NotitiesFaith, Hope and Carnage
Nick Cave
"Faith, Hope and Carnage" by Nick Cave explores themes of creativity, grief, and the transformative power of suffering. It reflects on the artistic process, emphasizing the importance of authenticity and vulnerability in songwriting. The text also delves into the relationship between faith, doubt, and the human experience, highlighting the beauty found in both creativity and loss.
Suddenly, there was an extraordinary sense of relief, a sort of wave washing through me, a kind of euphoria, but also something more than that–a crazy energy. A sense of potential, maybe? Yes, but true potential. Potential as powerlessness, ironically. Not the potential to do something, but the potential not to do something. (Page 2)
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It was like I had been given the license to just be, and not do. (Page 2)
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It felt to me like it was a moment to sit inside history and just think. (Page 3)
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At some point, I just grew tired of writing third-person songs that told a structured story that began at the beginning and moved obediently towards their conclusion. I just became suspicious of the form. (Page 4)
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I was afraid of the stuff that was boiling away inside me. I wanted to start writing songs that were truer somehow, that were authentic to my experience. (Page 4)
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Our editing process was initially akin to collage or a kind of musical assemblage. Then we’d work at building songs on top of that. It sounds, dare I say it, like there was an element of winging it involved. No, that’s really not the case. We weren’t just two guys who don’t know what they’re doing. There’s a deep intuitive understanding between the two of us, and, of course, twenty-five years of us working together. It’s an informed improvisation, a mindful improvisation. By ‘mindful’, do you mean meditative? Or considered? I mean that it’s intuitive, but also considered, if that makes sense. In terms of the lyrics, I’m never improvising from scratch. That’s important to stress. Having done a tremendous amount of thinking about the project, I come to the studio with loads of ideas and an enormous number of written words, most of which, by the way, are discarded. Nevertheless, there is always what you might call a lyrical context, and there are also certain dominant or overarching themes that have preoccupied me in the weeks or months leading up to the sessions. It’s a very liberating way to work. (Page 6)
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I imagine that process could go horribly awry in the wrong hands. Well, it does much of the time. But you only need ten songs, ten beautiful and breath-taking accidents to make up a record. You have to be patient and alert to the little miracles nestled in the ordinary. (Page 7)
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So when you’re working in this way, do you also spend hours in the studio meticulously editing the lyrics?
No, never. When I’m working on the songs at home, they take a long time to write, a lot of thought and a real care and dedication to the form. But when we’re in the studio, I’m a butcher who is happy to cut the legs off a treasured lyric in a heartbeat. In a way, the lyrics lose their concrete value and become things to play with, dismember and reorganise. I’m actually very happy to have arrived at a place where I now have an utterly ruthless relationship to my words. (Page 8)
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improvisation is essentially an act of acute vulnerability. But it is also a path to creative freedom, to wild adventure, in which the things of true value can often emerge through musical misunderstandings. (Page 8)
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You have to operate, at least some of the time, in the world of mystery, beneath that great and terrifying cloud of artistic unknowing. The creative impulse, to me, is a form of bafflement, and often feels dissonant and unsettling. (Page 9)
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to get there and have the confidence to do that. It requires a certain conviction to trust in a line that is essentially an image, a vision–a leap of faith into the imagined realm. I’m hoping that the image will lead me somewhere else that will be more revealing or truthful than a more literal line would be. It’s a matter of faith. What’s interesting, too, is that often, when I write a line that is essentially an image, it does something to me physically to write that line down, to articulate that image. I have a physical reaction to it that signifies its importance in the scheme of things. (Page 15)
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A dishonest line tends to deteriorate somehow after repeated singing; a truthful line collects meaning. (Page 15)
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for that magical thing to happen, there has to be certain things in place. It can’t just be a couple of guys who don’t know what they’re doing, sitting around bashing shit out. (Page 17)
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Religion is spirituality with rigour, I guess, and, yes, it makes demands on us. For me, it involves some wrestling with the idea of faith–that seam of doubt that runs through most credible religions. It’s that struggle with the notion of the divine that is at the heart of my creativity. (Page 19)
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Well, yes, mainly because as I’ve gotten older, I have also come to see that maybe the search is the religious experience–the desire to believe and the longing for meaning, the moving towards the ineffable. (Page 22)
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The more overtly unshakeable someone’s beliefs are, the more diminished they seem to become, because they have stopped questioning, and the not-questioning can sometimes be accompanied by an attitude of moral superiority. (Page 23)
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But that would require a leap of faith–a leap beyond the rational. Perhaps, but rational truth may not be the only game in town. I am more inclined to accept the idea of poetic truth, or the idea that something can be ‘true enough’. To me that’s such a beautiful, humane expression. (Page 27)
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I guess what I am saying is that the believing itself has a certain utility–a spiritual and healing benefit, regardless of the actual existence of God. (Page 28)
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As far as I can see, there is a transformative aspect to this place of suffering. We are essentially altered or remade by it. Now, this process is terrifying, but in time you return to the world with some kind of knowledge that has something to do with our vulnerability as participants in this human drama. (Page 31)
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Has your thinking on belief and, indeed, beauty been deepened by your experience of lockdown, by simply having the time to reflect?
