On music & organizing

I was listening to the old Song Exploder podcast the other day that talks with Vampire Weekend. In case you haven’t listened to it, Song Exploder interviews musicians “who take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.” It’s fascinating & inspiring — give it a listen!

But anyway, during the interview, lead singer Ezra Koenig explained the process of collecting bits & pieces of song, but not being sure how they all come together. Then he met with producer Ariel Rechtshaid.

”I showed him all these disparate parts and I didn't know how they worked together. And he very quickly came up with a structure,” Koenig said. “You know, it's almost like an old movie and the kind of pre-digital era where you see somebody like go to an accountant and they're just like, “Buddy, I'm in trouble.” And they just hand them like a banker's box, just full of like messed up, you know, napkins and stuff, and the accountant’s like, ‘Let me see what you got here. I can't make heads or tails of this right now, but let me arrange this and figure it out.’ That’s sometimes how it feels like when I roll up to Ariel and I’m just like ‘I’ve got a lot of ideas,’ and he’s like ‘Alright show me everything, let’s organise this.’”

That’s pretty much how I feel when I roll up to a client’s house. It’s a creative process of taking a look at everything they’ve got, and then working together to organize it so that in the end there is a beautiful melody, or at least a catchy little ditty.