In the late nineties I went to any class I could to learn how to write better music. At one class, hosted by ASCAP, Dan Keen, the head of ASCAP’s gospel music division, played a song by an artist he was very excited about - a guy named Wes Cunningham. I got excited too. I waited over a year for that disc to finally come out and when it did I listened to it incessantly. Very clever lyrics. Very hooky melodies, every verse could have been a chorus. And very skillful playing and production. It was the closest thing to a perfect album I’d ever heard at the time.
Some musiciains worship The White Album or Back In Black but I’ve always wanted to make something that made people as happy as Wes’ Twelve Ways To Win People Over To Your Way of Thinking made me.
A few years later, after Wes’ career had taken him away from labels and into independence, I signed with Rocketown Records. I had already written the songs for my first album when I signed so the only hurdle to recording was agreeing on a producer. I told my label’s president I wanted Monroe Jones to produce. He was a little surprised that I would have such a strong opinion about a producer, having never recorded before and all. He asked me what I knew about Monroe. What I knew, I told him, was that he produced my favorite album. He laughed knowing what I didn’t know: Monroe had also produced almost every single CD Rocketown Records had ever released.
I’m a good lyricist - on days when I can write at all. I’m an OK piano player. I’m a terrible guitarist and a mediocre singer who’s always battling allergies and sickness and fatigue to even get through a recording. If you’ve ever heard a song of mine that you liked it was largely because Monroe Jones produced it and Shane Wilson and Jim Dineen mixed it (this was the case for my first two albums) or Richard Dodd took my production work and fixed it in the mixing process (this was the case for my third album). I owe a full calendar, a blog audience, money in the bank and literally thousands of kids’ lives to these men who’ve waved their magic wands and multiplied my talents.
You can watch that wand waving this week right here starting Thursday at around 10:30AM CST ("Around" is a big thing in Nashville). I’ll be broadcasting our recording session live.
Now, there won’t be a fancy shmancy studio full of studio musicians. It’ll just be me and Monroe and Jeff Roach, his favorite guy for keys. We’ll be “working” on a song called Kingdom Coming. I’ll have at least one camera, possibly two, in Monroe’s home studio. Warning: This isn’t that exciting, which is one reason I want you to see it. Basically, we’ll hang out and talk a lot. And at some point I’ll play the song on piano. Then Jeff and Monroe have some ideas about what to add to it. Then, another day, we’ll record drums and guitars and vocals and bagpipes. (Kidding. Maybe. Probably.)
So, come back here Thursday around 10:30AM CST or go to mogulus.com/sgtv to watch on a bigger screen.
I was in college when I read that Steve Jobs was returning to Apple and planned to offer computers in multiple colors. Choice seemed like a good thing to me. I bought some stock. It split and grew.
I also worked for Sam’s Wholesale in college and learned that Walmart’s stock had just leveled out after plummeting. I started participating in Walmart’s emplyee stock program. Part of every paycheck was withheld and invested in company stock without any brokerage fees.
When I got married I worked for free at a music publishing company. But my sugar-mamma wife was a well-paid auditor. We decided to invest a fourth of her paycheck in her company’s investment program and other stocks and mutual funds. We invested aggressively, took big risks, and they paid off much of the time.
Since then, we’ve not always saved and invested. There have been months when I had no income coming in and no prospects for the next month, but when possible, when we’ve had more than enough, we’ve tucked it away in a savings account at the very least. This has been handy. In my first year as an artist I flipped down a bunny slop mountain and broke my hip. We had to use all our savings to pay the bills and treat all the medical problems that lingered for years afterward. When we built a house and then my career turned downward, we had to use savings to pay our mortgage some months. And we’ve used savings to help people we come across who need more help than our checking account can give them.
But the more I see of the developing world, the more I’m uneasy with our investment strategy past and present, regardless of its usefulness from time to time. These days, whatever we don’t use - to pay our bills and help out - currently goes into a savings account “just in case.” Some months that’s nothing. Sometimes it’s an embarrassingly large amount. That’s the music/blog/speaking business: Unpredictable.
When there’s more than a month’s income in savings (the longest I’ve been without work), I’m asking weird questions now like Why should I save for the future when people are dying in the present? And guys like Francis Chan are getting to me too.
I’m in a battle - a skirmish really - between being practical/prepared and becoming what might just be more Jesus than I’m comfortable with. It’s too risky. What if?
I know very few things for certain when it comes to money. But I know that investing is not inherently evil. And those who do it aren’t either. But I also suspect that investing (especially above a certain dollar amount) isn’t often necessary - not if we take seriously what God has to say about church, community, family and retirement. Oh, wait, retirement’s not in the bible. Exactly my point. And investing comes with its own spiritual hazards, just as poverty does.
I’m finding myself experimenting, praying a very scary prayer these days:
“Two things I ask of you, O LORD;
do not refuse me before I die:
Keep falsehood and lies far from me;
give me neither poverty nor riches,
but give me only my daily bread.
Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you
and say, ‘Who is the LORD ?’
