Apparently Pat Metheny has been keeping a road diary for decades. Stewart Copeland recently published his diary.
Diaries have been invaluable to me as well. When I revisit them, lots of the ideas that I jotted down have come to fruition, sometimes with very long lag times: It wasn't that I was going back to the diaries to get inspiration to finish the projects, the act of writing them down made it more possible for them to be finished. Now it's more interesting to read diaries and memoirs of other people. Keith Haring kept a fascinating diary. And I discovered Count Harry Kessler, an aesthete/flaneur/world traveler from the turn of the century. A 700-page tome was published about 10 years ago, with very detailed entries about his travels--hanging out with the likes of Stravinsky, Rodin, Rilke, and Matisse. I kept a paper diary for 15 years, and then stopped because I couldn't keep up with it. But I still keep an electronic diary which is the focal point for all creative activity. The interesting thing about electronic diaries accessible from a smartphone is that they can be endlessly re-shaped. This is both a good thing and a bad thing, as good ideas can be erased. Paper diaries are interesting in that they are the ‘dumbphone’ version, and can also have drawings and diagrams.
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When you're in a creative flow you can do things out-of-order, and create new "nodes" for new seed ideas (or "seed from the fruit" as Rick Rubin calls it), or loop back to the beginning to modify the seed idea for a sense of closure. The example I always cite are the sculptures of Tony Smith, a minimalist sculptor from the 1960s whose works are based on shape primitives (hexagons, octagons, and so on). He had an interesting way of working where he would go back almost to the beginning of the project and complete it by making the preliminary drawings, which in music has historically been notating it on manuscript paper. The common notion is that the artist starts with a sketch and it evolves linearly from that point to where it was actually fabricated and installed, but in Tony Smith's case, for the work to be completely resolved, it needed the "original" sketch. That's how I work as well: a piece will evolve and get elaborately produced, then once it's finished I'll realize I never wrote the chords down, or it never had a good acoustic guitar part standing on its own as the "original".
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AuthorLee Barry, Musician/Content Producer Archives
May 2024
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