The Race is to the Swift
The Race is to the Swift
What we can learn about collaboration from 'Miss Americana' and 'Matilda'
My indifference to, and ignorance of, the regular online flow of gossip about “celebrities” are both pretty robust. I’m basically not interested.
Yet despite this, I've recently found myself watching documentaries on a well-known streaming service recently about a couple of famous singer-songwriters.
Why?
Creative Collaborations
Well, the aspect I find most captivating about these documentaries - to be honest, almost the sole intriguing element - is the insight they provide into the creative methods of prominent figures. We observe both Lewis Capaldi (whose music I'm not very familiar with, I admit) and Taylor Swift (whose music I do enjoy, I also admit) collaborating efficiently, albeit sporadically, and ultimately quite successfully, with a variety of music producers.
The musicians play a few chords, strike some piano keys, hum part of a melody, softly sing a couple of words before pausing... the producer contributes an idea or offers feedback ("that's so cool"), and ultimately (we don't witness the final stage of the process) a remarkable (or at the very least, quite satisfactory) pop song comes to life. It's genuinely quite remarkable and serves as a valuable reminder that teamwork is fundamentally crucial for the development of any piece of work - be it a song, opera, ballet, engaging news article, or a piece of copy for a client.
Others enhance the work we create - or we do the same for them. Occasionally, it's about input from another person; at other moments times, it's about being granted resources or time (a gift we frequently overlook) by a producer, editor, or partner.
National trends
An intriguing recent example of collaboration also involving Swift (which, as far as I can recall, wasn't mentioned in the video) is with the band 'The National', which has received substantial coverage here. I have definitely enjoyed several of the songs they produced together.
Most individuals who write professionally understand the significance of editors. At times, we have no choice but to self-edit with a "fresh pair of eyes" the following day (assuming we have that luxury). But even the most accomplished journalists admit that their work can always be enhanced by a skilled editor.
Waltzing Matilda
The literary history of the US and UK, at least, is full of examples of editors who coax, entertain, or pressure the best from their authors. A fascinating example I recently discovered, courtesy of the brilliant critic Merve Emre, was in a comprehensive article on Roald Dahl in the New York Review of Books.
Emre elaborates on how 'Matilda', one of Dahl's most beloved books (and perhaps best recognized today as a hugely popular musical in London's West End), was written with the astute guidance of his editor, Stephen Roxburgh. Considering the book's endearing nature and its significant contribution to Dahl's fame, the revelation of the editor's influence in this case is quite enlightening: "Roxburgh provided Dahl with everything that makes Matilda appealing." Emre presents a persuasive argument for this claim, making the essay a captivating read.
While collaboration is seldom as intense as in the case of 'Matilda's creation, this example, along with those of Swift and Capaldi, serve as a reminder, at least to me, that the creative process should not be undertaken alone. Instead, we must seek out others and learn to collaborate effectively with them in order to achieve our greatest potential.
In that spirit, please use the button below to give me feedback! Many thanks.
Hi Nicola, thanks for the feedback! Much appreciated. As regards the 'tests' I was referring to, the most famous and perhaps most influential of its kind, was from TS Eliot: "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." The reference is here: https://tseliot.com/prose/dante and he very much sees it as a test.
I also had in mind what John Ashbery called an “almost satisfactory definition” [by the nineteenth-century French poet Banville]: “[ Poetry is] that magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a combination of sounds … that sorcery by which ideas are necessarily communicated to us, in a definite way, by words which nevertheless do not express them.” Neither of these is a rigorous method, but I guess many readers of poetry would recognise instances where the sound of the poetry has an impact - e.g. moves or stirs us in some way - before we have comprehended the meaning(s) of the lines. I think "awakening sensations" nicely catches what is meant by impact here.
A final thought. Mostly we are talking about the sense of hearing being engaged by poetry. But we also move our bodies to its rhythms too, sometimes. For instance, if I read Tennyson's 'Charge of the LIght Brigade, it's hard for me not to walk around as I do so... https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45319/the-charge-of-the-light-brigade Try it out for yourself!
I hope that helps and thanks again for the comment!
Thank you Jeffrey. This is really helpful. I will follow-up with great interest and get back to you.