For most of this summer, I couldn’t write anything new.
I don’t mean I wasn’t writing. I was sitting down, playing chords, working on melodic phrases. But every idea arrived with the same thought attached: I already have a song like that.
That’s a particular kind of frustrating. It isn’t writer’s block. The ideas are there, they just feel used.
I tried a few things that helped. I changed the context an idea lived in, the same way Taika Waititi tells Jojo Rabbit through a child’s imagination and makes something we’ve seen a hundred times feel completely new. I changed my inputs and started listening to experimental electronic music, which pulled me toward a solo project I’d wondered about for years.
But the thing that helped most wasn’t a technique. It was a different question.
After 20 years of putting out my own albums, maybe “this sounds like me” isn’t a sign of being stuck. Miles Davis reinvented his band constantly, and you could still pick out his sound in a second. That’s not staleness. That’s identity.
So the question shifted from “how do I stop sounding like myself?” to “what haven’t I said yet as myself?”
That’s what this week’s episode of Keep the Flow is about.
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