Making Your Masterpiece
Welcome back, I hope you had a great week!
Quick business update:
It sounds like my feature pitch a couple of weeks ago was well received and I’m (hopefully) advancing to the next level at the studio. My current mantra is, “Make one champion at a time.”
I had a blast at Comic-Con and I want to pass on a story I told at the panel. In 2012, the year before I sold EXTANT, I went to Wonder Con in Anaheim and caught a panel about writing for television. One of the panelists was a writer named Keto Shimizu, and I remember being particularly inspired by her. I followed her work through the years, always cheering inside when her name popped up in the credits. Cut to this past Friday and I was on a panel WITH Keto, sitting right next to her.
Like I told the room, “It can happen and it does happen. Any one of you could be sitting up here in a few years.”
One last thing before I get to the heart of the matter...
The R&D Report has been free since the beginning and it will continue to be free. I don't have any plans to make it a paid subscription at any point.
Part of that is the consistency, or lack thereof. I publish these issues when I feel like I have something worth sending to your inbox. It's a pretty organic process. I don't want to fake it or force it. Also, I discover these things while in pursuit of my day job. That takes time.
But as someone who will regularly find himself between jobs (shows get canceled, development takes forever, and/or falls apart), it would be cool if this could eventually supplement my income, even in a small way. As long as it doesn't throw up any barriers to entry.
Enter the Ko-Fi button.
This is a totally voluntary, no pressure, no obligations kind of way to give people the opportunity to support this newsletter. I'm going to put the button at the bottom of each issue, starting today. If there are other ways of supporting that come up I'll add them down there along the way.
You don't have to do it, you don't even have to look at it if you don't want to. It will just be sitting down there, quietly, for anyone who feels moved by the spirit to "buy me a coffee" for the purpose of picking my brain.
We will never speak of this again.
Making Your Masterpiece
I was totally unprepared for the effect of seeing videos of Joni Mitchell on stage at The Newport Folk Festival this past week, her first public performance in nine years.
If you don’t know, she suffered a brain aneurysm in 2015 that took away her ability to sing, play guitar, even get up out of a chair by herself. She had to relearn all of that and joining Brandi Carlile and friends on stage was the culmination of that road back, 53 years after her last appearance at Newport. At this point I’ve watched every video I can find of that show at least twice, tears every time.
I didn’t discover Joni Mitchell until my early 20’s, thanks to Tori Amos’s cover of “A Case of You,” still one of my favorite songs. When I was working coat check at The Blue Note a couple of years later I heard an up and coming jazz singer named Jane Monheit do a cover of it as well. That’s what finally sent me to Blue, and immediately one of my favorite songs turned into one of my favorite records. Blue is a masterpiece.
The videos from Newport reminded me of an article by Ann Powers that I read last year, on the 50th anniversary of Blue’s release. Her article had a huge impact on me at the time because it put the album in a new context. For five decades it’s been praised for its raw, confessional quality. Joni herself talks about feeling like “a cellophane wrapper for cigarettes” while she was recording it, totally transparent and open.
Later, she bristled at being thought of as a “musical memoirist.” She wasn’t just documenting her life at the time and spilling her guts on vinyl. She was making artistic choices. What to keep in, what to leave out, thinking about how to take what was in her head and communicate it. There's an astonishing level of craftsmanship on display.
The article digs into some of the inspirations behind the album, including Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, another masterpiece, and finds a number of threads connecting them. They were both made by artists going through times of turmoil who found the discipline to engage with their pain while also applying the tools of their trade. This paragraph reached out and slapped me when I read it again this week:
“Mitchell herself has said that she bled these songs onto the pages, and that's what everyone has chosen to remember. The master herself has come to think of Blue primarily as a wound. That's just how we, on the gender binary, talk about creativity. Women bleed. Men forge through. But in fact, art of this caliber is always made through both the cut and the suture.”
I love that idea so much because it highlights the fact that turning your personal experience into art can be an act of healing. By finding a way to process your thoughts and emotions and make them relatable to other people, by sharing them with the world, you can (hopefully) bind those wounds. Best case scenario, you stitch up a few other people on the way.
There were two other threads that I found fascinating between the creation of Kind of Blue and Blue. They were both made by artists seeking to simplify and distill emotion, while simultaneously making space for experimentation. Miles didn’t rehearse his band for Kind of Blue. He gave them a few simple instructions and created space for them to improvise and find melodies of their own.
