The Role of Chance in Creativity
Inside: New Music, Berlin Film & an Essay on Coincidence
In Short:
In today’s newsletter, you will find:
🎲 A reflection on chance in life and creativity.
🎵 Unreleased Song “A Unique Way”
🎬 A film called “A Berlin Musical Love Story"
Read Time: 5 minutes.
Chance is but the pseudonym of God for those particular cases which He does not choose to subscribe openly with His own sign-manual.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Dear friends.
We never know how one thing will affect another.
Or the impact a coincidence may have on our lives.
I find it a heartening idea.
You have no idea what might be.
When you are struggling, what a thing that is - that life has its own plans.
It’s a paradox, then, that we desperately seek control.
And to order the chaos.
When we get too much order, we wonder why we’ve boxed ourselves into our own safety.
I remember an important moment in my psychoanalysis.
I was experiencing the first sustained period of balance in my adult life.
My therapist leaned in and looked at me:
Oh yes, Jim, but don’t lose the anarchy entirely!
All these years later, I noticed that the anarchy never did entirely leave my life.
Or rather, it is just written into life’s fabric.
Despite our plucky fortitude, we were born out of a cosmic explosion.
Yes, you are stardust.
You are the frenzied hallelujah.
You are a remnant of an ancient decision: I will no longer be void.
Despite our world of legislation and rule, we can’t avoid it - we are just particles of the primal dance.
When considering how to present this week’s material - a short film and a song, I wondered how to unify two artworks from different times of my life.
Then I realised both hinge on something Prime Minister Harold Macmillan would understand:
'Events, dear boy, events'.
And so, I present you two little artworks - and with each, a short tale of the role of chance in their inception.
A UNIQUE WAY
Of all my songs, “A Unique Way” has the strangest birth.
Finding myself living alone for the first time, I had no idea that my solitariness was about to be amplified by the global pandemic.
When it struck, the world pivoted online.
Being contrarian, I found myself doing the opposite.
No, I’m not available to Zoom; I have an appointment with Mephistopheles…
You will find our mutual friend in the lyrics:
Mephistopheles is bored Can't escape these four worlds We're drinking whiskey and discuss my soul He's tellin' me how the devil rolls...
It was a time of examining my inner landscape.
I read the books I’d been too busy to read.
And at night, I’d get shitfaced and converse with the characters I read about and write about what they said.
“Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Those words became my great albatross project - “The Isolation Diaries”.
1500 words of handwritten notes.
Who knows their destiny?
Maybe they are thrown into a skip by an indifferent hand. Or one day published.
What did happen was a coincidental meeting with my neighbour.
AJ plays Viola for the Berlin Philharmonic.
He’s forgotten more about music than I could learn in a lifetime.
He heard “A Unique Way” and told me he had ideas for it.
And so he got to work on the string parts you now hear.
An orchestra of the insane resonated through the walls above me…
Two years later, in my van in The Alps, I was compiling the songs for the as-yet-unreleased “The Isolation Diaries - Volume 5” EP.
I remembered the song and, again shitfaced, opened it up on my computer (a scene you can see in the documentary, which is available to preview for paid subscribers)
It felt like the missing piece.
So, I worked up a few more parts in the van and sent the files to my producer, Jonathan Kluth.
He said:
Jim, keep the vocals. You can feel where you were at.
I did.
But we felt that there was still something missing.
And so the song travelled to another studio, and my friend Gideon Carmel laid down the drums.
The final workflow?
Written and vocaled at home
Strings by AJ in his living room
An acoustic in The Alps
Drums at “The Famous Gold Watch”
Mixed in Neukölln
More important than its inception is its message:
Everyone must find their own way... Through the storm... Life don't belong To anyone But you...
You have no idea what something is trying to be when it sparks inside you.
As a creative artist, your job is to follow a trail of serendipity.
It is asking you to bring it into being.
Will you honour that question?
Today, I am sending you this song.
Through the different ingredients of chance, it finally came into being.
I feel incredibly emotional to pass it on to you.
It is like letting a bird out of a cage.
The reminder I give to you is the reminder I give to myself:
Sometimes, you have to outlast a pandemic, a wilderness and all the resistance in yourself and the world to create something.
Today:
Stop being so dam down on yourself.
Every single step towards what you create matters.
If it asks for half a life, so be it.
Stay the course.
And never, ever, allow life to lock the cage.
There is always something out there for you.
No matter what has been:
You still Be.
A BERLIN MUSICAL LOVE STORY
Over the last year or so, I’ve become great friends with a guy I fell in love with musically: Dean is Home.
At the start of the year, I asked Dean to come and play on my new material.
I realised that I had some nice footage of our back story and thought it would be fun to reflect on it.
Was it chance that I should meet Dean?
It feels like it was inevitable.
But it can’t be pre-written, can it?
Why don’t you decide:
"Synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance…”
— Jung
Thank you as ever for your time, dear friends.
If there’s anything I can help with creatively, don’t hesitate to reply.
And if you’d like to make my day, do drop a comment on the YouTube video.
Despite the positive exchange on other platforms, that one remains obstinate! 😆
With love,
Jim
As always, a little something for my paid subscribers:
Kafka
Don’t Complicate Discipline
How I schedule social media
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