I think so. There is something about slowing down that is just quietly powerful, don’t you think? (Page 32)
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Grief can have a chastening effect. It makes demands of us. It asks us to be empathetic, to be understanding, to be forgiving, despite our suffering. Or to ask ourselves, what is it all for? What is the purpose of any of it? (Page 33)
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The more I’ve written, the harder it is to disregard the fact that so many songs seem to be some steps ahead of actual events. (Page 35)
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I tend to think my records are built out of an unconscious yearning for something. Whether that is a yearning for disruption, or a yearning for peace, very much depends on what I was going through at the time, but my music does often seem to be one step ahead of what is actually going on in my life. (Page 35)
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Through writing, you can enter a space of deep yearning that drags its past along with it and whispers into the future, that has an acute understanding of the way of things. You write a line that requires the future to reveal its meaning. (Page 36)
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If so, that kind of magical thinking is a strategy for survival that a lot of people use. Some sceptics might say it is the very basis of religious belief. Yes. Some see it as the lie at the heart of religion, but I tend to think it is the much-needed utility of religion. And the lie–if the existence of God is, in fact, a falsehood–is, in some way, irrelevant. In fact, sometimes it feels to me as if the existence of God is a detail, or a technicality, so unbelievably rich are the benefits of a devotional life. (Page 37)
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there is a kind of gentle scepticism that makes belief stronger rather than weaker. In fact, it can be the forge on which a more robust belief can be hammered out. (Page 38)
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The priest and religious writer Cynthia Bourgeault talks about ‘the imaginal realm’, which seems to be another place you can inhabit briefly that separates itself from the rational world and is independent of the imagination. It is a kind of liminal state of awareness, before dreaming, before imagining, that is connected to the spirit itself. It is an ‘impossible realm’ where glimpses of the preternatural essence of things find their voice. (Page 39)
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For me, lighting a candle for someone may be more an act of hope than faith. And I tend to think of it as one of the few residual traces of my Catholic upbringing. Perhaps, but to go into a church and light a candle is quite a consequential thing to do, when you think about it. It is an act of yearning. I guess so. And yet I struggle with what it means exactly. It may be that it just makes me feel better about myself. I think at its very least it is a private gesture that signals a willingness to hand a part of oneself over to the mysterious, (Page 39)
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Prayer to me is about making a space within oneself where we listen to the deeper, more mysterious aspects of our nature. (Page 40)
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When it happened, it just seemed like I had entered a place of acute disorder–a chaos that was also a kind of incapacitation. It’s not so much that I had to learn how to write a song again; it was more I had to learn how to pick up a pen. It was terrifying in a way. You’ve experienced sudden loss and grief, too, Seán, so you know what I’m talking about. You are tested to the extremes of your resilience, but it’s also almost impossible to describe the terrible intensity of that experience. Words just fall away. (Page 41)
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We are all, at some point in our lives, obliterated by loss. If you haven’t been by now, you will be in time–that’s for sure. And, of course, if you have been fortunate enough to have been truly loved, in this world, you will also cause extraordinary pain to others when you leave it. That’s the covenant of life and death, and the terrible beauty of grief. (Page 41)
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Stillness is what you crave in grief. When Arthur died, I was filled with an internal chaos, a roaring physical feeling in my very being as well as a terrible sense of dread and impending doom. (Page 42)
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So many grieving people just remain silent, trapped in their own secret thoughts, trapped in their own minds, with their only form of company being the dead themselves. (Page 44)
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There’s a vegetarian takeaway place in Brighton called Infinity, where I would eat sometimes. I went there the first time I’d gone out in public after Arthur had died. There was a woman who worked there and I was always friendly with her, just the normal pleasantries, but I liked her. I was standing in the queue and she asked me what I wanted and it felt a little strange, because there was no acknowledgement of anything. She treated me like anyone else, matter-of-factly, professionally. She gave me my food and I gave her the money and–ah, sorry, it’s quite hard to talk about this–as she gave me back my change, she squeezed my hand. Purposefully. It was such a quiet act of kindness. The simplest and most articulate of gestures, but, at the same time, it meant more than all that anybody had tried to tell me–you know, because of the failure of language in the face of catastrophe. She wished the best for me, in that moment. There was something truly moving to me about that simple, wordless act of compassion. (Page 44)
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‘What does it really matter what happens?’ So that was a big shift in my thinking, for sure: to relinquish concern for the outcome of my artistic decisions and let the chips fall where they may. That idea has reverberated through everything I have done since. (Page 46)
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When you are making music together, conversation becomes at best an auxiliary form of communication. It becomes unnecessary, even damaging, to explain things. (Page 48)
