what inspires me to write music?

Last night, I received an email from the Covenant Awards to submit a 30 second Youtube clip expressing my personal response to several questions about art and creativity and why I do what I do. The question that caught my attention was What inspires me to write music?

For me, writing is a means of expressing what I'm seeing, feeling, hearing. The lyrics may be deeply personal and become cathartic in my "working through" thoughts, emotions, questions. The first song I wrote years ago Living Sacrifice was a love song with a painful twist written after splitting with my boyfriend. My song Pictures in My Heart helped me work through the grief of my grandmother's dementia.

Other times, my songs are more like commentaries on experiences. Recently I wrote a song called Mannequin Woman which began from processing betrayal in a relationship I was in and then grew into something that became more philosophical.

When I write spiritual songs, they come from an inner place of surrender and openness. If they are based on someone else's text, I let the natural inflections of the poetry take me to melodic possiblities like Our Father a setting of the Lord's Prayer. Intuitively, I hear melody and harmony together. If the lyrics for my spiritual songs are original then it's almost always come from a place of digging deep into an experience for meaning like my personal favorite Father of My Spirit.

For me the process of writing music is like the process of making music - you have to live it. The great jazzer, Charlie Parker said it: Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.



© 2009, Bev Foster