Part 2
Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?
It’s different for every song! Some take years to write, others just flow out.
What pleases me now about my creative process is that I’m working with other songwriters. Especially with my sons Neill & Calum, and my daughter-in-law Kate St John. Working with other people is fascinating, and having worked with Calum more than anyone else, I’ll choose something we wrote together called ‘Flowers By The Roadside’, about those that are left at the place that someone has died. I had an idea, a few lines, and I took them to Calum during our writing time, and he started strumming his guitar. I was thinking ‘what?’ I thought he was going to talk about the lyrics I’d written, but I’ve learnt just to let other songwriters do what they do. He began a chord sequence and hummed a tune, and from there on, once we had a foundation we just rolled through it. It’s not the kind of song that I would ever have been able to write alone, and it stemmed from that chord sequence (he can play more complicated sequences than I can) - it’s thrilling.
But I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a Peggy Seeger Style, other than that there’s more words and melody than there are rhythm and harmony. Words, words, words.
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 prefer to listen to music in solitude, because I was taught you don’t speak whilst someone is singing - you listen to the words, with nothing else going on in the background. So if we’re at a restaurant it cripples me, because I can’t concentrate on the conversation. And I don’t go to parties for that reason either. When I went to square-dances the music was communal and it was for you to dance to, you could involve your whole body, the way you do when you’re listening to music.
Creating music is very different. I’ve written with different people, I’ve stolen ideas from cartoons, from jokes, which is also collaborative in an odd way. I’ve created in many ways and for many reasons - with political songs you create them according to where you want to sing them, and who to. Every song, you have an idea where it’s going to go.
How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?
This question is tricky. You’d have to ask the world how my work relates to it. I can only hear echoes from people who’ve heard my music, to know how they relate to a specific section of the world, and I am on the very fringe of a fringe section. Folk is now an accepted category, but the kind of folk I do is now so out of date, so 1960s/70s, I still do what I’ve always done. I don’t try to adapt to what the world might be interested in, because I don’t know what the world is. I don’t know what society is.
Some of my songs have been taken up, one ‘The Ballad of Springhill’ is considered a folk song in Nova Scotia. ‘The Lifeboat Mona’ was taken up by the Lifeboat Society up on the east coast of Scotland. So I make the songs that I want to make, and if the world accepts them & wants to do something with them, that’s fine. Echoes come back at me, and that’s fine too. And I’m often surprised by songs that I don’t expect to ‘make it’, like ‘Gonna Be An Engineer’, which is very very very long, hard to sing (big range), or a song like ‘Reclaim The Night’, which is about women being safe to walk at night. When the million women march took place in front of the Capitol in the States, I was astounded to see a line of 10 women all singing that song, which is really a philosophical joining of violence against women to what capitalist society is doing to human beings. These women had linked arms and were singing this difficult song, not in harmony but in unison, and it was powerful. Would I have ever expected that song to get that performance? No. So I don’t know how my music relates to the world, but I do know we need music. The role of music in society is that music is vital to us, and yet we’re busy cancelling it out of school curriculums. That can only lead to disaster. Making music, listening to music, participating in music is a vital activity, and has been since we got up on two legs.
Music affects the brain the way nothing else does. It vibrates every part of your body, and people who say they don’t like music, I don’t understand that because there must be some form of music that they do like. Or maybe they just haven’t found the form of music that their brain wants to hear.
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 feel the best explanation to this question is in my memoir, ‘The First Time Ever’. It’s a big question. In a way, music gave me an outlet - I haven’t written with life as life, all my songs deal with life in various forms, different people & their stories. As far as loss is concerned, I keep writing about it. Death, I’ve written one song about (maybe there’s more & I’m not remembering well). Love - I’ve written a dozen love songs for my partner Irene, and maybe one or two for Ewan MacColl. My songs are full of pain, and being able to express these things through music means you don’t have to say ‘this song is about pain’, you can say ‘this song is about love’ or ‘it’s about loss’. Death is a hard one, but it helps to put it into music and music is a reduction to the simplest form of a huge emotion. Sometimes when I’m going to write a song I gather ideas for it - I say ‘I’ve just lost my husband’ which is what happened to me in 1989. And writing that song started as a song about losing things - it’s called ‘Lost’, because I was lost when he died, and all I wanted to do was howl. I had a nervous breakdown, and the song was a reduction of all those things into 4 simple verses. The same as if you leave a bowl of salt water out, eventually the water disappears and all you’re left with is the sodium. And so these are the basic skeletons that songs have - I think it was Ivor Cutler who reduced his feelings about the world simply to ‘It’s time for the women to take over, it’s time for the women to take over, it’s time for the women to take over, it’s time for the women to take over, now before it’s too late’. That’s all the song consists of - those 4 lines and instrumental breaks, and it’s very powerful.
It helps to put my understanding of these emotions into songs, but it doesn’t mean that I need other people to sing them, I just need to do it myself. I try to make my songs applicable in a general way, not too tied to me personally, so that other people might sing them.
There seems to be increasing interest in a functional, “rational” and scientific approach to music. How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?
This question is on sticky ground for me as I don’t know enough about the music industry, I don’t know enough about how music can be made by machines. I do know that you can make music based on a scientific theory, which is what my mother (Ruth Crawford Seeger) did. I make music because it thrills my body & mind, I can’t help but make music.
I’ve made songs that sound like a machine gun, catalogue songs where you list things one after another almost like rap, it sounds machine-like. And I’ve heard music that I’ve really liked, that probably turned out to have been made by a machine, scientifically!
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?
I prefer to answer the last part of this question if that’s ok. When I was 6/7 years old, I used to help my mother with the laundry. It was the 40s and she washed everything in this big Belfast sink, and I would operate the wringer to squeeze the water out of things, and we used to sing a song whilst we did this. It only had a one octave range, with verses about washing, wringing and hanging out the clean sheets. It was very monotonous but it made the process of doing the washing easier.
I don’t have that kind of mundane task with music making. What I express through music actually feels physical all over my body. It’s the strangest thing to tell someone who doesn’t play a musical instrument. This goes back to the question about making music on machines/through scientific processes - I think music has got to be made, participated in & understood physically. So by making and performing a piece of music, you’re hoping it’s something which then makes the brains, bodies and fingers of the people hearing it vibrate, and that’s a magical thing.
Like ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’, it was made up quite differently to the way people chose to sing it, but that’s the way they choose to vibrate, that’s fine. Music is the ultimate connection of all the parts of your body with something that goes out through your mouth, or something that you create. Music is quite magic!
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?
This is a very scientific question, that has to do with the way the body works. I would advise you to go to a book called ‘Why We Sing’ by Julia Hollander. That’s all I can say - it’s about how our bodies work, how our ears work, our memories work. A large part of it is physical construction, but it’s also our willingness to take in new messages and new sounds.