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Note: Damaging
In my experience, boredom is often close to epiphany, to the great idea. In a way, that is very much the agony of songwriting–because boredom is just boredom until it’s not! But perhaps boredom is the wrong word here. For me, it’s more a kind of distraction–a sort of letting go, or a willingness to relinquish control of an idea that you thought was important. I find I can only get to that place through improvisation and, of course, collaboration. The nature of improvisation is the coming together of two people, with love–and a certain dissonance. (Page 54)
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So the three of us, Warren, Andrew and I were all in this strange, wounded place, I guess. We weren’t necessarily discussing these matters, we were inhabiting them. The atmosphere was–I don’t know how to describe it–rare. Haunted, even. (Page 59)
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Am I right in thinking that this new improvisatory way of working doesn’t lend itself easily to a full band set-up in which everyone has fixed roles? Well, it’s difficult, because you often find that the rhythm section will impose a shape on a song and take it to a particular place, from which there is no turning back. (Page 64)
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Anyway, there is much I regret about my behaviour towards my mother. I wish I had been in a position where I was mature enough to have acknowledged her enormous pain and helped her with it, but for most of my life I was a furious whirlwind of self-absorption, with little time for others. That, too, is a source of deep regret. Children need their parents, but parents need their children, too. Sometimes it’s all they have. I have learned that. (Page 74)
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Religion is asking the question: ‘What if?’ And to me, that question is also, in its way, a completely adequate answer. (Page 78)
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Markeren(Geel) - Pagina 79 · Locatie 1201 (Page 79)
But just to stay with the ‘what if’ question, does it not in itself leave room for doubt as well as wonder?
Yes. Doubt and wonder. Well put. That’s quite a dynamic, though–almost contradictory. Well, I think the only way I can fully give myself over to the idea of God is to have the room to question. To me, the great gift of God is that He provides us with the space to doubt. For me at least, doubt becomes the energy of belief. (Page 79)
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Why would I deny myself something that is clearly beneficial because it doesn’t make sense? That in itself would be illogical. (Page 79)
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Some music can even lead us to a place where a fundamental spiritual shift of consciousness can happen. At best, it can conjure a sacred space. (Page 80)
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Well, whatever you think about the decline of organised religion–and I do accept that religion has a lot to answer for–it took with it a regard for the sacredness of things, for the value of humanity, in and of itself. This regard is rooted in a humility towards one’s place within the world–an understanding of our flawed nature. We are losing that understanding, as far as I can see, and it’s often being replaced by self-righteousness and hostility. (Page 82)
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You either go under, or it changes you, or, worse, you become a small, hard thing that has contracted around an absence. Sometimes you find a grieving person constricted around the thing they have lost; they’ve become ossified and impossible to penetrate, and, well, other people go the other way, and grow open and expansive. But what I want to say is this: this will happen to everybody at some point–a deconstruction of the known self. (Page 106)
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No one has control over the things that happen to them, but we do have a choice as to how we respond. There was a defiance there, in the face of the world’s indifference and apparent casual cruelty. A defiance, but also an acceptance? Well, the thing I found helpful was the realisation that it is commonplace. Grief is as ordinary or commonplace as love. (Page 108)
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We spoke on the phone a little while back, when you were just starting to work on some new material. You were feeling quite daunted by the prospect, which surprised me. Well, writing songs is daunting. It isn’t a case of skipping through the fields, merrily picking up songs and putting them in your basket. It’s a bloody business, particularly at the beginning. You start from a point of deprivation, of nothingness, of complete lack. And that’s when you’re confronted with yourself minus your ideas, the very things that normally insulate you from all the ingrained negative bullshit about yourself and your capabilities that lives inside you like a curse. (Page 111)
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don’t write continuously. Instead, I’ll put an actual date in my diary for when I will begin writing the next record. And that date is the starting point, the initial action towards making a record. I don’t start with notebooks full of ideas, scraps of dialogue, cool lines, or even interesting titles–indeed anything collected during the time leading up to that date. I don’t take notes in that way. Not for songs, anyway. All the lyric-writing gets done from the ground up in an allotted time. I start with a new, blank notebook, an idea-free mind and a considerable amount of anxiety. (Page 112)
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Note: Anxiety
I think it may have been prompted by the image of the toppled Edward Colston statue in Bristol. I think it was probably to do with that, but I can’t be sure. But even still, the narrator as an ice sculpture, lying on his side, made of frozen human tears, melting in the midday sun, is not a bad start for a record. I’ve written records with a lot less. (Page 112)
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Can you talk about how that anxiety manifests itself?
