Thomas Sullivan

If this column goes anywhere — and bear in mind that no one has ever accused me of writing from a plan — I hope it leads to this conclusion: EVERY GREAT MUSICIAN WHO CREATES THEIR OWN SONGS IS A WRITER AT HEART, AND EVERY GREAT WRITER IS A MUSICIAN. Now, I’m no kind of great writer, and I’m all the way around the world from being a great musician, but you don’t have to be either in order to read and listen to greatness. And before I launch into this, I’d better connect some dots from the last few months.

The first part of this series [ http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2008/07/16/thomas-sullivan-cross-lake-glenn-frey-breathing-the-sky/ ] appeared here two months ago after a sterling three-day weekend when Glenn & family invited me up to pristinely beautiful Crosslake, Minnesota, where he was giving a concert. The crossovers between books and music inspired a lot of things I started to share with you. The reason the second part was delayed was so that I could write about the life and death and hereafter of author Franklin T. Wydra, who died on August 2. If Flamingo Frank was larger than life — and he was — then he is certainly larger than death: [http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2008/08/16/thomas-sullivan-flamingo-frank-2/]. People are still reading that column, still responding. If you would like to see more about Frank, including photos of the pink flamingo I planted in the deep wilds of Elm Creek to honor him, here is a link to last month’s newsletter: http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/newsletters/08162008.htm

So returning now to Crosslake and the Manhattan Beach concert. How do you hide on a vibrating stage in the middle of a Glenn Frey set? Answer, you blend with the night air behind the soundboard, and that’s where I got this for the newsletter two months ago: “When a song stops, tsunamis roar over the stage.” But that’s not precisely correct. The tsunami of approval from the audience generally starts in the closing chord. It is the same tsunami that rose briefly in recognition at the start of the song. The recognition can come after even a single note, and I find that amazing. Amazing and informative when it comes to understanding what turns on readers/listeners and why.

Al Garth — one of Glenn’s versatile and key musicians — said he didn’t know about just one note when we were talking about this in the middle of the night after the show, but I beg to differ. I’m not enough of a musician to know or to sort through terms that are only vaguely comprehensible to me — pitch, timbre, etc. — I just know that there are an infinite number of nuances the human ear can pick up, and that recognizing them is what it’s all about in music. Why is that? Why aren’t songs like books where you hear/read them once and that’s basically it? Why does a song bear repetition? Why do I listen endlessly to something like The Cranberries “Dreams” or Duffy’s “Mercy” (yeah, I know, ‘cause I’m nuts)? It is ritual for me to pull up the official music videos of these on YouTube every night and let them flow through my veins like a drug. There is a huge clue in that repetition factor for writers.

The simple difference is that music is primarily a sensory experience and reading is primarily abstract. But sense and sensibility are like two outtakes of the same scene, each delivering information. In being sensory music informs the emotions, whereas reading mostly informs the rational mind. Still, good writing has to reach the emotions, of course, and the fact that music succeeds by repeating sounds makes me wonder if writers can’t achieve the same thing in their own way. True, we may never have that out-loud sensory link, but if the words evoke the images and trigger the feelings, the reader will get there. We can’t just inform, we have to arouse. Instead of notes we use silent abstractions, so we are never going to have a direct feed into the senses, but we have all day to take the reader there. We are less confined by structure. We can create more complex descriptions and a deeper analysis. And if music has it both ways — that is, it can use both its own sonorous form and our wordplay and storytelling — writers can use qualities that music has as well. Great writing has meter and rhythm and balance and repetition for emphasis. Alliteration is music. Onomatopoeia is a sensory experience. Rhetorical writing that goes for the music lover and gains that lucky niche where it can be read multiple times for enjoyment alone has a name. It’s called poetry. And maybe this is another way of saying that even prose should rise to some level of poetic form if it wants to reach full potential as communication. I’m not talking arty-farty stuff, I’m just saying that anything beyond the level of a shop manual written in Taiwan should pay attention to the silent music of words.

Like I said, Every great musician who creates their own songs is a writer at heart, and every great writer is a musician. They meet at the corner of Meter and Metaphor. It’s poetry by a lesser name. Call it music’s cousin.

Thinking and feeling, feeling and thinking. A drink and a chaser. Hmmm. Lots of substance abuse imagery here. Maybe I should issue a disclaimer that I don’t do drugs and almost never drink (what the hell’s wrong with me). Is that why I like books and music? Substitutions for wild rides through potent feelings and unbounded imagination? Anyway, regarding thinking and feeling, should one come first in presentation? Do they need each other? Instrumental music is pure sensation and doesn’t need thought, so I guess feeling can be enough. On the other hand it’s hard to imagine fiction simply delivering thoughts and being successful. The thoughts have to lead to emotional impact on the reader.

