By The Landlord
“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.” – William Shakespeare
“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.” – Albert Einstein
“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” – Michelangelo
“I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.” – Pablo Picasso
“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination. My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.” – John Keats
“Scientific thought and the miraculous unconscious are two waves in the same ocean. For me they are no different, reality and dreams.” – Alejandro Jodorowsky
“Imagination is the true magic carpet.” – Norman Vincent Peale
“Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.” – Jimi Hendrix
“My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.” – Tom Waits
“My imagination is a twisted place.” – Taylor Swift
“Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!” – Dr. Seuss
’Tis a right crazy, chaotic, hemispheric organ,
this blood-oxygen onion, creative engine.
A blessing and curse, constantly a-twitch.
How is yours? Mine has no off-switch.
Stalked, fleshy mushrooms unearth their pileus,
umbrella invention, to mammalian thalamus,
from eons of cells, and fast-racing bloodstreams,
to millions of years of animal dreams,
cretaceous lifeforms’ flickering eyelids,
ceratodus fish picturing sky-squids,
expanding strategies in new neocortex,
swimming around in the brain of a T-Rex,
tiny lizard dreams he wins a snake fight,
REM in a mouse mind, picturing flight.
Then a chimp pauses preening, and shoving his cock,
and turns his attention to tools – stick or rock.
Now something has freed the mind from its cage.
Rage, lust, necessity? They find a new language.
Sapiens’ brain then turns a fresh page,
Wheels, printing presses? All stem from the Stone Age.
For emotion, or practical ways to compete,
from crisis to art, and thinking on feet,
it’s time for collation, and gradual formation
of songs on the tool of imagination.
Lyrics on anything that involves this process,
ways to find access, get out of some mess,
impress or invent, surprise forms of linking,
ways that involve some out-of-box thinking,
seeing in mind what’s not in front of you,
picturing as yellow what normally is blue,
object, mood, word – twist them like sticks –
friction brings sparks. There’s the rub and the mix.
There’s many a method to stimulate it,
at its most fertile when children cognate it,
dreaming to drawing, writing and reading,
imagination’s hungry for seeing and feeding.
Take a fish and a fireman, a rocket, a quarry,
moods and events cement. Churn into story …
Dolly Parton’s library, Brian Eno strategy,
Oblique to the obvious, vivid to scrabbly,
daily self-editing, the mind forms narration,
review situation, then realisation,
picturing people, secrets undiscovered
nothing’s more sexy than imagined, and covered.
Art and life mix in the right hemisphere,
let’s see in song how they might appear.
Songcraft itself drifts from the imagined,
a process of pinning what floats on the wind,
driven by dreams, lust or frustration,
comes phrase, tune, rhythm, chord progression,
wrestled suppression from improvisation,
hewn into song by a shaping obsession.
But here not in jazz or prog freeform style,
but in lyrics and stories, ground more fertile.
So who, we imagine, this week mans the Bar?
Steering this topic is the wise ShivSidecar!
Your imagination becomes reality
through his judgement, and songlist sagacity.
Brian Eno’s imaginative method …
Meanwhile, for further ideas, who else is visiting the Bar today? Let’s see what they have to say:
“Those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the unknown worlds, by means of what are commonly termed par excellence the exact sciences, may then, with the fair white wings of imagination, hope to soar further into the unexplored amidst which we live.” – Ada Lovelace
“If you use your imagination, you can look at any actress and see her nude... I hope to make you use your imagination.” – Hedy Lamarr
“Vulgarity begins when imagination succumbs to the explicit.” – Doris Day
“I may have been sexy, but I was covered up total. There was something left to the imagination.” – Suzi Quatro
“Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.” – Hilary Mantel
“The imagination is a muscle. If it is not exercised, it atrophies.” – Neil Gaiman
“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.” – Vladimir Nabokov
“Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.” – Simone Weil
“An idea is salvation by imagination.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
“There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.” – Gilbert K. Chesterton
“The imagination is part of the arsenal that actors draw from.” – Bryan Cranston
“Essentially, I'm untrained, so I just go with my imagination and try to put myself as solidly as I can into the shoes of whatever person I'm going to be playing.” – Christian Bale
“The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world.” – Malcolm Gladwell
So then, please employ your fertile imaginations to suggest songs on this subject. Deadline is Monday 11pm UK time for playlists published next week.
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