How to Be the Best Kind of Drug (creator-wisdom from Maggie Rogers and Pharrell Williams)
Choose to be the type of creator people can’t think of a single reason to quit
The year was 2016. The location was NYU’s music school. Legendary everything, Pharrell Williams, stopped by a classroom to provide feedback on the latest creations of a group of budding musicians.
In the first two demos that he was asked to critique, Pharrell went through the motions without displaying much emotion.
But the third person he’s introduced to — a then 21-year-old folk singer-songwriter named Maggie Rogers — clearly hit something different.
When Daft Punk’s record Random Access Memories dropped, I heard Pharrell say he drove to a lookover above the ocean and after pressing play, in beat with the waves he allowed each track to take him away.
I love the visual of that. Not being random in where he choose to make that memory. I imagine his body movements and facial gestures in his car mirrored the way he moved when listening to Maggie’s song in class.
He shifts a lot.
One minute, his eyes are closed.
The next, it’s almost as if he’s forgotten how to blink.