Oops! Didn’t mean to stiff the lyricist’s role in music. Great stories and hammering lines are the scaffolds of music from The Phantom of the Opera to Desperado. But it’s also true that you can get away with much less in the way of wordsmythery or even fundamental coherency and still have a great song. In fact, melodic delivery trumps sense almost any time it becomes an issue. Sing “Light my fire, light my fire, light my fire…” 63 times in succession or “Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa” and nothing more need be said to explain it, “Oop poo pah do,” thank you very much. And for sure music often evokes the “soul” of character by deliberately using unsophisticated language, “Da doo ron ron.” It uses the grunts and belches of passion to be real, “Do wah diddy diddy.” To be informal is to be human. Listeners who don’t get that are usually just missing the point as well as the experience. You see the same thing with dialogue in fiction or with an informal narrator. But still, there are countless examples of clumsy lyrics in music, even in great songs. Just as the music of words tends to get shorted by fiction writers, so too the lyricist often shorts the logic of words. You want I should start an argument with an example? Yeah, here we are in the Roman Colosseum…okay, I’m game.

But let me do it by segueing back to the Crosslake concert where the context for all this began. A couple songs in at Manhattan Beach the rains came and I fled with Glenn and the band to a large secluded room in the lodge. When The Maestro is building magic and passion with the audience like Glenn does, to be cut off like that is a lot like coitus interruptus. So, with several thousand people out there waiting to see if the concert would resume, it was a little tense as well as humid and gloomy in that upstairs room. Naturally I lapped it up. Nothing attracts and inspires me more than the unexpected. So I’m soaking up the panoramic view of brambles of lightning and storm clouds scudding across the lake, and when Deacon — Glenn’s 15-year-old son who was debuting vocally that night — mentioned something about lyrics, a connection with the storm popped out of my mouth. “You don’t want to think too hard about what makes sense in a pop song,” I said. “Like Sheryl Crow’s Good Is Good. Terrific song but — hey — ‘And every time you hear the rolling thunder, turn around before the lightning strikes’? Man, by the time you hear the rolling thunder, you’re already toast. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second while sound travels about 1100 feet. Do the math. Zap…rumble, rumble. Lightning wins by a mile. Actually 185,599+ miles or the rate thereof.”

Okay, argue with me. But like I said, you don’t want to think too hard about it. And that’s the point. It’s beyond poetic license. Precise logic is simply not the focus for an emotional medium like music. Great lyrics or bad, the standard does not require either, and grammar is not an option. Do the same thing in a novel (and there are lots of examples of this), and you’ll find the stakes for “sense” less forgiving. You can hide behind an informal first-person narrator, but the grammar police are on duty just waiting for you to step across the POV, which as we all know stands for Plane Old Vernacular.

To be sure, this isn’t a group dynamic that separates all musicians from all writers. There is a mystique about it that changes with each artist. Mystique. That’s another word that came up at Crosslake. We kibitzed around about that all weekend. Despite infrequent contacts, Glenn and I feel we know each other core deep in unique ways. Musician and writer. Synonyms , sort of. Given our career fortunes, I styled us The Mystique & The Mistake, but hopefully (for me) there’s a better term — a bridge word. Or a phrase. Students of life. That’s the connection. And yet the mystique is there. Something unsolvable in the imagination and personality of the artist. Have known Glenn to be a businessman, philosopher, philanthropist, creative artist, performance artist, art collector, athlete, husband, father and teacher. The same high standards he has in other areas come across in a genius for organization. He can delegate, and that’s a secret for large-scale empires à la Walt Disney — the ability to pick good people. He has a gift for that. Comes across in every choice he makes in musicians and all other things. But he’s hands-on when it comes to interacting with the world around him. Crosslake was just one of many beautiful settings that he draws inspiration from. Yet, no matter how much you see the method and the man, you can never delve the true source of uniqueness and creativity. It’s almost spooky. Ignore that man behind the curtain.

But look for the mirror. You can learn a lot about your own creativity by looking at someone else’s. And I’ve left a lot in the mirror still, so I’ll try to come back to this at some future column. Love these searches into excellence, and I wouldn’t want to leave a horizon unexplored. The Eagles hit the Target Center in St. Paul September 30^th..  These guys are immortal. But what do you expect with anthems like Take It to the Limit? Hope that’s on the playlist.

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see more of my work, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website.  And I’ll be happy to e-mail you a free newsletter every month with similar rants about life and writing, plus photos of whatever I’m writing about.  Send your e-mail address and you’re on the list.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/