In March of 2014, songwriter and performer Sting gave a TED Talk (Technology, Entertainment and Design) entitled "Sting: How I started writing songs again | TED" where he talked about how his creativity went dormant for many years, and how he regained it.
Here's the Ted Talk video:
http://www.ted.com/talks/sting_how_i_started_writing_songs_again?language=en
Read a transcript of the Ted Talk here
Guy Raz, host of NPR's TED Radio Hour interviewed Sting in a program entitled "Sting: How Do You Get Over Writer's Block?". Guy asked questions about Sting's TED talk, played a few audio clips, and asked Sting to talk more about his process of rediscovery.
Sting's story is interesting, inspiring, and a lesson about life itself. And, you don't have to be a musician to get something out of it.
Here are the highlights of Guy's interview with Sting, along with a couple of quotes from his Ted Talk:
When asked to define "creativity", Sting described it as the "ability to take a risk".
From 1978 through 2003, Sting produced album after album of exceptional work and was nominated 38 times for a Grammy award, winning 16 times.
After all of that success, Sting went through an an eight year period where the "the flow of songs stopped". Sting wasn't idle during that time. He played, practiced, and refined his music, "but the desire to write something down was not there, it simply wasn't there."
TED Talk:
What have I done to offend the Gods that they would abandon me so? Is the gift of songwriting taken away as easily as it seems to have been bestowed? Or, perhaps there is a more, deeper psychological reason, that was always a Faustian pact anyway; you're rewarded for revealing your innermost thoughts; your private emotions on the page for the entertainment of others, for there analysis, the scrutiny of others. And, perhaps you've given enough of your privacy away.
Sting began to think that maybe his best work wasn't about himself. Maybe he needed to put himself in someone else's shoes and see the world through their eyes. And that empathy with others, along with relinquishing his focus on me, my ego, who I am, and giving his voice to someone else is what finally broke his "writer's block".
An integral part of Sting's process was returning to his childhood home in the shipyards of Wallsend, England.
TED Talk:
And as soon as I did that, as soon as I decided to honor the community I came from and tell their story, songs started to come thick and fast. I've described it as a kind of "projectile vomiting"; a torrent of ideas, of characters, of voices, verses, couplets, entire songs almost formed whole materialized in front of me, as if they'd been bottled up inside of me for many, many years.
Guy asked Sting:
How did you know how to do that? Like, how did you know to go back to where you came from in order to reclaim your creativity?
Sting responded:
Well, I think songwriting can be considered a kind of therapy, and maybe a kind of regression therapy, you know, to go back to the beginning. Why are you like you are? Why do you think the way you do? Why do you behave the way you do? And most of the answers are in your childhood. So, I spent a lot of time thinking about my childhood. It wasn't a particularly happy childhood. It was a little confusing, my childhood. And so I forced myself to go back there, and in going back there I wondered whether I shouldn't try and honor the people was brought up with.
Guy:
It was almost like you had to get out of your own way, like you realized that it didn't have to be about you; that it's not about you.
Sting:
It's not, and the creative process often takes place outside of your ego. You channel something, but you can't take credit for a lot of it, you just tap into it; you tap into that thing. And it's a wonderful honor to be that channel.
Guy:
I mean, how did you get out of your own way?
Sting:
Just by saying "get out of your own way". You're in the way, Sting is in the way, I'm sick of Sting, so let's sing about somebody else's thing. And I realized very quickly I was writing in dialect, the dialect that I was brought up in, that I haven't used, and I don't use. In fact I only use it unconsciously when I get angry. But I was writing in dialect. And the rhythms, and the cadences of that dialect were helping me create the story; it wrote itself.
Sting went on to describe creativity as "very ephemeral".
When asked about feeling pressure to write and produce music, Sting admitted to feeling some of that, but said:
I try and go into a deeper place inside me that is much calmer; and it's irrelevant whether I'm successful, or celebrated, or not. Where my true happiness lies has got nothing whatever to do with any of that; it's basically just comfort and being who I am. It's deeper. It's at a deeper level.
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