https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=3Mqc1iOVMXQ
You know, another thing I’ll touch on with songwriting, which was, it’s a good friend of mine now that’s in the music business. I don’t like throwing people’s names out there, but he’s a very well-known artist in country music and he and I have been talking for a while and we may or may not have sang a song together in North Carolina, but he and I were talking about songwriting and songwriting is weird for some people. So like, ain’t got a dollar is one that I’ll give a good example of. I almost say I didn’t write ain’t got a dollar. It just sort of came to me like very, and he shared a similar experience. Like he said, he was driving down the interstate one day and one of his most popular songs, like this almost came to him like very, like I remember I had gotten out of the shower and I was drying off in the bathroom and it just hit me like ain’t got a dollar, don’t need a dime. Like the whole song just came to me almost like somebody was putting it in my head and to the point that like I remember I felt emotional about it. I was tearing up and stuff and I ran into the other room and so I always save all my stuff on my phone. So I opened a Google drive and just started typing all the words in and it’s like the whole song was done in five minutes. It’s like it’s weird, but I’ve had that happen multiple times. Yeah, it’s like, and I don’t know what that is. I don’t know if that’s… It’s revelation. It’s weird. Yeah, it’s weird how parts of, and I don’t know if it even is if it even is your own brain or if it’s like somehow we’re just picking up signals that are flying around the same way that cell signals fly around. Yeah, that’s a complicated problem, man. That’s a complicated problem. Well, you know, your comments about prioritization I think are dead on because you might say, well, why put an arbitrary limit on what you’re going to say? And the answer is, well, as you said with the journal, well, you could say it in 10,000 words, but that’s 10,000 words, or you could say it in 50 words. And if you’re going to say it in 50 words, you better make damn sure you got the words right. And so the limitation of the form forces you to prioritize. You got that dead on. That’s exactly right. And that if it’s prioritized properly, you’ve struck to the core, right? You’ve got to the treasure. You’ve extracted the gist or the spirit and people can tell. And the reason they can tell is because they have these in collate and ill formed emotions and ideas that are sort of floating around. And there’s way too many of them. And then you come along and you go, here’s the structure that captures all of that. And it’s such a relief to them because they can leave a bunch of that behind then too, right? Because if you get to the core, you don’t have to carry along the extra burden. And a great poet does that. Great musician does that. They strike right. They hit the target right in the middle and everyone can feel that. It’s interesting too, because a lot of the comments I’ve gotten on all the videos have been, the comment will say something to the effect of, I hate country music, but I love listening to this. And it reminds me of like, there’s certain people in the rap music game that like, people who don’t ever listen to rap will still listen to them because lyrically, they’re able to like, I guess you kind of hit the nail on the head of what it is, but it’s yeah, that’s exactly that’s a weird phenomenon. But it’s almost like that idea isn’t just limited to, people like certain genres of music for their sound, but they really connect with the lyrics of songs more than anything. It’s the sound is just kind of there as an add on, you know? It’s very interesting how music is like the fact, it’s just a weird thing to think about how people can sing songs and find such peace and hope from them anyway. But like- It is, it is. Music is a mystery, man. That’s for sure. Yeah, yeah. I made a piece of art representing music back in 1985. It took me about four months to make. And now that’s the logo I use. It’s called The Meaning of Music. And I was really fascinated because I was really interested in nihilism and meaninglessness at that time, because you can make a pretty coherent rational case for nihilism and meaninglessness, you know, looking at the primacy of suffering in human life and its finite nature. And I thought, well, what the hell? What’s the argument against that? Because we do have finite lives and people do suffer and there seems to be a lot of pointless misery in the world. What’s the argument against that? Logically. And I thought, well, maybe the argument against that isn’t exactly logical. Maybe it’s like the phenomenon of meaning itself. And I thought, well, where does that manifest itself most strikingly and irrefutably? And the answer to that seems to me to be in music, because I remember at about the same time, I’d gone to a Ramones concert and they were like major league punk rockers. And my wife and I went to this concert and we watched the mosh pit where these like punks were banging into each other at high velocity, very aggressively, right? But they were celebrating the meaning of the music at the same time. And so even if you’re a nihilistic punk rocker who hates the world, you go to a concert and the music grips you and it grips you in a meaningful way. It’s like meaning itself, speaking to people directly and there’s no criticizing it. There’s nothing stupider than, no one sounds stupider than when they’re criticizing music per se. You know, you can say, well, I don’t like that piece of music. But nobody in their right mind ever says, well, why do you listen to music for you idiot? Because almost everybody has a genre and music speaks directly to people in a way that argument can’t refute. It’s really quite a mystery. