Nicholas Dobson
// Author & MusicianNICHOLAS DOBSON is an author and musician from Oakland, California. “The Frustrated Songwriter’s Handbook” (2006), co-authored with Karl Coryat, is available from Backbeat Books. Nicholas Dobson is co-founder of the Immersion Composition Society, an innovative network of speed-composers that are organized into independent groups called lodges. Each lodge follow the basic rule of speed song-writing within a limited amount of time.
Website: www.ics-hub.org
Photo: Michael Mellender
Interview:
That’s a difficult question there, actually. I mean, most people think of the arts as being very spiritual, and will respond that this is the case automatically, and it’s a knee jerk kind of thing to say. An aphorism. A bumper sticker. I don’t want to give that kind of answer. Ok, I’ve got it. I think that music and spirituality need to be separated, just like church and state need to be separated in a forward thinking country. Whatever life is, and whatever the world is, artists are free citizens of it.
If you read the book, you’ll remember me saying something similar to the following; like a lot of songwriters before me, I used to think that inspiration was a magical force, and that the universe had these magical rules, and I had to think about all of this magical stuff when I made music. I don’t think about stuff like that, now. I think people can abuse this kind of thinking. I know I did. It can get very superstitious and oppressive, a bit like living in a backwards religious theocracy.
Not that I don’t think that there’s magical stuff in the universe. I believe there is a spiritual component to myself. But I prefer to think of the music itself as having no innate spiritual quality. I see music as an extension of a living organism, like… hair! Or a snail shell. When I make music I am the boss. All the good spiritual stuff is inside myself. I am not sentimental about a song when I am working on it. I’m happy to chop it, stretch it, mangle it, and ultimately burn it if I don’t care for it. It’s just inert matter. I don’t owe it anything. But if I manage to make that song into something that another person can connect with, that is when something spiritual happens. Another person is feeling something that I felt one day. That person has a spiritual component, probably. So do I, probably. So that is quite magical. Probably!
“If I manage to make [a] song into something that another person can connect with, that is when something spiritual happens.”
– Nicholas Dobson, author of “The Frustrated Songwriter’s Handbook”
