A bit of nostalgia with Jimmy Chamberlin (but a good point)
In my teenage years and in my early 20s I was a huge fan of The Smashing Pumpkins and for a lot of reasons I have not paid close attention to any of their later work but every now and then the YouTube algorithm will recommend something to me.
I was heavily influenced by singer Billy Corgan's view on art and music in my own thinking, but in a very recent interview drummer Jimmy Chamberlin articulated a beautiful point about art. He talks about music, but he later says art and I think he realizes he's making a much broader point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3jcjKP2ltU
55:19 (on instinct:)
If you land where you’re supposed to start from… when you start to think about a song, when you think about "how do I want to feel when this song is played", the choices you make as an instrumentalist become way different than if you start to think 'calculously' "how can I fit this in here or what is this"
(…)
56:15 (on what it means to be an artist:)
A lot of times I’ll come up with grooves like that, and Billy will be like [shakes head in confusion] but then he’ll get to understand it, like, why the emotional content of it becomes a vital part of it.
In order to do this stuff two things have to happen: you have to be willing to lose, and you have to be willing to fail in front of… anyone, which is our job. Our job as musicians is to expose ourselves in a way that people are afraid to do. Our job as musicians is to make people feel things. Our job as musicians is to take chances that people normally wouldn’t or anybody in their right mind wouldn’t. Our job as as musicians is to give people permission to fail as human beings. That’s our — that’s what art is.
So you have to have, you have to be thinking on the balls of your feet in those terms, and as you go down that road enough times you start to realize that that’s where the money is, that’s where the the learning happens. (…) Normally… you’re like "I want to leave now", but if you’ve been around long enough you’re like "it don’t matter what happens tonight because I’m going to leave here better than I got here".