The finished article

I was travelling in my friend’s car. We were listening to my CD of Bryan Ferry’s Boys and Girls. As he drove, he pointed out the note contrast between the end of opener “Sensation “and the beginning of the next track, “Slave to Love”. “Listen,” he said, “I just love how that chord answers the other.”

I’d never noticed what he pointed out and yet, I had always noticed how the one track following on from the other just felt right. Sound affects.

I’ve always loved music. I remember having my first go playing a record on my own for the first time (David and Ansell Collins “Double Barrel) as a child. I remember being mesmerised by the bass line loop of Bob Marley’s “Exodus” at a house party a few years later. I remember throwing my head around in a darkened sitting room to The Police’s “One World (Not Three)” as a teenager. I remember waking up to certain tracks playing because I slept with the radio on in my 20s. I remember being so shocked by a bereavement that I couldn’t listen to music for months. I remember being so upset by a break up that I could only listen to a particular genre for weeks afterward.

This love of music came back to me with the belated discovery of a new track on an old album: “Happy Cycling” by Boards of Canada from their Music Has a Right to Children long player. I only noticed this track recently, because for years I’d not listened to albums in their complete sequence on my MP3 player. Since hearing it, I’ve listened to it while psyching up at the beginning of my commute, relaxing during lunchtimes and winding down at the end of the day.

Over the past few years my MP3 listening radically changed my appreciation of music. I’d always skipped one or two less favoured tracks while listening on vinyl, but with my belated discovery of the shuffle button, I began to listen to my favourite tracks in a never-ending, constantly-surprising, context-free jukebox stream.

I think it was my friend’s enthusiasm over two less favoured tracks from Boys and Girls, which I tended to skip and leave out of the shuffle stream, that turned me back to whole album listening, along with Julia Cameron‘s exercise in The Artist’s Way, in which she encouraged people to sit and listen to one whole album’s side in order to fully appreciate it. Listening to Boys and Girls in full later, I realised how one track on its own may not be so appealing, but in relation to other sequenced tracks would make perfect sense: it was part of a whole.

My appreciation of music always used to be like this. I remember leaving school and walking to Our Price, buying a record on occasion and taking it home; looking at the sleeve as I played it through the first time. There was nothing “collector-ish” about this; this was just how it was. One would buy an album and listen to the whole thing. Now, I find myself doing that again on MP3; really listening to a whole album, it’s opening tracks, its peaks and troughs, its closing tracks. Good, bad or indifferent, a whole album has its own sense. With this deeper listening, I’ve been discovering that every track would be there for a reason: all killer no filler, so to speak.

This respect for musicians’ work dovetails with a respect for creativity. As a young record buyer, film goer or book reader, I thought that these works just appeared fully formed; not imagined, written, worked on, reworked on and sometimes abandoned before the best work was released.

Also, I learned through listening to back catalogues that all these artists started somewhere: they learned, practised, wrote, rehearsed, made demos and made more demos before their first releases; before they hoped to release an album…

This really struck a chord with my own creativity, be it in writing, photography, drawing or filmmaking: one doesn’t produce fully formed works. They are planned, worked on and refined before they’re shown to others. Many mistakes are made, which one aims to learn from. Creators in any field have had to work and work to get to the point of making something good. And when they fail, they keep working.

The stories that circulate on creativity highlight inspiration and overnight success, but each of the fields I love depend on hard work: showing up each day and working towards completion. See you at work.