Last night I watched a few interviews with David Brooks about his new book How To Know A Person. He gives a good talk, but I think he's a bit scripted. The two interviews that I listened to were almost identical. But he's particularly interesting in that he's warmed up over the years, although still a centrist conservative at the core. I think that's a good thing. It keeps you grounded to come back to the things you value personally. Artists have gone through similar changes in their lives yet still have a consistency of always working on something that doesn't always involve introspection. The fact that I'm listening to David Brooks about his new book doesn't have anything to do with what I'm working on in music, but we can "code-switch": When you're with friends playing sports you're not having in-depth philosophical conversations, but when you're with your friends who you can have those conversations.
I know some guys who’ve been in a monthly basketball game together for years. They may never have had a deep conversation, but they’d lay down their lives for one another, so deep are the bonds between them—bonds that were formed by play. But it can also be the opposite: you're not veering towards small talk, or the conversation isn't meandering around to different things. Desultory conversations with no thread between them where one person is talking about what they want to talk about and the other is talking about what they want to talk about don't lead to good conversations because there's no thread between them. Conversations can bottom out when you don't have any shared talking points. As an artist, the things that you're doing are a form of constancy. The piece that you're working on doesn't necessarily have to reflect all the things that are going on in the world. Sometimes I let them fly in through the window, but I don't always have the window open, whereas some artists do. On October 7 I was working on something where I opened the window and reacted, but for me it's rare. I'm not reflexively going to pivot on current events. It seems more natural to always be reactive to the core elements of what one could possibly be reactive to, as opposed to major inflection points, e.g. the idea of endless wars as a facet of the human condition. This way it becomes thematic or conceptual to your individual way of working. It's helpful to have a script. It's a way of keeping your story straight as an artist. You can move from project to project and the fact that you're changing projects doesn't change you as a person.
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AuthorLee Barry, Musician/Content Producer Archives
May 2024
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