Valentine Wolfe

Misleading headline is misleading, sort of. This is more of a wrap-up of the recent activities of your resident ne’er-do-wells, and an observation on the Creative Process.

We’ve been snowed in, and we spent the time by rehearsing/writing/lathering/and repeating. We’ve made a huge list of show ideas we have, and once again, demonstrated the futility of the creative impulse against the realities of a budget. The overall shape of our next 2 projects is taking shape, in terms of both material and vision. This is a long winded way of saying you’ll have more material to listen to rather soon. We’re also working on absolutely packing our schedule with Valentine Wolfe shows…the only question right now is exactly WHAT will happen at these shows. And where. And with who. And with what. This is a byproduct of our desire to not simply stand there in our street clothes and stare at the floor while we play. You’ve plenty of other outlets where you can see that.

So onto ideas: I draw many parallels, happily and probably incorrectly, with science and the creative process (see the entry title). Two concepts I keep in mind are reproduction and natural selection, and they both shape how I create music.

We tend to think of ideas as rare and precious, the way animals that reproduce a relatively small number of offspring value their young. Since there are few, each one must thrive, so that DNA can replicate and be passed one. Other animals are very wasteful (more or less) when they reproduce-out of tens, hundereds, sometimes thousands off offspring, very few will survive.

I’ve begun looking at my ideas as wasteful. One thing that has held up Valentine Wolfe in the past is the notion each song must be a finished masterpiece. This is because I don’t want to write 100 songs for a project and pick the best 15. I only want to work on what I use.

However, this has made composing tedious and joyless. Hence, the shift to not holding every idea as sacred.

And Natural Selection? I hold that great artists steal and replicate, mostly. The trick is to steal from a large, varied, and exotic sample of source material. In other words, taking the best traits of that which inspires and making it your own thing. I could expand on it, but that’s the basic idea.

Not one I cherish above everything else, though.