… or why we don’t have to be scared about the impression that there isn’t „anything genuinely new under the sun“.

Thoughts and impressions from an interview with ABC puts us artists into a place of new possibilities.

Tom Waits on finding his voice:

„I think inside every song there are other songs. But I also think, inside your voice, there are other voices that you have yet to discover and that’s kind of why you are here.“
Tom Waits, Interview with ABC

Tom is not talking about the voice in the literal sense, here. He is referring to „the artist’s quest to find their one true voice, the channel through which their wildest and most creative ideas are fed to their audience“. It’s not about the form in which our ideas are manifested. It’s about that stuff that fuels our imagination.

Form and channel can be entirely different things.

One of Tom’s channels is sound, way before it becomes music, way before any sensing being has transformed it into meaning.

„The pops and clicks you get from vinyl is almost exactly the sound of chicken barbecuing on the grill.“
You have to be curious for sound to even get the point, let alone draw this connection from chicken to vinyl in front of the barbecue on a 30° Celsius / 86° Fahrenheit day with boiling streams of sweat under your shirt.

Sometimes we are so overly concerned about the uniqueness and the quality of our ideas that we forget about the most important thing – reconnecting to the channel, the voice, the source, first. And we can have more than one. What fuels your channel?

And by the way… who cares if someone else on this planet has a similar idea? There are almost 8 billion pairs of ears on earth. There will always be someone who listens, needs and appreciates the work we do.