{"id":3838,"date":"2011-02-17T12:07:38","date_gmt":"2011-02-17T20:07:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=3838"},"modified":"2011-02-17T12:07:38","modified_gmt":"2011-02-17T20:07:38","slug":"creativity-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2011\/02\/17\/creativity-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Creativity"},"content":{"rendered":"

I almost wrote about James Taylor a couple of weeks back, because he’s giving free guitar lessons on his Website, actually, since I was last there, he’s posted one more:<\/p>\n

\n
James Taylor guitar lessons<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Although I gave up playing the guitar decades ago, I was stunned that a musician of his caliber seemed to be not only utilizing the Web, but using it to give back.<\/p>\n

But that’s not what inspired me to write right now.<\/p>\n

Last night, I was flipping the channels before going to bed and I caught James on Charlie Rose.<\/p>\n

I’ll admit I checked out Letterman first, but he was doing his once a year grocery bagging competition, you know, where he gets the big winner and goes head to head and throws stuff on the floor and cheats and it used to be funny, but that was back in the eighties.<\/p>\n

And flipping with the remote, I can’t wait for Time Warner to have an iPad remote, that truly shows what’s going on, that makes cable TV comprehensible, I saw a guy I recognized with just a few too many years on him since I’d studied him last.\u00c2\u00a0 It was definitely James Taylor.\u00c2\u00a0 But the sync was off.\u00c2\u00a0 I switched to the non-HD iteration, but his mouth and his voice weren’t aligned there either, so I went back to HD.<\/p>\n

And it’s no crime to get old.\u00c2\u00a0 But in fine detail, James Taylor looked less like a star and more like a person.\u00c2\u00a0 After all, these are just human beings, flawed like the rest of us, but they wrote those songs…\u00c2\u00a0 How did they write those songs?<\/p>\n

Not the way they do it today.\u00c2\u00a0 Not the way those big Top Forty hits are constructed.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re built from the ground up. And even those Nashville compositions are anything but bolts of inspiration.\u00c2\u00a0 Brick by brick you build the song today. But great songs are feats of inspiration, they enter your brain and you have to write them down fast, before you forget them.<\/p>\n

I was stunned, I was pissed I’d missed the first half of the show, because James Taylor was talking about creativity, something I deal with every damn day.<\/p>\n

You can be reading the newspaper, watching TV, walking down the street, standing in the shower, and suddenly you get an idea, and you’ve got to RUN to the computer.<\/p>\n

And sometimes it’s not a complete idea.\u00c2\u00a0 Sometimes complete songs come to James, other times just fragments, which he has to put together with other fragments to get an entire number.<\/p>\n

And it’s tougher now, because of the expectations.\u00c2\u00a0 Everybody is watching.\u00c2\u00a0 Well, not everybody, but his loyal fans. You’re only a superstar for a little while, but he’s lucky, a fan base has endured, that comes every year to see him, that keeps him alive.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s his insight, not mine.\u00c2\u00a0 But too often stars are delusional.\u00c2\u00a0 But James is not.\u00c2\u00a0 And he’s got the wisdom of years.\u00c2\u00a0 But he can’t be an outsider anymore.<\/p>\n

That’s how he felt as a teen.\u00c2\u00a0 An alien.\u00c2\u00a0 And he needed to write songs to delineate his condition, his feelings.\u00c2\u00a0 To illustrate where he was coming from.\u00c2\u00a0 But once everybody knew where he was at, they were watching, and that’s pressure.\u00c2\u00a0 That makes it harder.<\/p>\n

Our greatest stars were alienated.\u00c2\u00a0 They were not the cheerleader or the captain of the football team.\u00c2\u00a0 They were closer to suicide than being voted most popular.\u00c2\u00a0 But there’s a little bit of alienation in all of us.\u00c2\u00a0 And when they sing, we swoon.<\/p>\n

\n
James Taylor on Charlie Rose<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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I almost wrote about James Taylor a couple of weeks back, because he’s giving free guitar lessons on his Website, actually, since I was last there, he’s posted one more: James Taylor guitar lessons Although I gave up playing the guitar decades ago, I was stunned that a musician of his caliber seemed to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business","category-the-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-ZU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3838"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3838\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3839,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3838\/revisions\/3839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}