Practically, it begins with a lot of note-taking. I’m basically writing down lines that come to my head–ideas, images and so forth–but the problem with that is these notes, on their own, are not very promising. In fact, they are mostly meaningless–just piles of words that, at the time, seem to amount to little more than the evidence of my failure as a songwriter. And then, day after day, I find myself drifting into a really unhappy, even depressed state. What’s even worse is that this chain of events has been repeating itself for thirty years or more–maybe even forty! How bad does it get? Well, for a start, I’m just horrible to be around. Susie will usually pick up on it early on and say something like, ‘Ah, have you started writing songs again?’ And I’ll be, ‘Why!?’ And, she’ll say, ‘You’ve got that look.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, nothing is fucking coming!’ And she’ll say, ‘Well, nothing ever comes until it does.’ (Page 113)
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Well, the thing is, even though the notebooks are full of meaningless words, there are always little bits in there that in time begin to rise off the page. (Page 114)
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With songwriting, there are always these little glimmers embedded in all the scrambled nonsense and false starts and failed ideas. They’re buried in there like clues. What happens is that they suddenly present themselves, rise from the page, and begin to hold hands. Not all at once, necessarily, but quite rapidly, and then you start to get a creative momentum, a kind of collecting together of information that moves towards the basic framing of a song. (Page 114)
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So thank God, quite literally, for music, because it’s one of the last remaining places, beyond raw nature, that people can feel awed by something happening in real time, that feeling of reverence and wonder. (Page 118)
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In the end, after many years, I settled for chaos in the mind, order in the workspace. (Page 120)
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Blixa never thought his job was to carry the song. He thought his job was to augment the song. In my experience, that’s very rare. (Page 123)
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On some level it’s just the nature of the beast, I guess. It is what I call the corrosive power of collaboration. Collaborations that work are the most glorious and productive of things. But if the collaboration is not attended to properly, with care and respect, it can eat away at itself. The work can be so intense, you can forget to be friends. (Page 125)
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And the more someone feels they are losing their position, the more bloody and fraught the situation can become, until bad decisions are being made just to soothe people’s egos. (Page 125)
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We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around. Maybe the younger self finds it difficult to inhabit its true potential because it has no idea what that potential is. It is a kind of unformed thing running scared most of the time, frantically trying to build its sense of self–This is me! Here I am!–in any way that it can. But then time and life come along, and smash that sense of self into a million pieces. And then comes the reassembled self, the self you have to put back together. You no longer have to devote time to finding out what you are, you are just free to be whatever you want to be, unimpeded by the incessant needs of others. You somehow grow into the fullness of your humanity, form your own character, become a proper person–I don’t know, someone who has become a part of things, not someone separated from or at odds with the world. (Page 128)
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Well, it’s all getting a bit out of control, but it’s wild and lovely. I feel amped up. Maybe a little bit too much. What I’m saying is that there’s an openness and freedom to things that I’ve never experienced before, but right now it just feels like a very busy week. What I really want to do is curl up on the sofa and watch Netflix with my wife. It’s the small things, in the end, don’t you think? (Page 131)
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think I’ve done my best, as a musician, to insulate myself from these forces–by being my own boss. Nobody tells me what I can or can’t do, because there is nobody there to tell me. All aspects of my creative life–the work, the production, media, touring and so on–are done in-house and on my terms. (Page 139)
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We had to get up in the morning because something needed to be done. (Page 140)
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But this one I wrote very quickly, in one sitting–with a lyric that was, well, kind of perfect. It starts with the semi-humorous lines: I’m travelling appalling alone On a singular road Into the lavender fields That reach high beyond the sky That’s semi-humorous? Okay, not humorous, but mischievous. I’m really intrigued to hear this song, but what is it about exactly, and how is it mischievous? Well, the singular road is the hero’s journey, or the artist’s way, let’s say–the monomyth where the artist travels to the dangerous unknown to collect the knowledge and bring it back to the world. The ‘appalling’ journey, so to speak. To cast yourself as the hero in your own song is, I don’t know, Seán, an act of mischief, maybe! So ‘Lavender Fields’ is an archetypal hero’s journey song? Well, I’m not sure if it’s archetypal given that the protagonist only thinks he is on a hero’s journey; he is actually just dying. (Page 142)
