TL;DR: How should we search for our own voice? Some ideas regarding inspiration, iteration and feedback.

In the last couple of months I’d been attentively listening to Israel Broadcasting Authority’s podcast called One Song. The subject is always the people behind an Israeli song that ended up being popular - the authors, the performers, the producers, the inspirations - indeed, anyone affected by the song except the general public. Where possible, an interview is conducted or excerpted; if there are no longer enough interviewees and interviews to work with, prominent experts are brought in to fill in.

After tuning into more than 20 episodes, I think I’ve arrived at some observations which are worth sharing.

Inspiration and inception

One very frequent trope in the podcast is that songs are born out of a gag or an in-joke; such is the case with Alma Zohar’s Indian Love Song (a.k.a. Miguel), Kaveret’s Aging Child, T-Slam’s Gimme Rock’N’Roll and more.

More generally, it appears that the creative birth of a majority of great songs required a touch of serendipity; people going out a tiny bit out of their regular trajectories, in a way that happens to most of us on a daily basis, but in some cases - leaving behind a seed that could germinate. However, in a huge number of cases, the seed did not germinate right away! One abundant pattern is authors keeping little boxes with such seeds that they carry with them for decades. In Leah Goldberg’s words:

And then you laughed so hard when I intoned,
That I’ll approach the heavens’ rosy sweetness,
And pick it up, and fold it lest it slips us,
And store it midst the pages of my tome

(Don’t miss out the episode on And There Was Between Us Just The Shining!)

Perspiration and congregation

While boxing and keeping the seed is a skill in itself, it appears that most of the songs discussed require two more factors to thrive.

One aspect of that is simply professionalism - making that seed grow requires a hefty amount of onward iterative experimentation. At some point in thre song’s trajectory, there’s a phase of massiive reworking of details big and small:

For music: harmony, cadence, beat, groove
For performance: finding the right singer (which may require the incumbent one to “give up”!)
For lyrics: coming up with a C-part or incorporating somebody else’s material
For production - taking sound elements from other contemporary work, sampling, etc.).

However as we all know, such iteration can be frustrating and is likely to never get anywhere. Therefore, an additional prerequisite is needed for success: the incorporation of feedback – specifically, qualified criticism coming from somebody who cares, but is not as emotionally invested as the active creator. A great example of that is in the episode about how Izhar Ashdot countered Rona Keinan’s creative effort on an original English text she wrote as The Earthquake, in particular by inducing her to sing a Hebrew version as The Deluge; after hearing many other stories, it is apparent that while the song’s creators bear a huge deal of the effort, no matter how good the creators are, somebody else – who could be a professional producer or a peer who is not intimately involved with the work – is needed to unleash the creation’s full potential.

Search for an artistic self

The observation about criticism returns me to what is probably the most pervasive aspect of creators featured in the podcast - the search for an artistic self. If previously I imagined the process of coming up with great works of art as a creatot’s singlehanded search for diamonds, I now have a different metaphor in mind – that of a market of people daily transacting with each others using pieces of junk found on the seashore, which for most uninitiated is plain and simple rubbish. However, once in a while, two or three of the people involved manage to cobble something outstanding out of the flotsam, which is what makes them into creators. The new work in turns forms a new artistic self, and the process repeats. This strange loop is as much wonder as anything else in our world.