A pure gold plop: The classic Don Henley hit written on the toilet
Who is to say when inspiration will strike? When you look at some of the greatest songwriters of all time, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Leonard Cohen, they all have different approaches to creativity and have inspiration strike them at various points throughout their lives. For some, tunes, lyrics and melody all come in a split second, and then others have an approach that makes the process a lot more elongated.
For instance, Paul McCartney famously composed the melody for ‘Yesterday’ after awakening from a dream. Luckily, McCartney had a piano by his bed, so the moment he woke up, he was able to start putting the short melody he had dreamt up together. He was so certain he must have heard the melody before that he played it to his friends in the music industry, but it was an original piece constructed by his subconscious.
Meanwhile, there are artists like Leonard Cohen, who will sit on the idea for a song for decades before finally being in a position to reach it. “That’s been kicking around for forty years,” he said when discussing the track ‘Born In Chains’. “I’ve rewritten the lyric many times to accommodate the changes in my theological position, which is very insecure.”
The point is that there is no method for creativity. Sometimes, the idea is there, and then other times, it’s not. When you have worked in songwriting for a long time, you make peace with this fact, and your life begins to revolve around ensuring you can accommodate creativity when it comes rather than trying to force it.
Mike Campbell can attest to this, as a lot of his career as a writer of music began to revolve around the fact that he didn’t know when good ideas were going to come; he just knew he needed to be ready when they did. This meant always keeping guitars within reach so that the minute it felt as though he had something genius coming, he could begin working out chord sequences and riffs surrounding it.
“The songs, the body stuff all comes out together at the same time,” he said, “You have to have the instrument nearby, or even driving in the car sometimes you have to pull the car over. Cause, you know, these things come, and it’s a gift. It’s magic, and it’s mysterious, and I, for one, can’t just turn the switch on. It turns itself on. And you just have to obey it.”
Campbell was happy that he kept guitars nearby while working with Don Henley on the track ‘Heart of the Matter’. He struggled with the song’s instrumentation, and then one morning, still half asleep and sitting on the toilet, the idea of how the track should go finally came to him.
“There’s a guitar everywhere,” he admitted, “Everywhere I sit, I can reach over and pick up a guitar. And even – you may want to cut this out; I’m gonna be really honest with you – ‘Heart of the Matter’ … I got up. I sat on the toilet first thing in the morning. I had a guitar on the wall. And I was half-asleep, and I just went [strums opening chords].”
