"The mind is a strange and wonderful thing. I'm not sure it'll ever be able to figure itself out. Everything else, maybe, from the atom to the universe. Everything except itself."
To begin to figure out this mind, I think we have to go back to the beginning... the dark beginning.
"I like the dark. It's friendly."
Two movie quotes already. And why not. Movies are the friends we meet for the first time in the dark. Most of the time, that is, or at least traditionally.
The dark is where some of my fondest childhood memories took place. Either cowering beneath the covers on nights when I couldn't sleep, or hiding in the closet from relatives I didn't care to see. Not necessarily a pretty picture from someone else's point of view, but this is where I met the "person" who was the most influential in my creative development: my imagination.
"To me the imagination is a place all by itself. Now, you've heard of the French nation... the British nation. Well, this is the Imagine-nation. It's a wonderful place."
Another film quote. Imagination and film, that's where the whole crap-o-phonic thing starts. During the past 15 years or so, which is the time in which I've been actively writing music, I've also been studying film intensely. Looking back on what's been written so far, this is the way that my mind works most of the time. A bit of conversation here, a movie quote there, a little more conversation, another quote, and a few trivia items thrown in here and there for good measure. Ask anyone. This is the way it is.
I recently discovered that my outlook toward lyric writing is more like screenwriting. In a screenplay, you have the freedom to fade in and out of reality, in and out of linear time. I suppose the same could be said for fiction, as well. But, I do find that most of my peers seem to work from real life situations most of the time, whereas I will take just a smidge of a real life experience and toss it into a well of fantasy. from there, it ripples into something that is barely comprehensible. I don't even know what I'm writing about most of the time.
Scared yet? More entries in this exciting saga, er, self-examination, are coming soon.
