Searching for the profound in the Shrek 2 soundtrack.
And some thoughts on how to create something meaningful.
I was listening to the cover version of David Bowie’s Changes from the Shrek 2 soundtrack when I had the sudden, urgent realisation that I might never create a profound work of art. My daughter had just requested it for about the 10th time; preferring the lesser known and heavily autotuned collaboration between Butterfly Boucher and David Bowie to the 1971 original (known to her, inexplicably, as ‘the Larey Larey version’). Something about the song spoke to her through the years; the same thing that spoke to me when I downloaded the original from Limewire on my Compaq Presario as a teenager.
As artists, we send our work out into the world knowing what it means to us but not what it might mean for those who are to receive it. It’s this strange phenomenon that had me listening to ‘Have One on Me’ by Joanna Newsom on repeat throughout the night in my university bedroom, miles from California; or reading through the lyric booklet that came with ‘By The Way’ during the school summer holidays, looking for answers (I would later find all these answers and more during one of my many re-readings of ‘Scar Tissue’). It’s what had me, just this morning, pin ‘Devotional’ by Diane Williams on my pinboard, ripped from a magazine that I’ve been carrying around for months or, just now, notice a coloured dot on the Richard Hamilton ‘White Album’ poster in my kitchen that had never revealed itself to me before. Your art can save someone from something you didn’t even know existed.
I can go months without writing a single word, or taking a single photo; and then out of nowhere, there it is. Often what holds me back the most in the inbetween days is the very thing I have no power over; the question of what other people will think. Perhaps this is why I like my oldest pictures the best. They were taken before that thought took hold, when the connection between me and whatever I was taking a photo of was the most pure. Now, I have an archive of photographs and writing that is largely unseen. If I ever am to create something profound, firstly, I have put my work into the world, and secondly, I have to be free of the fear of what other people will think. This is not to say that I have to be fearless. Vulnerable, yes, but also somewhat bullet proof. Whatever you make, you are sharing something about what you truly think; who you truly are. You are letting people look inside your soul. Artists do not just give us their art, but also a part of themselves.
It’s possible I have completely over-thought this. My daughter does love Changes, but she also goes crazy for King Julien’s version of ‘I like to move it move it’ from Madagascar and Donkey’s cover of Livin La Vida Loca, also from the Shrek 2 soundtrack. One of our aging Fiat Panda’s best quirks is that it has a CD player, which has otherwise given her a rather eclectic and grown up taste in music. To make things fair, we bought her a Frozen singalong CD. She sits in her carseat clutching the lyric booklet, not yet able to read but flicking through it with the same voracity I had as a teenager searching on Songmeanings.com. I can see that she can be moved by something unexpected, and that it can take over. When we create, we must do it for ourselves, having no idea who it will resonate with. But it will, and it does, and that is also why we must create.
