Part 2

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

Hmmm.  I feel what my day is like is pretty typical. Wake up, and go through the hygiene stuff, pet the cats, smooch my husband on the way out, put headphones in and walk to the train, train to work. I work at a library, basically helping folks with accounts and printing issues more than anything. Come home and pet the cats some more.

Part of my daily, though, is trying to do just ONE thing creative every day. Work on a song, put down a concrete poem, even just writing a single good line in my notebook to use for a song or poem later. Something that leads to creative practices, reading and researching, listening intensely to an album, or doing things like applications and emails.

The balance for that is to combat the mundanity of the everyday.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

I tend to find jamming as meandering, and not very fruitful as a player. I know for many folks that spontaneity is where it’s at. But for me, I don’t want just hope for the band to maybe stumble into something good.

Largely, when I write, I will work on something solitarily. So when I have a good riff, a good structure, a great idea, I’ll be able to bring it to the band and we can work out the pieces. That is the moment for me I find most gratifying - bringing that new song to the band, seeing how they figure out their parts, and it all falling into place. That moment where it begins as some riffs, chord structures, and ideas, and turns into a “song”!

That exact moment of creation when a song becomes an actual is so exciting.

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

I spoke a little of this above, but I tend to want to have an idea cemented before I come to a jam and bring a song to the band. Just as a means to ensure we’re not polishing a turn or whatever. That I’ve had enough time to work something out, to make sure it’s good enough to bring in, and then we’re sailing on a new jam!

Certainly there’s a level of spontaneity that’s missing, but I find having a song ready to show gets us moving much quicker.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

To me, I see any type of true artistic output as an act of defiance - against the status quo, commercial, sold-to, complacent society we live in. A creative act in combat of that poison society is about the only thing I can do. I can do something in my day-to-day dealings with the world, through a creative act, say. While the macro - is out of my ability to affect, the micro - I feel I can do something about. I can do my little thing, in my little corner.

I think we need to define just what kind of thing we’re referring to. Music, too often is proverbial wall paper, Just another product to sell. The actual role of music is just that. But can it be something more?

On occasion, absolutely! it’s not music as a whole, it’s what that music is, what prompted it, what it’s saying, where it came from - that’s the part that affects and effects.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

I see music as a companion for life.

Less so as a therapist, or as a deus ex machina to come down and right all my wrongs. It’s certainly over-stating to say something like “a DJ saved my life” or something like that. But like the Jewish tradition to sit shiva with someone in times of grief, a feeling of “I’ve been there” or “I’m with you.”

Having a soundtrack as a companion to sit there, unobtrusive but so, so comforting, in those moments.

How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?  

I can’t say this has ever been a concern for me. In fact I would probably go so far to say (at least for my enjoyment of music) they run counter to each other. Either the gimmickry of technology, or some new psychological aspect or whatever, the tone of that is just cult-of-the-new to me. If they were connected in a conceptual way, then I’m on board, as a lens.

I see music as an ethereal, emotional, undefinable mode. To attempt to define or marry it to a scientific aspect kills the magic, and frankly, it's not interesting enough to bother to attempt.  

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

Yes, there is absolutely something different, and in no way do I mean that a barista cannot be artful. But the form of creation has that inherent difference. And in no way am I suggesting an ultimate hierarchy for artistic modes, but I see music as the best means to, in the classic piece of poetic advice: “show, don’t tell.”

There is just a piece within music whereby that punctum of what I’m saying is marked not only by the lyrics, but by the sound itself. For me I see music giving that extra bit underneath,  and how that emotional resonance that can be conveyed in music is unparalleled in other forms, mundane or otherwise.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

I truly have no answer for this. And I feel like I know this subject incredibly well.  

As a teacher, for years I used to actually teach sound science to kids in a music museum as well as school curriculum, how pitch and frequency operate, how waveforms work, all that. And the greater understanding I got of the physics and science of how sound operates, I became even less able to answer that question.

Kind of related to your question above regarding science, for me, that understanding of it brought me much farther away from the magic of it.