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s a perfect example, particularly with Richmond North of Richmond, because it had, like, it definitely, it went beyond all bounds. You know, it touched people that wouldn’t listen to country music. It touched people that weren’t even in the country. It just seemed like, I guess, because of through the lyrics, like it just, it definitely, it transcended all those boundaries that you would normally expect things to stay within. And that’s what kind of disrupted, I guess, it really disrupted things, people’s perception of what is, you know, it’s a weird thing for me to look at now, to try to make sense of it. You’ve probably heard by now that you should be using a VPN when you connect to the internet. But if you’re like me, adding an extra step to anything you do every day just sounds like a hassle. Well, let me tell you, if you knew how easy it was to protect your connection with ExpressVPN, you’d be doing it already. 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And, well, that’s true in some way, but there’s a way it’s not true because what you did, and I don’t know how you did it or what did it through you or any of those things is you, and I figured this out too listening to on YouTube, so you’ve actually been paying attention for a few years, you know, and while you’re paying attention, you’re, you know, you’re gathering information about what’s worth paying attention to, right? So you’re gathering up all these observations about the state of the world. Then your poetic imagination goes to work on that. And it extracts out the gist and you put that in a song. And if you hit the mark, right, everybody goes, oh my God, that’s just exactly the right song for the moment. And of course it is because you’ve been paying attention. Look, I talked to Jimmy Carr about how he prepares his comedy sets and other comedians have told me this is like, before they go out on the road, they go do like 50 comedy shows at small clubs. And they try out their new material and most of it flops, but now and then every say 10% of the time, they’ll tell a joke and everybody in the room will burst out laughing. And the smart comedians go check, we’ll keep that. And then they do 50 shows and they gather the 5% of the material or the 2% of the material from each show. That’s the best because the audience told them. And then they go out on the road and everyone laughs because the jokes are a reflection of what the audience needs, you know, and if you’re paying attention and your poetic imagination is gathering up the right information and you put that in a song, you’re going to hit the space that people need to articulate perfectly and then it’s going to be a hit. And obviously something like that happened to you and that’s not just fluke, even though, you know, you’re fortunate enough to be healthy and here you are for it and all of that. You can’t just think of that as fluke. It’s, you know, you hit the target, right, for some reason. You think, you know why? Do you have any sense of why? I mean, really my gut feeling is that it’s above my head. I really think I commented this on Joe Rogan too, but I really think it was, I don’t know, I really don’t know what to think of any of it. But my gut feeling tells me that it’s, whether this is, whether the, I don’t know which one’s the chicken and which one’s the egg, but I feel like I’ve been put in this opportunity to try to share some of the message of what you and I discussed today and what was touched on about, I mean, it’s just the importance of trying to reintroduce God into modern society and us trying to at least limit some of the horrible things that we do to each other, you know, like in today’s political climate and the way the world, like I, yeah, I just feel like maybe it was just an opportunity, maybe the song was just a vessel of an opportunity for me to be able to have the time to have these conversations and get things, and plus, not to mention, like I said, I think it’s just, I think part of it maybe goes back to all those conversations I had with people in my work, because I talked to people from all over the country and Canada and the conversations you have in those environments aren’t in any way, I mean, they’re very open and honest, you know, it’s just two people talking about life, there isn’t anything to prove in those type of conversations, so I think maybe that gave me a very, an unusually transparent view of how people are feeling, because I was able to almost- That’s an excellent observation, because one of the things I have noted is that people who emerge as leaders, I mean, genuine leaders, I don’t mean the fake, you know, persona psychopath types, I mean, the genuine leaders, some of them, some of whom are accidental leaders, they listen, right, they’ve gone out and they’ve heard people and they’ve gathered their stories together, and then they amalgamate them, and so it’s very interesting that you point out the relationship between that and the honest conversations you had while you’re doing your sales work, you know, that’s very much akin to Jimmy Carr going out to the audiences and testing his material to see what clicks, right, it’s that dialogue between you and the crowd that you’re attempting to communicate with, so that’s very cool.