My first interview for 15 Questions
#15
Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you personally feel as though writing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn’t or wouldn’t in more ‘mundane’ tasks?
Certainly creativity comes in many different forms, or rather, creativity is necessary for many activities in life. But making art is different in important ways from other things. To make art you have to be prepared to embrace the discomfort of not knowing. As an artist it’s your job to bring something into being that doesn’t yet exist, to bring forth an idea from nothing. There’s real intellectual sweat involved in that. It can also be hard on you emotionally as well.
You have to be prepared to be unproductive. You have to be willing to sit with being unproductive. Sit with failing. And work through feelings of insecurity and feeling like everything is shit. In other kinds of work I do I just don’t experience these feelings. If I have a practical task to do the task is much more known and I can sit down and just work out how get it done and I know if I sit down and work at it for a certain number of hours I will get it done. Practical tasks may require creative thinking but there’s something different about making art - at least for me. I’ve said I approach making art like a practical task with a minimum of fuss partly because that’s my way of facing it in a sense, but it’s not really a practical task at all!
To be honest, after being creative for a while sometimes I really long for practical tasks! And even though I said earlier that I find writing music nourishing, sometimes I find it really hard and actually feel like it’s the last thing I want to do! It can be at an emotional roller coaster. It’s the best thing to have done, and it’s an amazing feeling to finish something and to feel like you made something worthwhile, or something true. But the actual making itself can be quite hard in a very particular way.
Full interview HERE