How to Be Creative
Also, go listen to my new single :)
I’m a Conservatory-educated classical composer. My credits are meager but respectable: I’ve written for choirs, a youth orchestra, even the world-famous Unheard-of Ensemble (yes, that’s a real group!). I’ve conducted Legally Blonde and scored various student films. (I promise this bragging will serve a purpose.)
But that composition education got me all up in my head. I couldn’t get ideas down without judging them, immediately trying to evaluate whether they’re “good” or not.
That is, except on the Turtletops.
See, I also ran cross country all through college, and we would take these vans to and from each meet. I don’t know why, but everyone on the team always called them Turtletops. It’s one of those things that I never thought to ask as a freshman and then took for granted in the intervening years til I’m sitting here writing this, scratching my head.
Anyway, these van rides were sometimes quite fun (yay, time to hang out with your best friends and play cards or watch football or whatever!) and sometimes interminable (Oh GOD my legs are cramping up and I can’t get comfortable even though I’m about to drift off from post-race exhaustion and the general sleep deprivation of being a student-athlete). So, to add some spice to the bus ride after a meet, I would open my laptop and…make beats.
Why only post-meet? Well, pre-meet, you’re either still too deep in the school headspace or too riddled with anxiety about the upcoming race. I was always either frantically finishing a paper or trying to visualize running fast with my teammates and pushing through the pain. But after the meet? All that anxiety is gone. You’re still flowing with excitement from the race, chattering excitedly with teammates. Even if you’ve had a bad race.
So, creative and literal juices flowing, I would browse the free sounds on Apple Loops in Logic (my Digital Audio Workstation of choice) and drag random snippets into the timeline. I would try to crowdsource some creative decisions, like asking the person next to me to pick a sound or figure out how long a certain loop should last.
This wasn’t exactly the ideal environment for beatmaking. The noisy chatter, not to mention that persistent hum of the interstate, drowned out any nuances in the sounds I was creating. It was common to listen back to a Turtletop beat at home and discover new textures I had no idea were there. But I think that gave them a certain charm.
Which leads me to the Turtletop beat I’m most proud of.
The race was a fuckin fever dream. It took place in a huge field at the National Warplane Museum outside Geneseo, NY. I think a propeller plane landed on the field right next to the course during our preview run the day before. The next day, without landmarks like trees or hills, I could never tell where we were on the course. But it’s flat as a pancake (the whole thing’s a giant airfield after all!), and it remains my cross-country personal best.
Afterwards, on the Turtletop ride home, fresh off a new PR, I remember thinking it was time to go big. I found loops I liked, stretched them out for minutes on end, and dragged a bunch of random vocal samples into the timeline. I’d figure out where to put all of em later. But I had the basic structure down, complete with a crazy beat switch just after the three-minute mark.
The beat languished in my library for a year. It wasn’t until recently that I opened it up again, dragged around the LITANY of vocal samples into an order I liked, and gave the mix some final touches. It’s time for the world to hear it.
I call it “Mike Woods (Centerpiece).” The title pays homage to two things: the Mike Woods Invitational in Geneseo, NY (that airfield cross country meet), and the Joni Mitchell banger “Harry’s House / Centerpiece.” I find this song a great companion piece to mine. Both start in one lane and end up somewhere different when an unexpected shift brings in new textures. Could it be I was inspired by Ms. Mitchell’s sharp compositional instincts when I was dragging random sounds through the timeline on that sweaty-ass bus? Unlikely, because I wouldn’t discover “Harry’s House…” for another year and a half. But I liked the idea of adding that comparison retroactively in my title.
Writing the story behind this new song elucidates one thing for me:
Judgment is the enemy of creativity.
On those turtletop rides, I was able to be creative, to “cook so hard” as the kids might say (oh god I’m sorry), because I wasn’t judging myself. I didn’t have anything to prove, wasn’t trying to show that I was better than anyone.
And if I’m being completely honest, I can’t say the same about all the music I made for my degree.
To me, there’s something hilarious about this beat, and how proud I am of it. Like, I spent 4 and a half years agonizing over what was “good” and “bad” in the music I wrote, when all I needed to do to get out of my own way was run all out for five miles until I was too weak and dehydrated to care about such constructs, but simultaneoulsy galvanized by a day spent playing outside with friends.
“Mike Woods (Centerpiece)” is out today on all streaming platforms.