The Hammock Papers: Universal.

22 June 2011

Universal.

The thing about the melodies I find is they never have a sell by date. A good melody will cut through the boundaries of eras and style. You can always adapt them and do a version of them any kind of way you want. I keep a melody orphanage all the time. I go to that orphanage and fish them out and you never know when a song will be brought to fruit. So I have my melodies and some of the songs may come by more quickly and some of them are born pretty much fleshed out, but I like to keep a melody orphanage as I do lyric orphanage.

Obviously emotions make their way into songs. I’m pretty affected by what goes on around me. At any given time there will be an emotion associated with my mood and I try to direct my emotions into my songs. It’s the only way to do it. It is usually at the most emotional moment that you will have a potent piece of magic. Even if that is not for actual performance use, the feeling will be a reliable one that you can keep coming back to.

I think a lot of personal songs are often universal songs. If you ever get personal about a thought you make it very singular and isolated – in a way you are essentially getting closer to somebody else’s heart. More like the way synchronicity works – somebody else is feeling what your feeling somewhere else.

I have my ideas of how about I am connected with my comrades out there – the rest of humanity and Godliness. I think it is a sign of independence and intelligence when you finally decide for yourself what it’s all going to mean to you. I’ve never really subscribed to the idea that one is to operate by somebody else’s thoughts and regulations. I think it is good to be inspired by what has happened in the past and given that we are current members of our time now, we have a responsibility to those great writers from the past and take their wisdom and bring it into the future. That’s where the idea of sharpening your own moral code or developing your own values comes in.

- Daniel Lanois

The Medicine Man, Daniel Lanois, "The Maker"

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL