Devachan Music - Community Room

You write what you hear — not what you listen to. If you are a songwriter, you need to protect your aural environment and what you take in with the same care you bestow on your diet. Take the elevator up to the doctor's; they're oozing Farfisa Tico-Tico at you; bungo-mungo, there it is in your musical vocabulary-soup. What this means is, first, be selective about what you expose yourself to. Second, pay attention to what you hear. Listen. Because...

The things you hear but do not listen to come back to haunt you. When you take things in unconsciously, the musical material goes right down to your reptilian and/or mammalian brain (depending on your state of evolution) bypassing the ego. Then, three weeks later, out it comes and you're convinced you wrote it and that God plopped it personally Herself on your doorstep. But it's really influence from your environment.

On the other hand, when you listen with conscious intent, you process the musical food and expose it to the digestive enzymes in your ears. Chew your musical food well, and even stuff you don't like and don't want to sound like will have less effect on you. The only alternative is never hearing anything but the Pure sounds and I don't know how you do that unless someone else is doing the choosing for you, which is worse. Also, if you can take in bad music and boil it down in this way, I kind of feel as if you are redeeming it in a mysterious fashion I can't quite explain.

Comment? Use the Tag "Songwriting and Listening"

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