Art for heart's sake

Paul McCartney was 22 years old when he wrote Yesterday and J. K. Rowling 31 when the first Harry Potter book was published. (We'll leave aside Salvador Dalí being six years of age when he painted Landscape Near Figueras because that's just ridiculous). Looking at examples like this, it's tempting to think that creativity reaches its zenith in the full flush of youth. There's certainly plenty of evidence to support that argument, a few honorable exceptions notwithstanding (Monet, J. R. R. Tolkien, Georgia O'Keefe, Verdi).

But wait, fear not, old friends; I bring glad tidings. Somehow, against all odds, I've managed to write three passable songs over the last couple of months after a fallow period to rival the post-Roman Empire era. While it's not exactly been akin to the early sixties work rate at the Brill building, where the likes of Bacharach and David, Neil Sedaka, Goffin and King and Neil Diamond would churn out hits to order on a daily basis, I'm quietly pleased with my meagre efforts.

The joy of creating new pieces of music out of nothing these days is, paradoxically, compounded by the fact that there's not much choice as to what can be done with them once they're finished. On the one hand, you can turn them over to a baldy Swedish chap who will, in return, offer you about 0.003 euros every time your song is streamed online by a long-suffering family member or, on the other, simply record them for the sheer joy of it.

To be fair, our perspective must have been radically skewed in the opposite direction in the days when musicians could spend a couple of months writing and recording an album in the Bahamas and then - if it was half decent - with the right marketing and touring strategies, sell a gazillion copies on a Tuesday. That was, in its own way, as absurd a business model as the current one. The fairest deal must surely lie somewhere between the two extremes. Meanwhile, writing and recording just for fun seems the best way to go.

In fact, it's probably fair to say that the greatest enjoyment of creating something is to be found in the act itself plus the fleeting sense of satisfaction to be experienced directly afterwards. In that sense, it doesn't really matter how good or bad what's just been produced might be. You only have to think of how similarly David Bowie must have felt about making the seminal album Hunky Dory and, much later, his first record with Tin Machine. Actually, that's probably a bad example...

Moving on, clearly the important thing is just to keep on trying, to put backside to chair and pen to paper as the old adage goes. If nothing else, creating stuff helps keeps us young at heart and, let's face it, nobody wants to wake up one morning and think "suddenly, I'm not half the man I used to be".

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