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Well, I think grief reinvents us. When I say grief, I mean the second life we lead after trauma. It feels more essential. The way we respond to things is altered–we become, as human beings, more precise. (Page 151)
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I was thinking about that some more, too, and I was reminded of that beautiful notion of William Blake’s–of Jesus being the imagination. And also that startling image from Matthew 27: ‘Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, who remain standing there in front of the tomb.’ That always makes me think of what it’s like to experience the birth of a creative idea; it’s as if you are waiting for the Christ to appear, to step from the tomb, and reveal Himself. That’s quite an analogy. Do you see songwriting at its best as a kind of creative self-revelation? Yes, and in order for it to happen, you have to be patient. You must have faith. And often you must do the waiting alone. (Page 155)
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I think a lot of musicians deal in residual ideas, because they’re seduced by the comfortable and the familiar. (Page 156)
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Does it ever concern you that you have inevitably lost some of your audience along the way? Well, the alternative is much worse. If you stick to the safe idea, it soon becomes overly familiar, and the audience will grow bored and ultimately resentful. Put brutally, the audience should never dictate the direction an artist takes. I say that with all the love in the world, but an artist does not exist to serve his or her audience. The artist exists to serve the idea. The idea is the light that leads the audience and the artist to a better place. (Page 157)
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Our better selves are made up of a collection of transitory experiences that have elevated us spiritually, music being potentially the most transcendent and necessary of these shared experiences. If we are deprived of transcendent experiences, we grow smaller, harder, less tolerant. (Page 158)
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It requires a certain amount of nerve to rip it all up and start again with something that feels new and, therefore, dangerous. For a start, your brain does not want to go there and it’s telling you that. It’s challenging to write away from the known and the familiar. (Page 158)
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What I’m saying is that you can’t get to that truly creative place unless you find the dangerous idea. And, once again, that’s like standing at the mouth of the tomb, in vigil, waiting for the shock of the risen Christ, the shock of the imagination, the astonishing idea. (Page 159)
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on. I think these absences do something to those of us who remain behind. We are like haunted houses, in a way, and our absences can even transform us so that we feel a quiet but urgent love for those who remain, a tenderness to all of humanity, as well as an earned understanding that our time is finite. (Page 159)
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Well, we’ve talked about this a lot, the idea that suffering is, by its nature, the primary mechanism of change, and that it
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I don’t want you to misunderstand what I am saying, but there can be a kind of morbid worshipping of an absence. A reluctance to move beyond the trauma, because the trauma is where the one you lost resides, and therefore the place where meaning exists. (Page 168)
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I feel compelled to create. It’s a force beyond my control, really. And I do what I can to keep the whole creative project alive by constantly trying to surprise myself. In that way things remain interesting. (Page 170)
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Have you seriously contemplated doing that?
Yes, it has crossed my mind, but I suspect that for me the world is enlivened by the creative process. It enhances the way I see things and makes the world feel sufficient, even abundant. (Page 170)
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I just don’t believe our artistic gifts are given to us entirely for our own amusement. (Page 172)
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I spent a year on Twitter, not active, just following people, but in the end even that proved to be utterly dispiriting. I followed all these people, people I admired, people I had been interested in for years–podcasters, writers, journalists, public thinkers, social critics–and I found that the form somehow diminished almost all of them. (Page 180)
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The second is the Rondanini Pietà by Michelangelo. It’s his final sculpture, in which the figure of Christ has been quite literally hacked back to its essentialness and is just so shockingly human. I’m often encouraged by this sculpture in relation to the way a well-honed lyric can be chopped back to its inner spiritual shape in the editing process, when we are in the studio. (Page 187)
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As an artist, you want to be fluid and impossible to define, even to yourself, and committed only to where your heart might take you, even if that is in direct conflict with the prevailing mood of the moment. (Page 190)
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