Dog Walk Philosophy: The Six-Minute Song
I walk my dog every morning. Most mornings we walk pretty much the same route. So I decided to give myself a challenge. Find something unique along the path I tread daily and take a photo. Somedays there will be something genuinely new. Others I will have to find a way to shoot the mundane with a new perspective.
*I apologize in advance for the old man “Get off my lawn” feel of this post. I promise it’s not intentional.
I like long songs. I grew up in a time when an artist could make a song as long as one side of an LP. I especially like long songs with distinct movements. Think “Freebird“ by Lynyrd Skynyrd or “Green Eyes” by Erykah Badu. They feel like expressions of complete thought. I like to listen to these songs when I”m drifting off and thinking of ideas for projects.
As much as I love streaming music services a side effect of the platform has been the production of shorter and shorter songs. Artists get paid per stream, so producing a song that’s too long actually hurts their pockets. I don’t fault artists for maximizing earnings on their creations and, to be fair, they also face pressure from their labels to make as much money as possible. But, for me, current music can feel like an incomplete thought. If there is a current song that hits a creative vibe for me, I’ll put it on repeat. I’ll play a song for an hour or more just to maintain my train of thought.
I’m now at a point where I want to create my own version of the six-minute song. I want my work to be a complete thought. How do you measure such an abstract concept? How will I know when I have expressed a fully formed idea through a photo, an essay, a video? The simplest way I can think of is whether or not my work generates other thoughts and conversations. If at some point someone else’s work is in some small way derivative of mine then I have started a new conversation. And that conversation is an extension of the one I was having with the artist from whom my art is derived.
We like to say that there is nothing new under the sun. This is mostly true, but I think it discounts how artists take the DNA of previous expressions and combine them in ways that are completely unique. A line from this song, combined with a scene from that movie, can become a wholly unique painting. And that painting is the extension of a conversation that has gone on for millennia. It is literally the most beautiful game of telephone in existence.
But it all begins with a fully formed thought.
“Six minutes… Six minutes” - Slick Rick
By the way I have a playlist I made specifically for writing. I add and subtract from it occasionally but I think I’ve done a decent job making something you can zone out and create to.
Enjoy!
