I Got a Job / The Book of Peter

Happy Friday!

I have some actual news to report in this week’s issue.

My new friend Joshua Troke came up with a genius idea for a series and I’m fortunate to be part of the team helping him through the pilot process and hopefully, eventually, to your television screen: Deadline article makes it official.

Lessons From The Book of Peter

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while you probably already know that I consider Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill” a form of self-care.

When things get really difficult in this business, if I have a particularly shitty day at work, I put it on full blast and take a drive. He wrote that song about his decision to leave Genesis just as they were starting to take off and everybody thought he was crazy for doing it. That song reminds me that I’m here by choice. Nobody’s forcing me to keep trying to write movies and television, and I can “walk right out of the machinery’ any time I want.

I’ve been a fan of Peter Gabriel since So was released in 1986. I was thirteen years old, right in the sweet spot between the Prince/Michael Jackson obsession of my early middle school years and the hair metal days of high school. The videos for “Sledgehammer” and “Big Time” were in constant rotation on MTV and something about the visual creativity and showmanship captured my imagination. For a short period of time I became absolutely obsessed with synthesizers and similar artists like Thomas Dolby and Howard Jones.

It wasn’t until my early 20’s when I went back to his first four self-titled albums that I really appreciated what a commercial breakthrough So was for him. As far as I knew, he was always a mainstream star. In reality, he was kind of a cult artist until So.

For some reason I found myself going down a week-long Peter Gabriel rabbit hole on YouTube, which then led me to pulling up those first five albums to listen to while I was going about my day, walking the dog, making dinner, etc. Going on a deep dive into his early career reminded me of previous issues I’ve written about Joni Mitchell and Prince. Like Blue and Purple Rain before it, So followed a common pattern for artistic breakthroughs: exploration followed by exploitation. (article linked at end)

Peter’s first four albums were wildly experimental, playing with atmospheres and textures. He used a Fairlight to sample raindrops and other sounds that he could then program to play on a keyboard. On his fourth self-titled album (Geffen forced him to call it Security here) he gave his collaborators a creative restriction: no cymbals. That period of creative exploration produced a bunch of great music, including my go-to choice for self-care, but it didn’t resonate with a wider audience.

After Security he wrote the score for the movie BIRDY, which is where he met producer Daniel Lanois. He decided he’d had enough of being serious and somber for a bit. He wanted to “instill more fun” into the next record. So he brought Daniel Lanois and guitarist David Rhodes to Real World studios in Bath, England, and the three of them went to work putting down the spine of the songs. They went about it in a very workmanlike way, even going so far as to wear yellow construction hats around the studio as a joke.

That conscious decision to instill more fun in the record triggered the “exploitation” part of the pattern. They were able to blend his experimental art rock sound with his other major influences like soul and world music. Then there were the lyrics. In the year or two prior, Peter and his wife started going to couples therapy. That process allowed him to tap into a more direct emotional honesty. In his words, he was pouring it out, “Like a blues singer.” All of those elements came together to make real magic.

So went on to sell 7 million copies. In addition to the aforementioned “Sledgehammer” and “Big Time,” the track list includes, “In Your Eyes,” “Red Rain,” “Don’t Give Up,” and “Mercy Street.” Stone cold classics all, IMO.

From his website:

“There is always wisdom from hindsight. And because So was my most successful record, I think that a lot of people, particularly in America, think it was designed to be that. From the other end of it, you never really know which records are going to do well. You know that some things are going to be so obscure and difficult for a mainstream audience that they’re no-hopers, but generally, with what I do, it’s hard to predict which albums are going to do well.”

It’s true that you can’t predict what’s going to be a hit. You can’t chase trends. There’s no secret formula for tapping into the zeitgeist.

But you can dive deep into periods of exploration, blowing up your stale process, discovering new ways of working, trying out new tools, taking in new inspiration. Then you can alternate with periods of exploitation, drawing from your passions, your obsessions, stealing a bit here and there from your influences and artistic heroes. You can make a conscious decision to go where the fun is.

In one of the YouTube interviews I watched, he talks about the “great giants of the creative process” being “boredom and fatigue. They hover over everything. As soon as you get tired or bored the thing is dead.”

I’ve definitely felt that over the past couple of years. I wrote forty pages of a feature spec before I realized I was boring myself to death with it. So I stepped back, tore it into pieces, and focused on the scraps of the idea that were most interesting and energizing. That gets harder and harder to do the more pages I put down. It’s especially hard to do with a finished script. I find myself wanting to hold on to as much of it as possible because of all the work I’ve already put into it. It gets hard to see a path to the new and better version. I was talking to a friend this week about some notes they got recently. They said, “I just don’t see a way to make that work.”

I said, “You don’t see it… yet.”

For the 25th anniversary of So he released a box set with a disc called DNA that takes the songs through various incarnations from rough demos to the fully produced, polished versions that we know and love. It’s a great reminder that it’s called “the creative process” for a reason. Things take time. They evolve. We evolve. We become better, smarter writers/artists/humans and we bring a little more experience back to the page or canvas, even if it’s just a day or two later.

This reminds me, on a recent Scriptnotes podcast episode, John August and Craig Mazin interview Daniels, the filmmaking duo behind EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, one of my favorite movies of the past ten years. They were talking about how the idea for their next movie is kind of intimidating, that they’re not the directors they need to be yet to pull it off, but the idea of becoming those directors is really exciting. I loved that. I may not be the exact writer to pull this script or even this scene off today… but I can get there.

Last verse from The Book of Peter. In one of the interviews, he gives the audience a tip for getting in a more creative headspace for writing lyrics. He suggests using “peripheral visual stimulation,” like being on a moving train or a car, with the world going by in your peripheral. His theory is that, over the course of our evolution, when we were chasing or being chased, we had to develop the mechanism for “accelerating and pumping adrenaline to our brain” when we had movement in our peripheral. I don’t know about that theory but I do know that a big part of my creative evolution happened while riding the subway in my 20’s in New York, eyes focused on my Moleskine while the tunnels and fluorescent lights sped by in a blur.

So, there you go:

Experiment

Explore

Follow the fun

Draw from the well

Mind your boredom and fatigue

Trust the process

Take a train ride.

And all Pete’s people said, “Amen.”