Random letters and crafted words

I returned home last night from a somewhat, err, sordid few days in London, and found a very random card from my friend Steve. Amusingly, it featured a black and white photo of a couple of nudists heading down a beach, while a religious nut wearing a sandwich board with “the end is in sight” splattered across it glances sideways at them, his face a picture of repressed curiosity! On the inside, Steve (who runs the website TTRP) had written “… thought you’d probably like a card with a tenuous link to wacko religions and some gratuitous nudity, so viola” and also enclosed a cutting of this fantastic article from The Guardian:

“OK, let’s go with the dead baby motif”

It talks about Colin Meloy of The Decemberists’ creative process, and should make interesting reading for anyone who does anything similar. I’m particularly interested in the embarrassment he describes during the creative process, while ideas are still being refined and the crap is still there to see. I haven’t always been too, err, conservative in throwing out works in progress, but these days I really am. The path to a finished final product is pretty hilly, as a rule, so I try and pick carefully the people who see me lying at the bottom (drunk, usually!) and help me push the half-written bastard back to a peak. There’s an amount of shame, I guess, in the cruft that comes with the creative process, but that’s really not what it’s about. It’s not something I think I need to beat, but just an interesting concept to think about.

There is much more worth reading in the article, so have a look… and here’s another excerpt:

Meloy is famed for his cast of characters: barrow boys, odalisques, gymnasts high above the ground. “The ones that pop out as being real characters come as a result of being just bizarre fascinations that I have,” he says. “I think of them as being archetypes or tropes from folk tales and adventure stories. When I started writing songs for the Decemberists, I got off on that tension between being an indiepop band and being kind of grossed out by what it was to be an indiepop band and what you were expected to write about. So, in some ways, I felt like it was an opportunity to make fun of the convention by saying, ‘Oh, here we are, an independent modern rock band but we’re singing about legionnaires stuck in the desert.’”