Why are so many musicians screw ups? Well, the other way you can look at it is why are so many screw ups musicians? Because I don’t think it’s the fact that if music heals, it’s not the music that’s making us screwed up, is it? It’s not the music that’s haunting us, it’s tormenting us. That’s the thing that’s healing us. So if we flip it around the other way, if we begin, if we are born with that kind of nature, that we have our emotions on our sleeve, that we have those levels of in incredibly high sensitivity to situations, to emotions, to to love, we’re very, very taught in that way.
for me, I believe that that’s why we feel the need to express it to just to get it out. It’s how we let go of these pressures that we feel this kind of, oh my God, I’ve got all of this stuff inside me.
What am I gonna do with it? And people that can’t create, maybe they just scream and they shout and they fight or they just cry. But we go, no, I’ve gotta get this down and it’s for me. I dunno about you guys, but I’ve often thought about songwriting as sometimes as a purging process. Do you know what I mean? Where we just kind of like, I’ve just, oh, I feel so much better now.
I’ve put it out there. I guess it’s like, in a way it’s a little bit like counselling. If you go and speak to a counsellor and talk to a complete stranger about all of these things that you are feeling, then you sometimes feel better. Even if you just talk to a complete stranger on a train that you just get into a conversation with and you can get off the train two hours later and go, I feel better getting off my chest. You know, you’re never gonna see them again, but you just feel better for releasing this stuff that’s inside you.
So if music is the thing that heals us, what causes us to feel more anxious? Surely if we’re just getting all of this stuff out and putting it on paper, then we should be healing us all of the time, right? So why doesn’t it, why does it with some people, why does it just increase and increase and increase self-doubt?
Absolutely. Let’s look at the different types of creatives here. First of all, the actual creators of music, because obviously there are artists that are singers that maybe necessarily don’t create, there are people in the music industry as well. But let’s look at creators for my money. Nine times out of 10, it’s fear. And I’ve seen it firsthand when I’ve been mentoring sessions, and I mentioned it yesterday in the session with Sasha, where I’ve seen people in co-writes, go and put their hand over their mouth to stop the words coming out.
Why are they doing that? Why are they doing it? It’s because they’re judging themselves. Self-judgment and what they’re actually doing. I think that they’re judging what other people are gonna think. They’re judging themselves by other people’s standards that they don’t even know what those other people’s standards are.
They’re thinking, if I say this, they’re not thinking it’s s**t. Otherwise they wouldn’t have thought it. They’re thinking, if I say this, somebody else might think it’s s**t. Maybe it is s**t, maybe I’m s**t. Oh, I am s**t. And they go down this kind of vortex and you, the more they clam up, the less they’re going to the, the, the more painful it is for them to be able to write.
And it’s a pressure that they put themselves in a co-write situation, which is why I loved it when Sasha yesterday said, be fearless in a songwriting session. Whatever you are you want to say, just say it. Because if you are in the room with the right people and you guys are the right people, then nobody is judging anybody. And I can promise every single one of you, if any of you, I know that many of you have been in a, in a songwriting session with me.
Hopefully you will never, ever have feel judged by me. I might say I’m not sure that’s right for the song, but I will never look at someone and go, just don’t even go there. If I’m with my mates, you know, Chris Neal, who I’ve written with for 20 years, and he comes up with something, I’ll look at him for sure enough, and I’ll go, mate, that’s crap like that. And we’ll have a good old laugh about it.
But I would never say to him, you are a s**t songwriter. Judgment kills. So we don’t do it. And think of it by your own standards. If somebody, if you think people are gonna be judging you, just think about if somebody else says something in a songwriting session, are you gonna judge them? Are you hands up? Who’s gonna judge somebody in a songwriting session? Good. Otherwise I wouldn’t have to send you out the room. So think of it from your own perspective.
I’m not gonna judge people, so I’m gonna have faith that people aren’t gonna judge me as well. We have fear of failure. What about if I go into, especially when we’re writing by ourselves, wow, we have fear of failure. What if I go into, in, in, into my writing room and, and I write something and it’s, yeah, it’s gonna be crap. It well, it probably is gonna be great. Yeah, it is. I’m crap. And we go down that same vortex again, the fear of failure and how in just enlightening was that yesterday when somebody said to Sasha, you know, how do you, you know, do you ever get that self doubt?
He said, every day. And this is somebody that sold cajillions of records and he still gets self-doubt. Every time I do, when I go into songwriting sessions, it’s like, am I gonna be able to come up with the goods? Celine Dion apparently calls stage fright, talent waiting to get out, which is a lovely spin on that nervous energy that you get.
So it’s about trying to harness that nervous energy in a different way.
