You cannot force creation.
Inspiration is there or it isn’t.
In times of artistic doubt and uncertainty, sometimes it is best to simply sit and wait.
Sometimes it will come to you the next day.
Sometimes it takes ten years.
Ten years ago was the last time that my friend Joe and I crafted a Halloween song. Up until then we’d made it a late summer/early fall tradition to create a song for Halloween, following a few years in which he wrote some on his own. In this last decade, a lot has happened – in both of our lives – and for various reasons we never quite got it together to come up with another Halloween song. I think we were both fine with that, but I also think something was missing, and this year we found our way back to a place that fulfilled our creative expression and fostered our friendship.
After capping a few Halloween songs with an elaborate (for my limited capability) video in 2011, we may have both feared trying to top something that for us felt like a peak. There were other things at work too – parenthood and jobs and the way life throws one obstacle after another at us until we either turn bitter or jaded or entirely apathetic to the world at large. That’s not a good place to produce anything that might move people.
While I cannot speak for Joe, I can say that at various times in the last ten years I’ve felt like I lost my way a bit, and feeling lost is scary emotional territory. It’s often too frightening to exorcize through writing or artistic expression, and so we dive into the mundane details of life, merely going through the motions and trying to find ourselves in what society says we should be doing.
That rarely works.
All the goblins and the witches don’t disappear just because you close your eyes and pretend they’re not there. We may have stopped making Halloween music but that didn’t silence the demons that lurked far beyond Halloween, and only when I started delving into that and working on things I hadn’t addressed since childhood did I find my own way back to our tradition.
When Joe posted a few Facebook memories of the songs we’d done before, I watched and remembered. Those were such happy times, and it wasn’t because we were making great art or the perfect song – we were just creating and having fun and enjoying the way that making something together binds two friends closer in a manner that almost nothing else approaches. When I realized that, I also realized it was time to do it again.
That night a melody for a chorus snuck into my head, the lyrics poured out of me onto the computer screen, and I shot off a text to Joe with the idea. He wrote back that he was game, and our collaboration had begun. The video snippet above is just a sneak peek of our Halloween song for 2021: ‘Home for Halloween’. The full story, and song, complete with some special guest collaborators, is coming this week.
No one talks about the way we all come home for Halloween…
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