The Musician Within

Quick: think of a song you like.

Doesn’t have to be your favorite, just one you love.

Got it?

What if your favorite song held the key to a better life?

Sound crazy?

Let’s see…

As many of you know, I was a music teacher for nearly a decade. I've spoken about music a few times in my past newsletters, and want to continue exploring a few more elements of the art.

There are many lessons that can be learned through music, and in this week's newsletter, we will explore how music serves as a tool for cultivating creativity and present moment awareness.

It is obvious to say that music is fundamentally creative expression. But what does that mean?

Think about your favorite artists:

• Beyoncé

• The Beatles

• Taylor Swift

• Journey

• Madonna

• Beethoven

• Smashing Pumpkins

• Lin Manuel Miranda

• Jimmy Buffet

Recognize a few of your favorites?

Why do you like them? Why do you like their music?

Maybe it is the timbre (unique sound) of their voice, or the general aesthetic of their music, their style within a genre. For example, Taylor Swift gained popularity as a country singer and then transitioned into more general pop, The Beatles developed an early rock sound, and Lin Manuel Miranda takes an unconventional approach to musical theater.

We can parcel it out all day long but one thing remains true: you still love your favorite artist, and you probably don’t care about the actual constructs or intricate technical details of the music. And unless you’re neurotic (like me), you’re not thinking about chord progressions, vocal placement, or countermelodies.

You like them simply because when you hear their music, you feel something. Nostalgic, hopeful, energized, inspired, or maybe they found a way to describe exactly how you are feeling in a way you can’t articulate. Great artists all somehow capture an emotion, an element of "being human," and translated it into a musical product that impacted you in a personal way.

The musical scale, at least in the Western world, includes twelve musical notes. A, B, C, D, E, F, G and a few sharps and flats thrown in.

That's it.

12 notes, 12 keys on a piano.

Mathematically speaking, there are only 2,048 combinations of these notes, yet there are an estimated 150 billion songs that have been written. Music is an act of using something finite (12 notes) to create a functionally infinite number of products.

Mind-blowing, right?

When I was getting my masters degree in choral conducting, someone asked me, "Once you learn how to do a 4 pattern, what more is there to learn?"

How is this possible?

If you listen to a piece of music by The Beatles, it sounds like The Beatles, and when someone butchers it, boy you feel it.

Have you ever heard a bad rendition of "Living on a Prayer" or "Tennessee Whiskey?"

It’s the same notes, same chords, and same lyrics. Sometimes it’s even the same artist who probably should have given up performing 20 years and 40 lbs ago.

Despite the seemingly endless possibilities for what can be created, music is a deeply personal experience. Whatever the mode of expression, you have to translate an intangible feeling or thought—which are nothing more than chemical reactions in the brain—into a motorized function (plucking a string on a guitar, pressing keys on a piano, or opening your mouth and passing air over your vocal chords) that you then attach to a series of inherently meaningless dots on a page in a practically random sequential order.

If you look at a piano keyboard, all you see are white and black keys and sometimes up to three foot pedals. What about any of those keys says sadness, joy, or love? A guitar usually has 6 strings and up to 24 frets on the neck. Yet, listen to the guitar solo in any 80s big hair band and you feel electric and alive.

Know that feeling?

When we engage with a product of creation, we are shown a part of ourselves that needed to be seen. The emotion we feel needed to be felt in order to remind us that we are, in fact, alive.

But you don’t have to merely be a recipient.

Creative expression, whether through music or another modality, taps into a biological wire inside all of us and speaks to each one of us as if we were the only ones listening. Creativity itself, therefore, is a fundamental component of being alive; a part of our DNA that many of us have learned to ignore.

To be human is to be creative.

Rick Rubin discusses the art of creativity in his book The Creative Act, and in the very beginning he addresses this exact point. We are all, by nature of being human, creative. Maybe you can't write a platinum album, but you do possess inside of you all the tools to create something totally unique to you because you are the only one who has ever lived your life. You are the only conscious being who will ever experience the same sequence of events in the same order at the same point in time.

To "create" simply means to bring something into existence that wasn't there before. This very newsletter is an act of creation, just as much as writing a book, painting a painting, or making up a new recipe. Creativity can be taking a new route to work, designing an updated logo for your brand, or coming up with a delicate way of delivering undesirable news.

Conversation is creativity in real time. You don’t know what is going to come out of the other person’s mouth, and most of the time we don’t spend enough conscious effort to figure out what comes out of ours. We open our mouths and suddenly words appear and it is usually not until after they are out in the world do we hear them back at us.

