"Just remember what was yours is everyone's from now on"
Maybe think about it like this: Art of any sort has to begin as an inkling of a thought inside one person's head. It is, in its conception, entirely personal, entirely self-reflective, and completely dependent on its creator for its meaning. And it can stay this way, so long as no one is ever exposed to it. But the minute you let it out, it gets bigger than that.
You can't keep your song entirely yours. All of the words and tears and love and joy and heartache that go into every song are only the beginning of what it means. I had an odd experience as a musician where I wrote a song some years ago and discovered that a new friend of mine had it playing on her mySpace, and in that instance, I realized that what I'd written was entirely bigger than my outlook for it. I'd written a song that I thought was too personal to connect to anyone properly, and felt the need to explain it to friends in order that the backstory might complete, but here was this new friend of mine who took this song I'd written completely blind, no back story, no emotional input from me, and connected with it on a level beyond what could've been possible if I'd sat down and explained it to her line by line. That started teaching me a lesson.
It's incredibly tempting to explain your art away. In some sense, it takes a bit of an edge off of it, makes it a little more comfortable for the listener to hear, because you think they know what to listen for and might offer a little more forgiveness if they see the full scope of everything surrounding.
But that ruins the experience for them. It's no longer a song waiting to made theirs, it's your song waiting to be heard by them. The connection gets muddied, weighed down, and made soggy by all the extraneous explanation. Yet, either way, they have to run it through their own minds to interpret it, no matter how much explanation you give.
So why not offer them the entire song? It began as yours, but in order for it to reach its full potential, it has to become someone else's, and in becoming theirs, it loses the intricacies of the personal situation that made it what it was while connecting on an emotional level that runs far deeper than is fully expressible simply through lyrical content. And as frustrating as it can be to reach a point where your band has fans that simply don't ring resonant with what it took for you to create these songs, it can still mean something to them, too.
The meaning of it, then, doesn't lie solely in your hands, or solely in the hands of the people it's connected to, but somewhere in between-- the fans drawing meaning from your original one, while filling in holes for themselves, offering the artist new ways to understand what they've written through the evolution of this song as it takes on this new meaning.
And that meaning, that beauty, that purpose for the song, that string that runs resonant deep beneath everything that's been written over top of it to work to express, that's that white light that shines out of it, that connective force buried inside the music, inside the writer before it even finds its way out into an instrument. But once it's there, it can't be put out. It can only be built on.
elsey you nailed it. To me, Tweeds is singing about art, no matter what kind. A song or a painting has a way of impressing itself into our brains. It carves out an image in our mind and calls out specific emotions. He is singing about the process of cross-fertilization and interpenetration. Once it is "out there" we all borrow and we steal. It's the way it works. There is no getting it back. "You can struggle with it all you like. You'll only get uptight." One of my favorite Wilco songs, for sure.
elsey you nailed it. To me, Tweeds is singing about art, no matter what kind. A song or a painting has a way of impressing itself into our brains. It carves out an image in our mind and calls out specific emotions. He is singing about the process of cross-fertilization and interpenetration. Once it is "out there" we all borrow and we steal. It's the way it works. There is no getting it back. "You can struggle with it all you like. You'll only get uptight." One of my favorite Wilco songs, for sure.
"Just remember what was yours is everyone's from now on"
Maybe think about it like this: Art of any sort has to begin as an inkling of a thought inside one person's head. It is, in its conception, entirely personal, entirely self-reflective, and completely dependent on its creator for its meaning. And it can stay this way, so long as no one is ever exposed to it. But the minute you let it out, it gets bigger than that.
You can't keep your song entirely yours. All of the words and tears and love and joy and heartache that go into every song are only the beginning of what it means. I had an odd experience as a musician where I wrote a song some years ago and discovered that a new friend of mine had it playing on her mySpace, and in that instance, I realized that what I'd written was entirely bigger than my outlook for it. I'd written a song that I thought was too personal to connect to anyone properly, and felt the need to explain it to friends in order that the backstory might complete, but here was this new friend of mine who took this song I'd written completely blind, no back story, no emotional input from me, and connected with it on a level beyond what could've been possible if I'd sat down and explained it to her line by line. That started teaching me a lesson.
It's incredibly tempting to explain your art away. In some sense, it takes a bit of an edge off of it, makes it a little more comfortable for the listener to hear, because you think they know what to listen for and might offer a little more forgiveness if they see the full scope of everything surrounding.
But that ruins the experience for them. It's no longer a song waiting to made theirs, it's your song waiting to be heard by them. The connection gets muddied, weighed down, and made soggy by all the extraneous explanation. Yet, either way, they have to run it through their own minds to interpret it, no matter how much explanation you give.
So why not offer them the entire song? It began as yours, but in order for it to reach its full potential, it has to become someone else's, and in becoming theirs, it loses the intricacies of the personal situation that made it what it was while connecting on an emotional level that runs far deeper than is fully expressible simply through lyrical content. And as frustrating as it can be to reach a point where your band has fans that simply don't ring resonant with what it took for you to create these songs, it can still mean something to them, too.
The meaning of it, then, doesn't lie solely in your hands, or solely in the hands of the people it's connected to, but somewhere in between-- the fans drawing meaning from your original one, while filling in holes for themselves, offering the artist new ways to understand what they've written through the evolution of this song as it takes on this new meaning.
And that meaning, that beauty, that purpose for the song, that string that runs resonant deep beneath everything that's been written over top of it to work to express, that's that white light that shines out of it, that connective force buried inside the music, inside the writer before it even finds its way out into an instrument. But once it's there, it can't be put out. It can only be built on.
elsey you nailed it. To me, Tweeds is singing about art, no matter what kind. A song or a painting has a way of impressing itself into our brains. It carves out an image in our mind and calls out specific emotions. He is singing about the process of cross-fertilization and interpenetration. Once it is "out there" we all borrow and we steal. It's the way it works. There is no getting it back. "You can struggle with it all you like. You'll only get uptight." One of my favorite Wilco songs, for sure.
elsey you nailed it. To me, Tweeds is singing about art, no matter what kind. A song or a painting has a way of impressing itself into our brains. It carves out an image in our mind and calls out specific emotions. He is singing about the process of cross-fertilization and interpenetration. Once it is "out there" we all borrow and we steal. It's the way it works. There is no getting it back. "You can struggle with it all you like. You'll only get uptight." One of my favorite Wilco songs, for sure.