Its Sunday and its a good time to take time out and meditate on life, inspiration and how to grab it. Often that is not easy. My advice is try an article thats in this weekends Sunday New York times written by Johnny Cash’s daughter Rosanne Cash ” Measure for Measure” how to write songs and other mysteries”.
Its a story of her own loss and pain, which she like her father has had in spades. In January she experienced the loss of her friend John Stewart (”Daydream Believer,” “Gold,” “California Bloodlines”).
She recounts John Stewart “used to say to me, upon hearing a new song of mine that he thought might be too perfect or careful or contrived, either lyrically or structurally, “But where’s the madness, Rose?” His belief in songs, and his sense of liberation and expansion when he approached writing, was deeply inspiring. John showed me that songs were the expression of the essential language that all other languages hinged upon. When I first began to know him, I felt that I had been speaking with a vocabulary of 200 words, and in a few months he taught me 10,000 more.
Rosanne Cash took John Stewart’s advice and let a little madness, paradox and uncertainty into her life and the result was “Dance with the Tiger” (1990) . Read her article first and see what takeaways you will get for drawing inspiration in the lifelong “Dance with the Tiger of Life”
