Songwriting as a design approach
Happyplaces Stories
In October 2013, I interviewed Erik de Jong, better known as singer songwriter Spinvis. After several years of virtually working together on several projects, Erik and I finally got to meet each other in real life. Spinvis is a Dutch one-man project centred on Erik. Using experimental, lo-fi music, Spinvis became an instant success in the Netherlands, earning two gold records in the process and performing sold-out tours in both the Netherlands and Belgium.
In 2001, Erik, at the age of 40, sent a three song demo to the Dutch indie label, Excelsior Recordings. Within two weeks, a record deal was signed. The label decided to keep the songs that had been recorded by Erik on his home computer. With some minor mixing touch-ups these songs comprised Spinvis’ first album, released in the Netherlands on 1 April 2002. At the time, I was working for the label, making music videos for some of their bands, album covers, websites and other stuff for band promotion. That was a really fun time, with a lot of concerts and festivals. For the release of his first album, we created an online player that allowed people to listen to three of his songs. Hard to imagine now that it was fairly unique back then, but remember internet access was really slow and online music scarse. No broadband, no Spotify, no whatever other service did that what is now normal. That player was quite succesful that it impacted sales — when we limited the full songs to 30 second previews, the physical albums started to sell better. Funny times, figuring out how to use that ‘internet thing’ properly. Next to that player, I also helped with his physical print work, and other side projects. Later when he created a radio play, I made a part in video that together with other video makers colored in the story being told.
Erik was also crucial for the start of a project I was working on, called Texelse Boys. That project started out in a bar with my friend Jaap, a musician. I never learned that, making music, a key reason why I started making music videos and other music industry related stuff. If you can’t play an instrument, then I’d better work with musicians was my thought. Erik remixed one of the first nightly creations I made with Jaap into a fat house track. What led to invite other musicians to do the same, then other makers to make videos and more with them until the project’s biggest momentum with an festival within the Lowlands festival. Great times. Erik’s contribution was crucial: his creative response brought things into motion, started this movement where a great bunch of international creatives created stuff beyond their comfort zones. Fascinating stuff.
It took over 12 years to finally meet each other in person. When I read on Facebook that he was performing in Meppel, the small city where I live, I called him to have a beer, but then ideally I would bring my camera too to film him for Happyplaces Project. He agreed.
No need for space
So, we met. A physical handshake after a lot of email exchange in the past and talking on the phone. And it was good. No need really for formalities, a funny familiarity allowed to just continue a conversation we never started. We found a place to record, I asked him if he needed any info or questions to get started. He said no. And then said: ‘I really don’t need any space…’
Perfect. Trying to learn how he creates space to do what he does and this was his answer. But what than followed was a fascinating nine minute long monologue about his way of working, his thoughts. Perfectly, considerately and calmly worded. Of what I learned afterwards would not only apply to making music and songs, but could also be a strategy, an approach to design anything else. By just replacing the words song and music in your head to whatever defining words of the industry you’re in. To for example ‘building’ and ‘architecture’, or ‘device’ and ‘technology’, or ‘learning’ and ‘education’, etc. Powerful stuff. He turned out to have a space creation strategy afterall.
‘I think it’s more like the the law of conservation of mass. There is always the same amount of mass and energy. It just depends on how you arrange it. So what I do, is not the creation of space, but arranging and rearranging elements that were already there, were a part of me, and I just put them in a new order. And that new order, that I make partly conscious, rationally, that is only half of it. The other half is maybe intuition, and that occurs when you think you’re doing nothing.’
01. Lallygag
People are always ‘working’. While you think you’re bored, when you’re sleeping, when you’re lallygagging, wandering, a lot of things are happening. While you’re doing that, you see things, experience things, hear things, think things that find a place in your head. They mean something, have a value. But what they mean and what their value is, you will only know in retrospect.
Every nothing becomes something in retrospect. Allow yourself to get bored. To not continuously think about things too much. To do things for no reason other than to do them. It clears your head. Creates space to be filled up with new thoughts, ideas, associations. Meanwhile you are unconsiously sponging up things that are happening around you that might be of value later.
02. Mumble
The misconception about songmaking is that it is not about first writing a text and then make the music with it, or the other way around. Truth is that in reality, it starts with something that is quite difficult to understand, how it exactly works.
It starts with getting behind a piano or a play some guitar. When a sort of melody occurs, mumble along with it, fake sing with it, like a child phonetically sings along with songs they don’t know or can understand in a foreign language. Pretend a text of a song that doesn’t exist yet. Start recording directly when you start, you never know what you discover while playing and trying.
Listen to what you have recorded. It is so suggestive, that you can hear words and phrases in your own mumbling, and you can just write down entire phrases you can associate with it. Phrases that you hear only when you hear the recorded music with the mumbling on it. Phrases you picked up, overheard while sitting in the train looking out of the window, while waiting in line at the supermarket, the words you wrote on the foggy window of your shower, thoughts you had while running, now colour in your song. It’s a remarkable game. You have to enchant yourself. It’s a game of suggestion. And then, eventually, you end up with a text.
Faking it is making it. Instead of trying to get everything right first and then record, this is learning from doing. It liberates you from trying to solve the entire puzzle first in your head to directly have a result you then can iterate upon. It’s a way to inspire yourself with yourself. Rapid-prototyping. An agile process. It’s a whole lot easier to discuss things when they’re out of your head, then when they’re only living in it. You can ‘mumble’ in any form. Make doodles, play with clay, build it from cardboard — anything goes. Give substance to your ideas. So they can cast shadows. And you can then give substance to those shadows.
03. Remove the pit
When you end up to have a text, you kind of know what it is about. Then you can also understand what it is about. It could be to be about something that was on your mind already, maybe even for years. This your capital, your source. Then it’s a matter of getting rid of all the parts that are too clear, too figurative, too concrete, too narrow, too defining.
Imagine a circle, with a core. Cut out the core, like a pit in a peach. And what remains is a shape in which you can still see the missing core, but all the parts are pointing to that missing core. So when you then listen to the song, you can only hear, see or experience suggestions that hint or point to the core. But because it’s not there, you fill up that empty space with your own associations, memories, smells, love, anxiety, fears, cultural background. With the books you have read, the movies you have seen, stories you have been told. That’s different for everyone. That’s the movie you make in your head with the music you listen to. That is immensely touching, because you created it yourself. And that’s why it becomes intensely meaningful.
It really relies on trust. It’s an agreement. It’s that what you have created as a maker, you don’t exactly know what it is but you feel that it is valuable, worth something. And then you hand it over to an audience for them to complete it in their own way.
It’s a mutual responsibility, the receiver also needs to work, needs put effort in, needs to want to work with it. But when that happens, then you both did half and then together you created something new from it. New memories, new stories.
Perfect imperfection. We all always feel the need to finish stuff completely. But by doing that, we exclude people instead of including them. Then we’re telling them, dictating what to do, instead of asking them to participate, to add their own stories. Incompleteness is the invitation to participate, to contribute, to co-create, to join. Incompleteness invites interaction. The more people can add of themselves, the more valuable it gets to them.
Like Sir Paul Smith, the English fashion designer said: ‘You can find inspiration in everything. And if you can’t, look again’. One of the things I’m learning from Happyplaces Project is that a lot of things already have been solved and that most of the knowledge is already available in different disciplines, but that there are too little multidisciplinary exchanges. How Erik creates a song is largely similar to how Ivo Victoria creates stories as a writer, and Stephanie Akkaoui Hughes approach to architecture. If only they could be found easier, it would save people a lot of time searching for answers and ways to do things.
Next time, why not try the Spinvis approach to create your new service or product?
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