What if I just tried operating in a different mode?
Perfume Genius on going to the gooey place
Welcome to the 190th issue of Subtle Maneuvers. Please note: I’m moving our next Book Club meeting back one week, to Sunday, July 26, at 11am PT / 2pm ET. We’ll be discussing Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, which I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since reading it last month. There’s so much wisdom (literary and otherwise) contained in this slender book; I’m really looking forward to discussing it with you all. Find all the details and the Zoom link here.
As much as I disapprove of algorithm-driven social media and genuinely believe that it’s harming my brain—I love it, too, of course, in moments, especially when the algorithm serves up what feels like a little clue from the universe, as it did for me one afternoon in late May:
This is the musician Mike Hadreas, aka Perfume Genius, promoting a four-week songwriting workshop that he hosted in June with an organization called School of Song. I’m not a songwriter—but as a creative-process obsessive (and a Perfume Genius fan) I could hardly resist this pitch:
Songwriting, for me, requires a very open, exploratory, like, baby-smooth-brain somatic place, to start. Shaking off all expectations and external pressures, internal pressure, and seeing what’s there. And staying there long enough to find something inspired. . . .
So I’m going to be sharing tricks I’ve learned over the years to do that, how I start in a very, like, gooey place but maintain critical self-consciousness and a zoomed-out-ness just enough to make it something to be shared.
I signed up on the spot. But then I got busy and didn’t get around to watching the recordings of the lectures until last weekend, after the class had already ended. Which was fine, wonderful even. Sometimes the live-ness of a Zoom class prevents me from fully absorbing the material; watching the recordings later, I got to marinate in them in a different way—appropriate for a workshop that was largely about marinating, creatively: how to do it with a little bit of structure but not too much, and how to bring something forward, gradually, from the “gooey place” mentioned above.
I’m tempted to write a step-by-step breakdown of Hadreas’s process and/or share some of his specific techniques—but that seems unfair to all the parties involved in putting on the workshop. So instead I will just mention one moment that leapt out at me, from the first lecture.
Hadreas was talking about a change in his songwriting approach that took place between his second and third albums (which, perhaps not coincidentally, was the moment when he broke out to a much larger audience, circa 2014). He said:
Up until the third record, a lot of my songs were very kind of plaintive and simple. They were piano and vocal, and I would write the lyrics at the same time, and I thought of the music as very much, like, supportive. And when I wrote “My Body” [for the third album] it was just—one day I was like, What if I just tried operating in a different mode?
What if? For Hadreas, this question led to a whole new songwriting method, which he describes in the course, and which is much less about thinking up something to “say” in a song and more about uncertainty, experimentation, and building up a song from fragments without any predefined outcome in mind.
This feels like the question I need to be asking myself, too, at this moment—around this newsletter and around other things as well, which I may write about more next time. And so I’m pinning it here as a marker to myself, and for anyone else who needs the reminder that we can do this, anytime really: we can just try operating in a different mode. Sometimes it’s all we can do.
I feel like you have to write a book based on the exact premise of this Substack: HOW various artists have wiggled through. What they did to keep ‘getting it up’ again. Including interesting moments like you focus on in this post--moments when they changed their swing (Tiger Woods reference). When they shook up their approach and did something different.
I started writing and performing songs in my early 30's, songs built on traditional folk, country, blues structures. But I came from a writer place more than a musician place and as I kept writing, recording, and performing, my songs became more personal, more irregular, and in some cases complex. Not complex because I knew what I was doing, but because I didn't. I needed to build songs around writing that didn't necessarily follow song forms. So his observation..."it's much less about thinking up something to “say” in a song and more about uncertainty, experimentation, and building up a song from fragments with any predefined outcome in mind" resonates with me. It's good to hear. These days it seems I'm cycling back to basic forms - not intentionally - and wishing I could capture that lightning dust again.