New Hum Love playlist on Spotify and Apple
We can’t live inside the magic of a song forever. We can play it again but it always comes to an end again.
But that vibe, that hook, the way the singer sings that word…for a moment we are lifted. A little taste of something higher. We wish we could stay there forever but we can’t…that’s part of the charm.
A good costume has something specific about it that tells everyone what it is.
A uniform, a wig, a pair of glasses, certain shoes, face paint, a hat, a helmet…it’s immediately recognizable and tells the story.
Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, Stevie Nicks, Steven Tyler, Katie Perry, Bono, KISS, John Bonham, Amy Winehouse, Paul McCartney, Slash…
You know how to dress up as all of these artists. And that’s not a coincidence. Like Brian Epstein said, or at least thought, ‘if you wear the same thing all the time you’ll be more recognizable’.
We don’t want an IQ test to take five seconds.
We want it to take at least thirty minutes…or maybe a couple of hours just to make sure our brains were appropriately mined.
Even if it only actually takes five seconds, we don’t want to believe such important results about ourselves could be discovered so quickly…so make the test longer. It will make us feel better about ourselves no matter what the score is.
What do people want to believe about your product and process and how could you make it more true?
»» Michael just wanted the numbers re-crunched.
Once you know the basic plot lines of Lord Of The Rings you could skip ahead a hundred pages and probably be ok.
And similarly, you could hit ‘summarize’ on the whole series and get the gist in three pages.
But the point Lord Of The Rings isn’t to know the story…it’s about reading the book. Living in it. Imagination. Stimulation. The fact that it’s long is one of the best things about it.
This is what we have to do as artists. Make things that are so compelling that being informed of them is not enough…it must be experienced. And when it is, it’s well worth it.
If you wait until your team wins the championship to put out your song about the team winning the championship, you’re too late.
If you wait until Christmas to put out your Christmas smash hit, it’s not going to hit this year.
If you wait until the summer solstice to put out your breezy summer jam, it’s not going to be the song of the summer.
Songs and timing and culture and seasons and phases.
It’s tricky.
But in all three of these cases (and many more), the song has to be out there ALREADY if it’s going to find the intersection of all these things.