It doesn’t come from anywhere. It’s already there.
Every song that has ever, is ever, and will ever be written exists already - there are only 12 notes, after all (at least in Western music).
I’ve always believed that all possible music - and for that matter poetry, literature, art - is already living and hovering “out there” (as well as “in here”)… just as all colors exist all the time in the spectrum. Factor in the fourth dimension – the space between the notes, and their progression – and it’s clear there’s an infinity of unborn songs out there, waiting for today’s creators, and tomorrow’s, to pull them in.
Every artist, or child, or anyone who aimlessly hums a melody, is simply tuning her or his radio to a certain, individual frequency. When I was 10 and living in England, I was obsessed with a portable multiband radio we had (short wave, medium wave, long wave, AM, FM) - dumbfounded as faraway music simply materialized as I moved the tall vertical tuning line left, and then right, and then left again.
This is how songs are born - fumbling through that dial, more or less alert to “what wants to happen.” Rehearsing a song I’ve already written, or just fooling around on the guitar or piano, I’ll stumble on a “wrong note” - something I didn’t expect to play. And that “wrong note” (or especially, wrong chord) will suddenly open a window I didn’t see before and shine a new light, a scary-good new feeling. A sudden hit of heaven.
It’s chemical. Something like falling in love. (And, like love, once you’ve tasted it, you have to work for it.)
So what is the spark that gives that “something” that’s always been there, lurking around our collective-private cosmos, the power to appear?
That, of course, is the mystery, the miracle - the divine game of creativity. It’s what we all seek. When you look for it, you can’t find it.
Fortunately, when you don’t look for it, sometimes it will find you.
That moment of pure grace when a highly limited earthling stumbles on something, and the first inkling of a new universe – one that’s always been there, hiding in plain sight – crashes through.
Leonard Cohen, as usual, said it best: “Everything has a crack in it. That’s how the light gets in.”
