And yes, one way of doing that is to really concentrate on how you feel. But I absolutely disagree with you that ‘it can’t be faked’.

For a start, if you’re writing a song and decide that you’re going to lay yourself bare and get to the absolute heart of what you feel, you are already faking it, because you’ve made the conscious decision. The emotions didn’t just happen to end up in song form, you decided to compose.

Art always includes craft, which immediately makes it ‘dishonest’.

Similarly, any performer who tries to find exactly the right kind of emotion in themselves is faking it, to an extent. They’re acting.

In fact, I think that is just another ‘lick’. Yeah, there are succesful artists whose entire act is an attempt to show their true emotions. There are also incredibly succesful artists (eg. David Bowie) who have never been ‘honest’ in their career and have still created deep and profoundly moving songs.

Besides, central to my point was the idea that what matters is the audience’s journey. Sure, you can try your best to express your emotions, and sometimes it’ll work and sometimes you’ll come across as self indulgent and pathetic (hello Alanis Morissette).

Music depends on moving an audience, not moving yourself. Your best art will be informed by your feelings and opinions, but it will also be informed by craft and technique and rational thought.

The audience wants to be fooled. They want to think their connecting with the artist’s emotions. But they don’t care whether they’re connecting with genuine emotion or not. They don’t even know if they are.

It is therefore perfectly valid for the songwriter to know all the ‘licks and tricks’, only one of which is finding your own feelings and expressing them.

For instance, just the other day, I was reflecting on what a beautiful crazy woman I was in love with taught me about songwriting many years ago.

She said when you get to the chorus, it’s time to turbo-condense your emotion into a white hot concise emotional statement. Doing so won me a publishing contract with EMI.

Not out of any calculation.

Not with an eye to the market.

Not with any consideration of the audience whatsoever.

Here’s another reference. Have you ever attended a performance workshop? Something intended to support an individual in connecting with an audience?

One of the principles that becomes very clear very fast is that “we want your truth”. The audience is hungry for authenticity. And you can’t fake it.

It has often been written by various tall foreheads that what is deeply true and fully realized by one person will be universal.

I can only tell you that when I’ve worked with singers, I’ve worked very hard to get the licks and tricks out of the way, and to allow that person’s point of view to shine through. Their emotional point of view.

I have never for one second wondered how my song would move the listener. But I did write a song which caused an intelligent person to say, “I just saw God”. It would never have occurred to me to intend that. But I did have a very deep experience which triggered the song and which a listener clearly connected to.

And I have written songs that people claim they had stuck in their heads for months. But if it “worked” for that person it had only to do with how profoundly I felt it. Somehow it transferred. Somehow they connected with it.

One of my mentors said that to read a great piece of literature or to stand before a great painting was to “brush souls with a genius”.

To me, if I connect with a piece of “art”, what I’m really doing is connecting with the place it came from. The artist was in a state out of which arose expression. The state is coming across…it is communicating across time and space.

One more reference. One day I read the forward from a book on a Sufi journey of self discovery.

There was a little poem at the beginning which knocked me on my ass. I sought out the poet and discovered that he has been having that effect on people for centuries in all cultures.

When Rumi was confronted by Roman occupiers, he wondered how he could get his message of transcendent love across to them. He noticed that they responded to songs and poetry. So that’s what he gave them.

That’s a great support of your view.

But, he also put himself into an ecstatic state from which his poetry had such power that seven hundred fifty years later a boy in a book store would be moved to tears in six lines knowing nothing of the man, of his culture, of his intention.

Audiences want your truth. Scary, huh? They don’t want what they want. They want most what only you can give them. If you want to call it your feelings, fine. If you want to call it your mama, that’s fine too.

But an audience really wants something real and powerful, and nothing is so real and powerful as something that comes from deep within YOU.

It might just rock worlds seven centuries and thousands of miles away.

Tom St. Louis
http://www.gmsiamovie.wordpress.com