Yesterday was a kind of weird day. I am worrying about a lecture that I am to give next Monday to a local quilt guild on a rather touchy subject, and I felt that my brain was in a fog all day. I did some housework, hoping that paying attention to mundane things would give the back of my brain the ability to work out its problems unaided. I took care of some other household tasks, but it didn’t seem to work very well. And I couldn’t really concentrate on being creative when I had this background worry noise going on in my head.
So in the afternoon, I watched Inside the Actor’s Studio: Sir Elton John. My sister, who subscribes to all the premium channels in the universe, had taped it and we’d met for lunch on Tuesday so she could bring it to me. (Funny sidebar: It took three tries beginning in November to get it recorded. The first time her husband had set the VCR for the wrong time and the second time he simply forgot to set it at all. Fortunately this episode is now in late-night rotation on Bravo, and I was able to find a third showing at 1:00 am, or some such, and he got it for me.)
I love music. I like a lot of Elton John’s music, but I would not have wanted to see this episode simply because he was appearing. I wanted to see it because of a note written to the QuiltArt list back in November by a man who’d seen it on its first run-through. At the end of the program, he said, someone handed Elton a book and challenged him to write music to a random paragraph, then and there. And Elton sat down at the piano, chose a part of Scene II of Peer Gynt, began noodling around on the keys and came up with a spontaneous composition.
Well, this fascinated me. It sounded like the musical equivalent of what we do as artists when we “audition” fabrics against a design wall, or cut out pieces and pin them up there to see how they work together. Some of us are terrific at this, working in an intuitive way that comes together apparently effortlessly, while others of us have to really work at it.
So I watched it yesterday, while waiting for my fogged brain to clear. He’s a little heavier than he used to be, his voice a little deeper, more mature, and without the swooping falsetto of “Benny and the Jets” and “Rocketman” (the result of surgery in 1988 to remove nodules from his vocal cords). He’s charming, devastatingly honest, and funny as hell. He’s also completely serious about his music, and he’s a much more accomplished and highly talented musician than I had ever realized. He was trained in classical piano at the Royal Academy of Music, although he says he was discouraged by his teachers, who told him that with his short, stubby little hands he’d never make a good pianist. Their judgment didn’t stop him studying, but when he started hearing Jerry Lee Lewis and Otis Redding and Ray Charles on the radio, he knew that he wanted to concentrate on contemporary music. And then, he said, his mother brought home a copy of Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel, and it was all over.
The “noodle” scene was indeed at the very end of the program, perhaps the last five minutes. One of the audience members asked him about staying fresh — How many variations can there be in writing popular music? Do you ever worry about running out of new material, new lyrics to write music to?
He answered (and I’m paraphrasing) that the music always came as a response to the words, and as long as there were words he’d be in business. Any words. “Anybody got a book? Any book.”
He took the copy of Ibsen’s play which was handed to him, opened it at random, sat down at the piano, and chuckled that he might very well make an ass of himself, but here goes. Two chords, then another, and he began to sing the lines from the play along with the improvisation that grew under his short, stubby fingers like magic. He played and sang for a couple of minutes; it started out perhaps a bit tentative, but toward the end there were flashes of something that could send chills down the spine if it were fully developed. It was amazing and humbling to watch.
So how does this relate to creativity and all the stuff we do as visual artists? It relates to a lot of the thinking I’ve been doing about trusting one’s intuition, about not getting too wrapped up in making everything perfect the first time out. I’m a Virgo. I have to be perfect. But watching him be willing to trust in his ability, to be willing to make a fool of himself in public, opened up for me the possibility that maybe it’s okay to just do and not worry so much about every jot and tittle along the way.
The lecture next Monday will go just fine.
So I pulled up the Sky.fm website to see who it was.
