What makes you feel you’re less than ideal?
What makes you feel you’re less than ideal
If you can’t get over it all?
That walk-away clause
can’t be just because
You’re mad at the cross on the wall
Oh the last time I saw you, with
that hole in your side
I had to put my hand in to believe
But I couldn’t meet
those elephant eyes
And you couldn’t take time to grieve
So bring out your poor,
your washed on the shore
Your refuse, your teeming depressed
You take them all in, ‘cause that’s
where you’ve been
A person who has to say yes
Every Sunday and Wednesday
you pay homage to
The naked and martyred and dead
Where every crypt tells the story,
the story of you
Where bodies aren’t bodies, they’re bread
And it’s true - no one else
will do what you do
Volunteers of America, I’m calling you
As a writer, I’m terrified of collaboration. Putting something I wrote out into the universe is already scary, but there’s a whole different kind of vulnerability that I think comes with trying to work closely with someone you respect. It can be painful, opening yourself up to someone you admire and having them say, “I don’t think this stuff you wrote is really working here.” And it’s challenging trying to find a way to funnel your energy in a direction that’s right for what the two of you are trying to create together, which can be wholly different from what you’d be creating on your own. But that’s also what makes collaboration exciting; the creation of something that neither of you could create if you were working independently.
Aimee Mann and Ted Leo are two musicians whose independent work I’ve enjoyed for a long time, and I find it fascinating that circumstances brought them together and that then they created an album together, as The Both.
In this interview, Ted Leo talks about the collaboration process:
The compromises that we arrive at, we make a very conscious decision to not have it be designed by committee. It’s not the kind of thing where edges get whittled away until it’s sort of blandly acceptable to either or both of us. We really kind of challenge ourselves to get to a point with every line or even specific words within lines where we’re actively excited about what we’ve come up with and we’re not just settling for something. If one or the other of us doesn’t understand what the person is saying or has a challenge to it or thinks they might have a better idea, we really made an effort to remove our egos from the process and look at each song as a really fun collaborative puzzle to be solved and made the best that we can make it as opposed to allowing any kind of clinging or ego-driven hurt to impede the process.
And that’s so hard, to put the ego aside in a way that doesn’t diminish the self but that lets the truth of each self come through. But it can also be so important.
In this interview:
Ted Leo talks about how the creative drive of The Both is its own thing, different from him and Aimee on their own, and Aimee Mann talks about how what’s great about working with Ted is that his energy is so different from her own. And then Ted Leo acknowledges the challenge of putting ego aside, talking about how he was shaken when he first sent a verse to Aimee and it came back with a lot of notes. And that is hard and scary.
A few days ago I quoted Cornel West on love:
“Love is a form of death, and market culture is a death-denying culture. But love is a form of death. You’ll never be able to get on the edge of that abyss to make the leap to know what love is unless you’re willing to take that risk… with your isolated, lonely self who’s killed in order for a new self to emerge and tangle with another self…”
Part of what’s scary about love is that it is a collaboration. And so there’s a sense in which collaboration is a form of death, the tangling with another self, a death to create a new life together. The nucleus burning inside of a cell.
And then, man, your old friend turned
the night on its end
Like your time was a bottomless well
But you grabbed me and said,
“Come on back from the ledge for a spell”
You can tell
By the laugh in the dark
at the sound of the bell
You can tell
It’s a nucleus burning
inside of a cell
Notes
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