Wayfinding

According to Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, “Wayfinding is the ancient art of figuring out where you are going when you don’t know your destination. For wayfinding you need a compass and a direction. Not a map – a direction”. I have found this concept to be quite helpful ever since I more or less rejected the concept of final destinations materially or spiritually.

This is a useful concept when it comes to music as well because the song knows its own destination it comes without a map with its own directionality in form of feeling about what the song expresses. The map of the components of the song chords, melodies, words et cetera these are always unclear at least the beginning. It is very rare the song leaps fully formed from the mind. For me in the years that I have written songs it  has probably only happened about three or four times.

Much of this concept of wayfinding is being brave enough to wander off into the wilderness without a map and this is something that people who attend song writing classes find the most difficult. They are always trying to rationalise or make things rhyme or they try to edit when all that is required is for the raw data to erupt out of nothingness.

The concept of nothingness is difficult enough for the Western person to understand anyway so to allow that to knock down the house of cards which is our intellectual reasoning and the belief that we are rational is challenging.

Over the last few blogs I have spoken about in creating songs or inspiriting the work that you do in order to reduce the banality that the intellectual mind has when you’re trying to create. The intellect is great as an editor but crap as an artist, so rationality is a good servant but a terrible master and this is  what we have arrived at with three hundred years of The Enlightenment, which from a trades description point of view is the most misleading term which could have only come from colonial thinking. That idea infects most of what we do in the West; that we have the right idea that the planet needs saving by us when we are the ones that got us into this mess in the first place, it is like getting Goebbels to set up the state of Israel.

So let the music flow and the ideas develop when you feel you’ve arrived at the destination then it is time to do a little bit of mapmaking so that you can discover where you have arrived and then find out more about the final destination. In other words the editor needs to come in and tidy everything up if you want to present it to polite society. If you don’t want present it to polite society then leave it as it is so that people can make of it what they want.

So try this as an idea, start off with some random lyrics and some chords from somewhere, change them around and allow the song to be undirectional before you start to structure the ideas. If the song just wants to stay with a set of four chords than let it, if it wants to become more complicated, let it do that, in other words let the song do what ever it feels it wants to do. See how it changes your concept about writing. 
This is a great technique for teaching children as well as it demystifies the artistic process and makes it accessible to everybody.

Vic www.bluescampuk.co.uk play in a rock band …………….