This clip of Damon Albarn showing where the foundation of an early Gorillaz song came from is remarkable. Not only is the beat there and the basic structure of the song, but the signature fill is just another button.
It’s a simple thing that sparked his creativity. The rest of the song grew from there, and wasn’t anything that the creators of the keyboard could have imagined.
Other musicians have done the same thing, finding the mood or rhythm of one song to build their own on it.
New Year’s Day by U2 started with Adam Clayton trying to figure out the bassline from Fade to Grey by Visage. In the Broken Record interview with Rick Rubin, John Frusciante tells how the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s Under The Bridge drew ideas from Hendrix’s Castles Made of Sand and T.Rex’s Rip Off. His guitar arrangement in Californication drew from an early Cure song. Radiohead’s Reckoner started as Thom Yorke parodying Frusciante’s approach to playing guitar. Warpaint’s Undertow started as a rough cover of Nirvana’s Polly. And Nirvana’s biggest song started with Kurt Cobain parodying More Than A Feeling.
That was the starting point. Then it went somewhere else.
It was an idea that sparked another idea. A mood. A concept. A quick thought that connected with another… what if it went like this instead?
It works in writing too.
In her second novel, Under the Bloodwood Tree, Julienne van Loon deals with the idea of assisted suicide. She references chapters from Tolstoy in narrating the character’s last days. She also draws on Camus in order to frame one character’s interactions to the Australian desert. By drawing on these concepts and reframing it in her own story, she brings the philosophical weight of the older work to a new perspective.
In Michael Ondaatje’s recent poetry collection, he notes that he draws lines from other poets. They add colour to his own work, contrasting and complimenting the image.
Inspiration is all around us. And sometimes you have to lean on something to get started.
You need to bury a stake in the ground somewhere to launch your idea. It’s making sure you leave that point for your own creative expression that makes the new work an original.