am, I can rely on my compass to find the way back.