Tips for the Creatively Constipated


Like anyone else who makes stuff up for a living, music arrangers occasionally suffer from creative constipation – sometimes to the point that we are so unsure of our ability to put a new spin on a tune and write it to our impossibly high standards that we back out of doing it. Then we hear the arrangement that’s used in its place, and we realize we could have farted out a better one after a dinner of corned beef, cabbage, egg salad and Old Milwaukee.

So my advice to the creatively blocked – no matter what your art may be – is always: Go have that dinner. Then write.

Write whatever is in your head at the moment, even just the melody and chord symbols. Bland is better than nothing, for now.

It can be merely the least inspired thing you've ever written … or you can make it intentionally bad.

Ask yourself what Mr. Trololo would do.

Let it be shabby and cheesy and gauche. Or maybe just a little over-caffeinated.

Write it as a jaunty march in 6/8 time, or as a sultry tango with a rhythmic backdrop of grunts and moans and crudely suggestive body percussion.

Better yet, make it willfully, wantonly, maliciously awful.

Give it the stinging pungency of unwashed armpits, the raucous colors of vomited Froot Loops, the can’t-not-watch awkwardness of humping dogs.

Just write something. Finish it now. 

Then let it sit for a day or two. Think about anything and everything else. Memorize the vice presidents of the U.S., or 100 decimal places of pi.

Then, while you still have time to mess with it, come back to your arrangement. Inhale its fragrance. Take it in. Wallow in the curious and possibly deviant allure of that crackling stench. Let it color your mind, spangle your eyes, vajazzle the very crotch of your creative essence.

Now you're hearing better ideas: C-flat Locrian, of course! Sharp nines! Bagpipes! Mark tree! And OMGZ, how did you never hear it before in 17/16?!

Now you can create the arrangement of your dreams.

Of course, you will hear your best ideas only after the first performance, which will be preserved in the amber of YouTube and generate 43 hits between now and the time your grandchildren show it to their grandchildren.

But you will make changes anyway – for the sake of artistic integrity (naturally!), but also for the benefit of those dozens of future listeners (dozens! I tell you) in the fetid gymnasiums of America's forgotten shithole towns: salt-of-the-earth, church-going, apple-pie-eating Americans who will hear your ingenious reworking of "Piano Man" and murmur to each other: "Lordamercy, what are they yowlin' on about? I don't care 'bout no John Lennon! Sing me some Hank, dammit!"

And who knows? One day, perhaps Billy Joel himself will happen across your fine take on his beloved cash cow before he sits down to his own dinner of roast beef, cabbage, egg salad and Old Milwaukee.

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