We're all just animals. That's all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That's where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.
Elvis CostelloRead
I've always felt writing a song was a bit like going on location. That's true in an almost literal sense. Where you are seeps in somehow.
Interpretation
Writing a song is deeply influenced by one's surroundings.
Elvis Costello compares the process of writing a song to the experience of traveling to a location, suggesting that the environment in which a song is created has a significant impact on its content and emotional resonance. This metaphor highlights the way that personal experiences and surroundings shape creativity, as the essence of a place can seep into the artistic expression of the songwriter.
In practice
At a songwriting workshop to inspire creativity in different environments.
We're all just animals. That's all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That's where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.
There are five things to write songs about: I'm leaving you. You're leaving me. I want you. You don't want me. I believe in something. Five subjects, and 12 notes. For all that, we musicians do pretty well.
It's the damage that we do and never know. It's the words that we don't say that scare me so.
And I don't feel any form of music is beyond me in the sense of that I don't understand it or I don't have some love for some part of it.
Happiness isn't a fortune in a cookie. It's deeper, wider, funnier, and more transporting than that.
I've had a lot of different experiences in music over the years.And not everything you do can satisfy everybody's idealised version of you.
Through a shared aim, shared needs, shared love of a shared result in theatre, from the creation of space... the coming-together of an endlessly repeated climax of shared performance, again and again, something special can appear.
I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it's a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can't separate persona from psyche; you just can't do it.
Mystery is an intellectual process... But suspense is essentially an emotional process.
Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.
Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.
How many shows on TV do you see young black people, both women and men, really embody a full-fledged human being, flaws and all?
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