Or I may become poor and steal,
and so dishonor the name of my God.
(Proverbs 30:7-9)
This post isn’t about erecting new laws for God’s people concerning money and generosity. It’s about me being brought to an uncomfortable place at which I now face some cutting questions: Why is abandoning savings so frightening for me? I don’t love money, so what is it I’m really afraid of losing if this prayer is answered?
I’m only blogging because I’ve been quarantined to my office and I’ve got nothing else to do in here. The rest of the house has been commandeered by four girls in various stages of undressedness.
Last night Gresham (age six) spent the night at a friend’s and some girls came over to spend the night with Gabriella (age seven). At the moment they’re taking showers and getting makeover’s before we head out the door to church. This makes no sense to me. Which is good. It reaffirms my man-ness, I suppose, after that unfortunate cake confession.
Why is it fun to wash one’s hair? To put paint on one’s face? To dress up in one’s uncomfortable clothes?
Besides the plate of bacon and pancakes, this makeover thing seems to be the highlight of the whole spending-the-night deal this weekend. Whereas, the highlight of spending the night at my friends’ houses as a kid was flipping Space Invaders and, in later years, Mario Brothers for the zillionth time. And mooning somebody. And sticking Oreos to someone’s house and cars. And drinking my body weight in Jolt and Dr.Pepper. That was fun. And makes total sense to me.
Penelope, age three, stood in the hallway greeting strangers while her mommy talked to big brother’s teacher and then big sister’s.
Then mommy turned her attention at last to Penelope, whose bottom lip was pushed out in a pout. “What’s wrong?” mommy asked.
“Some people say I’m cute. And some people can’t see me.”
That’s when we learned there are only two kinds of people in the world, according to Penelope: Those who think she’s cute. And those who just haven’t met her yet.
What’s this series all about? Read Creative Contradiction #1.
2. Convergent and divergent. The folks with the most consistent creative output are thought to be using two contradictory yet complimentary modes of thinking: convergent and divergent.
Convergent thinking is logic, measured by IQ tests. It’s used to solve a definable problem and find its one right answer. Black and white. Cut and dry.
Divergent thinking, on the other hand, leads to no one conclusion but generates a mound of ideas and possible relationships between them. Central to divergent thinking is the ability to see associations between seemingly unrelated thoughts, and to see all sides or perspectives of an issue.
Most of my day is spent in divergent thinking. My wife asks me often, “Who are you talking to?” My mouth and hands move a lot when I’m driving or making breakfast. I’m dialoguing through songs, blog posts, conversations, pitches. It’s embarrassing but I can’t stop it. And I don’t want to really. It’s true that 99% of that mound of ideas created by divergent thinking is crap. But that 1% is golden.
Here’s an example of how these two kinds of thinking work together. One night I dreamed I was watching a hummingbird outside our kitchen window. I woke up thinking about hummingbirds and everything related to them. I wasn’t trying to. It just happened. By the time I got out of the shower a mound of hummingbird related stuff was piled up in my head. And it stayed there, with all the other piles, for weeks. Then one day, eating dinner before a show, someone said I looked tired. They asked me how I was doing. I told them I felt “run down.” And I don’t think I heard anything else anyone said at dinner from that moment on. Instead, my brain started connecting stuff in the pile about hummingbirds with stuff I was feeling. And in the next few days I wrote words like “Feathered, tethered, feels like all the world’s a cage/worked up, run down, in this race to earn a wage/something inside tells me I was made to split the sky, so tell me why I’m living like a hummingbird/getting nowhere fast from all this work...”
One dream and a morning of divergent thinking built the mound. And divergent thinking connected the mound to a seemingly unrelated thought/feeling. And convergent thinking went to work on the pile to find only the best stuff. Convergent thinking sifted the pile by saying “Yes” and “No”, “Keep it” and “Trash it” a hundred times until the song was done.
Now, beware. If a creative person’s divergent thinking is stronger than their convergent thinking, they’ll have lots of projects going on and few completed, lots of output but low quality standards. They’ll tend to think every idea is a great one. But, if their convergent thinking is stronger than their divergent thinking, they’ll be so self-critical (always saying “no” in their head) that they’ll have low output of a higher quality - at least in their mind. But, and I know this from experience at the moment, if convergent thinking is turned up to 11, output will end altogether.
Ideally, we creatives need both kinds of thought in balance.
If you live or work with creatives…
Let them talk, if they’re a talker, about what’s in the pile. And then help them sift through it for the best ideas.
Do not tell a creative person everything they have done or are doing is great. Great means nothing if it’s all we hear. And hearing it too often kills our ability to self-critique, to think convergently.
Help develop the divergent part of a creative child’s mind, especially if he/she has perfectionistic tendencies, by drawing a doodle with a pencil on a piece of paper. Then ask the child to tell you everything they see in it. Don’t critique at all.
Help a child develop the convergent part of their mind by handing them a crayon and asking them to turn your doodle into one of those things they saw. They’ll have to make choices, pick from the pile they just made.
Does this help at all?
