Advice from Lynda

I sometimes think that the best advice for a musician doesn’t come from other musicians. It comes from other creative fields – from other creators who work in different media.

For me, one example is the marvelous “cartoonist, teacher, and blank scrabble square”, Lynda Barry. (That’s her Instgram bio.)

Consider this excerpt from her recent book, Making Comics.

“In the beginning there wasn’t drawing or writing as far as our four-year-old hand was concerned, but at some point soon after, drawing splits off, and for most people it moves first to the margins and then vanishes from the page entirely.

Lynda Barry, from Making Comics p.38

That’s a statement about creating music too, though she might not have intended it. (She might have intended it.)

Barry has recently been posting to Instgram sets of twenty or more drawn or painted studies of the same still life or envisioned scene. To see the way each iteration comes closer to a visual understanding of what she wants to say is to understand the work we have to do as musicians to convey what we want our audience to know.

Her book offers tools and inspiration for getting past that division between drawing and writing; we can do the same to get past the unnatural division between singing and talking, or between performing music and inventing music. Find simple games to play and get out of your own way.