Interview with MusicRoom
“It’s a great question. The first part of the process – pure inspiration – can come from anywhere and come at any time. I wish I knew how to how to activate it on command. I can go several weeks, I’ve always got ideas running and usually they are not remotely related to music. I’ll read something about medicine or astronomy, or I’ll have a conversation with somebody and we’ll be talking about sociology or something. Those could apply to musical ideas, whatever that is. Or I hear my little son laugh or giggle, just taking inspiration from wherever. But there’s that first part of the inspiration where it’s like, ‘that’s an interesting idea, that could be a thing’. The process of making something I’ve kind of codified over the years, and I’ve got this thing that I do where I make drawings – I call them emotional architecture. I paint and build the emotional journey of the piece that I want the performers and the listeners to go on, usually before I’ve written a note of music. There’s a lot of what looks like preplanning or blueprint drawing of a piece before I get into it, so that by the time I start writing notes, I’ve got a really clear idea of what it is I’m about to make. I’ve made this big video masterclass called The Beautiful Mess that we’re about to release and I talk through all the parts of my process, and when I watched the videos back I thought, ‘yeah this all looks like I’ve got it figured out’, like I’ve got a plan, but the truth is, every piece is just crazy, it’s just a mess. I’m sitting here thinking ‘what am I doing?!’, I’m just lost in the woods and somehow music comes out of it.”
Read the full blog on the MusicRoom website.