Singing In Your Sleep?: Creatively Finding Time To Create.
On Monday, I talked about the Rolling Stones song “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction“. There’s a great story of how that song came to be. Allegedly Keith Richards woke up in the middle of the night with the riff in his head. He grabbed his tape recorder and recorded the riff and the lyrics, “I Can’t Get no Satisfaction”, before passing out asleep. The next morning, he had forgotten all about it and, when he pressed the play button, he rediscovered that glorious riff…followed by a long session of snoring. He brought the riff to Mick Jagger, who finished the lyrics in about ten minutes, and it became their first number-one hit single in the U.S..
Implausible? Perhaps. But I have had a similar experience with songwriting.
Late one night, just before bed, I was strumming my guitar and hit on a progression I liked. I grabbed my laptop and recorded it with Garageband, along with some lyrics that came to mind. I went to sleep and forgot about it. Several weeks later, I rediscovered the recording, and thought,“This is good! I’ve got to finish this!” The rest of the lyrics came almost as quickly as I could write them down, and that’s how I wrote “21″, which has gotten probably the strongest listener response of all the songs I’ve written.
There’s something about the time between being awake and asleep that I’ve found to be a fertile ground for creativity. Your mind is not fully engaged with the day-to-day tasks, and the creative part of the brain is able to surface. I’ve written some great songs in the shower, when I’m still waking up in the morning. Late at night, when I’m winding down from the day, bits of song ideas will come to me and sometimes I’ll stay up for hours trying to coax it out.
I’ve found I can also tap into that creative space during the day. When I’m driving, or doing some repetitive task where I don’t have to think too much, I’ll often work on songs in my head, turning them over and over, singing or humming a melody, feeling for a lyric. When I first moved to Atlanta, I worked in a warehouse, stacking boxes and straightening them on shelves. To pass the time I worked on songs in my head. “Minnesota (Always Leaving)” came from that summer in the warehouse.
It’s always a struggle to block out time to write and create, but by using the small bits of time here and there, I’ve learned that I can keep an idea simmering until I finish it. And I’ve finished a number of songs this way. I try to record any little idea I get, and lately I’ve started keeping a disc of these unfinished song bits in my car to work on during long drives. Some of these fragments probably won’t amount to much. But some of them just might be great.
Remember, Keith Richards didn’t think much of his little riff, either.
How are you finding time to create?
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