ARTICLE: "Feeding the Monster" Musician Josh Ritter on the creative process
A friend hipped me to this great essay my musician Josh Ritter on his creative process from Paste...
Feeding the Monster
Feeding the Monster
By Josh Ritter
MusicFeatures
Published at 12:51 PM on May 4, 2010
As he prepares to release his new album, So Runs the World Away, one of our favorite songwriters opens up about his artistic inspiration
For hours I’d been lying awake in the dark, listening to the garbage trucks trawl the neighborhood. Occasionally a ship would blow its horn over in Red Hook, and I’d wonder again what it must be like out there on the ocean in one of those cold, steel boats. For the last year I’d been playing music in all weathers, all over the world.
Published at 12:51 PM on May 4, 2010
As he prepares to release his new album, So Runs the World Away, one of our favorite songwriters opens up about his artistic inspiration
For hours I’d been lying awake in the dark, listening to the garbage trucks trawl the neighborhood. Occasionally a ship would blow its horn over in Red Hook, and I’d wonder again what it must be like out there on the ocean in one of those cold, steel boats. For the last year I’d been playing music in all weathers, all over the world.
Now it was early spring and I was home in Brooklyn, sung out from performing, wrung out from jet lag and bone-tired in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time. Most importantly, I didn’t have a single new song. The year had been the busiest of my life, and I hadn’t built in much time for versifying. And versifying takes real time if you want to do it right. Not having put pen to page for quite a while, and with recording sessions planned and coming up quickly, I wondered if the songs would come easily. I suspected they wouldn’t, but hoped that I’d been feeding the monster well enough that it would let me have a few to get started on a new album.
The monster is the invisible force that decides what you write about. Some people call it “The Muse,” but I’ve never found that to be a particularly apt description for a creature so voracious. This is no gossamer-clad maiden. I don’t know much about it, but I know that it lives deep in the synaptic jungle, its tail twitching lazily, its slow-breathing bulk heaving sulfurous sighs as it waits. You have to feed the monster everything you come across, be it books, music or movies, your friends and enemies and any other shiny baubles you find strewn in your path. You shovel everything you’ve got—a long-handled snow shovel works best—into its big toothy mouth, and it chews everything up and sighs once again. It never says “thank you,” and you don’t expect any gratitude, but once in a while the monster will taste something it really enjoys. When it does, you’ll notice a slight lift of its scaly brow and a narrowing of its keyhole pupils. It doesn’t give away much, but if you know your monster, that’s all you need to see.
Read the full article here.
The monster is the invisible force that decides what you write about. Some people call it “The Muse,” but I’ve never found that to be a particularly apt description for a creature so voracious. This is no gossamer-clad maiden. I don’t know much about it, but I know that it lives deep in the synaptic jungle, its tail twitching lazily, its slow-breathing bulk heaving sulfurous sighs as it waits. You have to feed the monster everything you come across, be it books, music or movies, your friends and enemies and any other shiny baubles you find strewn in your path. You shovel everything you’ve got—a long-handled snow shovel works best—into its big toothy mouth, and it chews everything up and sighs once again. It never says “thank you,” and you don’t expect any gratitude, but once in a while the monster will taste something it really enjoys. When it does, you’ll notice a slight lift of its scaly brow and a narrowing of its keyhole pupils. It doesn’t give away much, but if you know your monster, that’s all you need to see.
Read the full article here.
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