Awaking your music-making brain
On creating conditions that connect you to songwriting
In the very first Midnight Voice Memos Sunday newsletter, I wrote about what I call a ‘music-making brain’ and how it needs to be kept awake:
Everybody who makes music has a music-making brain… What I am talking about is the part of your awareness that filters the physical, experiential world for information that can be turned into fodder for your creative pursuit. It's a part that looks everywhere for new ideas without you really even trying. Sometimes it feels like magic, it's so automatic. But it does need to be woken up and kept awake!
In recent weeks, my music-making brain has felt like it’s dozing. Not quite fully asleep, but definitely reluctant to be fully awake. I’ve been recommitting to a songwriting daily practice and the amount of resistance I’m encountering has been formidable—some days I swear my hands are repelled by my guitar’s fretboard.
So this week, I’m sharing some thoughts on what our music-making brains might need in order to want to wake up.
Big love,
Lucy
What you music-making brain needs
MEMO - “To sense wide expanse”
—Of time, of space, of possibility. The feeling that we may roam freely lets our imagination breathe. I write a lot about limitations and ‘getting it done’ but sometimes we rebel against such restrictions. We need to create pockets of shouldlessness: time for a long stretch spent daydreaming or a meandering walk to nowhere and back. Music-making brains need to unspool. Midwife the unspooling.
MEMO - “To believe in wild abundance”
The undulations of creative being are so skilled at helping us believe we have run out of ideas. At the bottom of a songwriting rut, it’s so easy to convince ourselves we have nothing more worth saying. Instead we could be reminding ourselves that new ideas pop into existence all the time, looking for playful, loving minds to take them in. The worst we ever need feel is a little bored because we’re in between one beautiful idea and the next.
MEMO - “To be in the real world”
Ordinary, truthful observations make better lyrics than attempts at writing something profound. Noting what is present and working with it isn’t easy but it is straightforward. You show up and write what you see, feel, sense. There are no spells, but it is a magical process. Plus, being in the company of others committed to doing the same will only sharpen your desire to accept and engage with what is there.
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