Help! I'm Stuck!

Sometimes, with a piece of music, or with your career, it seems that whichever way you turn, nothing seems right. Piles of crumpled paper litter your floor where you work, whether arrangements that just don't seem right, lyrics you think suck, or rejection slips from places you applied to for work or labels you hoped to sign your band to. When this happens, there is hope, but we just need to step back for a moment to regroup. Here are a few ideas to get you moving again.

DO SOMETHING REALLY WEIRD

Sometimes just doing something totally unrelated to your problem can help you see a solution. It's kind of like the phenomenon of trying to remember the name of a song, and just not being able to, giving up, then remembering it as you are doing the dishes a little while later-you just have to remove yourself from the problem for a bit. Sometimes, doing a little ritual, plopping open your devotional book and reading a passage, or just taking a walk will help. I like to clean things or burn incense, both of which supposedly help "clear the energy" of a room. I don't know if it does anything to the energy, but I do know that it distracts me for long enough to get me out of the mental mud puddle I got myself into before and helped me get out of it. There is a silly card deck my husband owns called "Oblique Strategies" made by Brian Eno that you can draw cards from and take a suggestion or so, just to try something really wild that might not work, but might let you see what will...that is the whole idea, here.

TRY TRACING

When I was a little kid learning to draw, I found I could make some really gorgeous pictures by taking tracing paper and putting it on other people's art or photographs, then trying to color it in like I saw in the picture. This is why sometimes it is good as a lyricist to pull out one of your favorite songbooks, find a song you like, and just writing the lyrics down on a sheet of paper as if they were a poem. If you are a music writer, do the same with your own chord chart/lead sheet of a favorite tune as if it were a shortcut you wanted to have to read off of in the studio. Look at how it was put together-the phrasing, use of elements, and placement of what bits and where these bits were placed. If it is a career problem, read a bio on the web or wherever you might have one just lying around and read up on how musicians you really like ran their lives at the point you are right now-I'm willing to bet they had problems, too, and you might try their solution if it is something you can move towards right now. If you look, you can probably see patterns that you didn't before, and you can try using these with your own current idea. Sure, it may sound really lame, but from there you might see some possibilities that you DO like that you were unable to perceive before this. Maybe you will find that you really like this new idea, and that there was a good reason the author decided on it-either way, you just learned something from the masters, and it is never a bad idea to learn at least one new thing every day. Most of them went through the same problems we are-sometimes it helps to see how others handled these problems to help us find our own solutions.

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