At its most basic, making art is about following what’s luminous to you and putting it in a jar, to share with others.
Here you go. A melody. See? I found it. It’s always been right there. That’s why it’s so familiar. Maybe it was in the rhythm of the washing machine, the awkward pause in a conversation, or the random collision of two radio stations blasting from two different cars and how it reminded you of your parents trying to be heard over one another. Remove a note, one flicker, and it’s the sound of the door closing for the last time and her footsteps fading into the first silence in forever. But wait . . . nope, the silence wasn’t really silence after all. You just weren’t paying attention. There’s always sound beneath the sound you hear. Or something else to see when your eyes adjust. It turns out there was also the sound of children playing outside your window and, below that, the buzz of a ceiling fan. That’s a sound you’d overlooked before, but now it’s all you can hear. We all see different flickers in a busy sky.
That’s where the melodies live. What do you notice that glows beneath the silence? Can that glow be bottled, or framed?
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Who knows where this drive comes from? Some artists, I suppose, were simply cultivated to be artists. Some crave recognition, while others seek relief from pain or an escape from something unbearable. Many just have a knack for making art. But I’d like to think that most artists have had some kind of dream beneath the drive, whether they remember it or not.
Excerpt From: Ben Folds. “A Dream About Lightning Bugs.”