I was just trying to write a poem. I sometimes just pick up the notebook or open the laptop and write the first thing that I see (Icicles hanging from my window eaves) and go from there. The icicles reminded me of the icicles that had accumulated on the underside of my car’s carriage, next to the brown slush iced into a clump, lovely next to gritty, and that they say the South gets snow very rarely when, as far as I can see, we’ve had 5 years in a row of a big snowstorm and a few days in a row of single digit temperatures. Not rare anymore. I wanted to just write what came to me, in a Flow, and hope that it would wind its way toward meaning without me having to force it. But not this time. I gave it up after ‘single digit temperatures’. I like the image of the icicles hanging from the car. I don’t know where it (or even if it) will go anywhere but I like it. That’s flow to me. Following what feels natural.
I have experienced flow doing these things:
Writing when I lose myself and my sense of time, no matter the quality of the writing, I could be writing garbage but it flows.
In the studio recording when the players and producer and engineer are all in synch and we are flowing so much together that usually we can grab the song in one or two takes.
On stage performing. Something takes over. I stop thinking and I just, I don’t know, feel the room. I have a set list that I sometimes stick to, but many times I move things around in the moment, I move stories from one intro to the other, I make up new things, I try out a new vocal trick on an old song. In the middle of singing my new song “In NYC”, which is a novel of a song, I literally lose track of the present while I’m singing about the past. It’s a marathon of a song for me and it’s when I experience flow the most.
Snowboarding or skiing. Which I haven’t done in a long time, but when I did, there was nothing like hitting the groove of the carve and taking long turns down a wide mouth Black Diamond (not double black) steep pass. I miss skiing.
I’m in the studio this week for the first time in 2 years and I’d forgotten how the rest of the world shuts out behind those doors. We’re recording a whole album in 5 days, going pretty fast, but when you have the right players who you trust, you trust the producer and let it fly. The song I just mentioned? “In NYC”? Tonight we went through it once to see if we had the arrangement, hit record, did it one take. I sang live with the band so we got the whole thing in one take. It felt like flying. I felt so inside this world they were creating out of words and a melody that I’d created that I felt The Strand Bookstore down in the West Village and I felt the late nights at Mona’s on Avenue B and that backyard garden I had where I planted rosemary and thyme in the shadow of the cathedral in Jersey City, where the bells chimed me awake, and those rainy afternoons at Anglers & Writers cafe on Morton Street and Hudson where I first started scribbling song lyrics into a $1 composition notebook bought from the Dollar Store on Broadway.
Where do you find Flow?
In that place in a tune where the I play it like I've not done before, and wont again.
Where it doesnt matter that the waitress is carrying a tray of glasses that are clinking and chinking in a different key and the drunk guys are so loud they cant hear themselves.
Then someone says that it was spellbinding.....
And all of that is thanks to you Amy.
See you in Stirling on the 29th. :)
Cheers, Colin
That one take feeling is godlike. Nowadays I find flow doing similar calculus problems to get inside the shape of them. I memorize formalisms by saying them out loud in the shower, driving, working out. I memorized Java’s 51 keywords and reserved words in alphabetical order on an elliptical machine at the gym. These things are like mantras that help me get into the flow.