THIS YEAR, I’M WORKING TO BRING A GROUP OF ORIGINAL SONGS TO LIFE, recording them with my band, BlueStoneMojo, and sharing the recordings online. Although organizational challenges have tended to dominate the project, it’s still a fundamentally creative process in which mysterious influences can manifest in unexpected ways.
Here’s an example of what I mean. I wrote five of the eight songs we’re recording. The selection process I used to pick the five songs to include in the project had nothing to do with the lyric content of the songs. Nonetheless, when I began listening to the raw tracks from our first recording session, I realized the lyrics in at least four of the five songs addressed the same theme: major transitions in important relationships and the ambiguities one experiences in such emotionally liminal times. What’s more, one of the other songs we’re recording, one written by my musical partner, also addressed the same theme. This unexpected thematic alignment is the result of an entirely unintended coincidence, a mysterious manifestation, if you will.
Yes, the songs all draw on personal experiences, but they actually aren’t autobiographical. It might be more accurate to say the lyrics were inspired by, or even better simply influenced by, lived experience. It’s as if the Muses used the emotional residues of real-life experiences to mix hints of individuality into otherwise impersonal images.
Of course, that’s how creativity in general and songwriting in particular feel. Some spirit from who knows where takes hold of you and creates something both new and familiar, something authentically personal but also (one hopes) universally understood. If the creative process comes out right, personal experience and universal spirit blend together to create a soulfully authentic (and hopefully appealing) song.
Jungian analyst James Hollis reminds us, “Of course we don’t know what soul itself means, but this not knowing is proper to sustain the soul’s purchase on mystery” (The Archetypal Imagination, p. 100). So, an authentically soulful song pulls its listeners toward the mysterious depths from which creativity and love and life itself emerge.
Sometimes the images in a song are obviously mythological or archetypal, sometimes they aren’t. Yet, as every great poet knows, even the most mundane of images can open up at times to reveal a glimpse of the transcendent. The next time you listen to “another silly love song,” consider what the song might be saying were the beloved addressed in the song to turn out to be God — or if you prefer Jungian language, were the beloved to turn out to be an archetypal image of the Self.
Human beings, “as the meaning-seeking, meaning-creating species … depend on the image which arises out of depth encounters. This image … is not itself divine, though it carries and is animated by the eternal exchange of that energy which we may call divine” (Hollis, The Archetypal Imagination, p. 119). We humans craft the images this mysterious energy brings us into myths, into scripture, into poetry and literature, into painting and sculpture, into music and song — and into the lives we live.
Thank you for reading my blog. If you enjoyed this post or found it insightful, please share it with your friends. And feel free to invite them to follow the blog, too. Oh, and while you’re at it, why not check out my book, Moonlight Shines in the Darkness, a Jungian study of Jesus and the feminine in the Gospel of John.
Soul Spirit Wisdom 