Creativity is a conversation between you and the Universe, an open telephone line that you can access anytime you wish. It is easy to marvel at the external product, like a Beethoven symphony or the greatest love song of all time, but we must remember that everything began with an idea. Everything you have ever seen, heard, touched, or felt began as an idea in someone's brain that they chose to release to the Universe. They "opened their mouth" and started talking to the Universe. They spoke their idea—a song of heartbreak or a newsletter about music and creativity or a revolutionary product—and they listened to what the Universe said back.

The greatest creatives of our time are not the ones who have the best ideas – they are the ones who know how to have a good conversation.

Second, music forces us to exist in the present moment. As any musician will tell you, as soon as they start thinking about anything other than what they are doing, everything goes out the window. When I was a young(er) musician, I remember the feeling when everything was going well and then I would start thinking "wow this is going well" and with near 100% predictability, I would then make an error.

How unbelievably frustrating!

Why does this happen?

Because I took myself out of the present moment.

To me, this is the most beautiful part of artistic work: you must become one with the present moment. You can’t start thinking about the work you have to do, that conversation you had that makes you cringe, the struggles or worries of running a brand new business, none of it. You must connect with what you are doing, right here and now, otherwise why bother?

You don’t have to be a musician to experience this. Any creative act will do. Decorating a mantle, repotting a flowerbed, knitting, drawing, writing a newsletter, it's all the same and the modality is less important than you might think. You can apply conscious focus to anything that you’re doing.

In my first few years teaching high school, I would have my non-performance students complete weekly music journals. Their assignment was simple. Here’s your homework for the week:

1. Find a song you love listening to. Preferably a song you could stand up and sing karaoke if you had to; a song you know really well.

2. Listen to it with no distractions. Not while you’re doing the dishes, piddling around the house, or using it as pleasant background noise for whatever task you’re doing. Sit down and listen. Close your eyes if you want (this is my favorite way to listen to anything).

3. Try and identify 3 elements of the music you’ve never heard/noticed before.

   • The saxophone part in the background that you never paid attention to.

   • The intricate harmonies in the vocal lines, even if you don’t exactly know what’s going on.

   • The drummer keeping the piece together.

   • A nuanced way the singer says a particular word.

All you are doing is simply noticing, and what you will notice is that there are likely dozens of elements you’ve never heard before. It might even feel like you are rediscovering a brand new song, even if it’s one you’ve heard a million times.

Bring your awareness to listening for more than just the melodic line, or how catchy the chorus is. Think about why the chorus is so catchy - what makes it appeal to you beyond "the beat"?

This might seem difficult, but don’t overthink it. You don’t have to have a masters degree to hear something that makes you think, “Hmm I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before!”

Music has a powerful way of speaking to us, and I believe that there is a reason evidence of music-making is as old as human society itself. It opens the door between us and the Universe and allows us to have a conversation that isn’t clouded with words (which are really collections of arbitrary scribbles and sounds that we attached some meaning to). Music serves as a portal between our mind and whatever lies beyond, and I believe that it was a gift to humanity to show us a glimpse of what life can be like.

A good piece of music seems to last an eternity and disappear in the same instance. A good song makes you forget that time exists, and it is in that state that we find ourselves in communication with eternity.

Music offers a powerful pathway to connect with your creativity and anchor yourself in the present moment. But what if you're seeking that same sense of clarity and purpose in other areas of your life - your career, your relationships, your overall well-being?

Feeling the present moment, fully and intentionally, is possible for anyone regardless of whether or not you are a musician.

Think about:

Having better, more meaningful conversations with those you love.

Loving waking up every day to a life you built intentionally.

Creating something for the world that you are proud of and makes you smile.

You are creative, but maybe you need a little help unlocking that potential. My 1-on-1 intensives are an opportunity to discover how you can create the life you know you can achieve.

You and me, 60 minutes, and a focus on unblocking your creative potential and identifying exact next steps to get you feeling like today, you are living the life you intentionally chose.

Here is what one client said about their 1:1:

“My coaching session was such a gift. I left feeling deeply supported and inspired. Everything felt clear, grounded, and empowering. I am so grateful for the experience!”

Rediscover your inner creative.

I want to leave you with one final, kind of morbid thought:

If the world were ending and you could choose one last song to listen to, which piece would you choose and why?

Until next time, live uninterrupted.

~Coleman