Joni Mitchell wrote many of the songs for Blue on a dulcimer, an instrument that she was introduced to not long before by a pioneer of the art form named Joellen Lapidus. It was as much percussion instrument as it was a string instrument. She also decamped to Europe for a few months to take a break from touring. That new tool, the change of scenery, the new cast of characters, all of that opened up new channels of her creativity.
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for awhile you’ve heard me talk about how I’m constantly itching to get to something “new.” Part of my hope in pulling apart my own process and examining it here is the hope that forcing new ways of working will result in more interesting stories. In some ways, it’s been an infuriating year, creatively. I feel like I’m always battling self-doubt, second guessing myself at every turn.
I came up with a feature idea recently and spent a week brainstorming and writing a few exploratory scenes. I went from “This is the greatest idea ever,” to “I’m so bored with this I want to burn my laptop at the stake.”
On the one hand I feel like I’ve cursed myself with this whole “new” thing. I’m dissatisfied all the goddamn time. On the other hand, when I push past that initial feeling, when I force myself to dig deeper — ie, sit with my emotions and ideas, boil things down to their essence, find ways to experiment — I arrive at something better. Not just better, something uniquely me, something only I could have come up with.
After banging my head against the desk for a few days I took a "This is so crazy it just might work" creative leap. I pitched the new version to a writer friend and his response let me know I was on to something.
This reminds me of one of the questions we got on the panel at Comic-Con, which is, “What are you looking for in a writer when you read a script for staffing?” I’ve only been through that process a few times. I’ve read a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty scripts for staffing purposes. The first things that came to mind were a strong voice, understanding of structure, compelling characters, crackling dialogue, etc, etc.
Then I thought about the times a script really got its hooks in me and in each one there was a moment or an idea that I never would have come up with in a million years. It was something specific born of that writer’s experience as a human being, their hard-won life lessons, their deeply held beliefs, their passions, their obsessions, something in that cauldron bubbled to the surface and grabbed me by the throat. You only get those moments when you dig deep into what makes you "you."
I don’t think I've ever consciously thought about trying to make a masterpiece and I don’t know that I’ll ever get there. I believe it’s possible for all of us. After seeing those videos of Joni Mitchell this past week and reading that article again I wrote down three goals that will hopefully at least get me a little closer to greatness.
Bring your raw self but apply your craft with discipline.
Simplify emotionally. Boil things down to their essence.
Make space for experimentation.
Above all, don’t be afraid of the cuts.
There is healing in the suture.
Fun Facts About Blue
Joni recorded Blue in the A&M studios, the current home of Henson Studios on La Brea, originally built by Charlie Chaplin. Now I have a new thing to tell people when I point out that Kermit statue.
Carole King was recording Tapestry at the same time in the studio next door and James Taylor was going back and forth to work on both, while recording his own album at Sunset Sound. No doubt there's some residual magic in the mortar between the bricks.
Nazareth did a badass cover of “This Flight Tonight,” and that that cover inspired Nancy Wilson’s riff for “Barracuda.”
I wasn’t familiar with Bill Evans, the piano player on most of Kind of Blue. Powers linked to a fully improvised piece he did called “Peace Piece” that is breathtaking. He refused to play it live afterward because he didn’t want to spoil the spontaneity, which is fucking rad.
If you want to go on an inspiring deep dive I recommend you check out Ann Powers’s article and click on every single link:
Joni Mitchell performs in public for first time in nine years — www.youtube.com Joni Mitchell surprised the Newport Folk Festival crowd when she joined Brandi Carlile onstage for her first public performance in nine years. Anthony Mason ...
Her Kind Of Blue: Joni Mitchell's Masterpiece At 50 : NPR — www.npr.org How do we understand Blue in the 21st century? Can we think of Mitchell's 1971 album, long considered the apex of confessional songwriting, as a paradigm not of raw emotion, but of care and craft?
Bill Evans "Peace Piece" — www.youtube.com Virtual Museum Exhibit: Pasos Peace Museum (visit: www. pasospeacemuseum.org)—Bill Evans's "Peace Piece" is an unrehearsed modal composition that he recorded...
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