Inspiration

Inspiration is a funny thing and it grabs you when you least expect it and in a lot of cases that it happens to me, I'm normally on the train, driving the car or walking somewhere....not always when I have a guitar with me. I suppose that travelling must inspire me...never thought about that until now. When I need it most inspiration disappears, like moments when I'm recording a guitar solo and get red light fever it's amazing or when the middle section in a song dosen't work and I need to conjure one up really quickly, all my brain says is 'Just play E over and over again'.

In order to be inspired, and I just speak from my own experiences, I need to be totally calm and without any worry, in most cases getting bogged down by money, work, band politics etc. In the rare moments when I do get to relax on my own, inspiration comes flooding over me in waves like as if I have a back log, a kind of bottle neck of inspiration and I can write half a dozen really good riffs in half an hour. The really good part of this flood is the joy of realising that I've not lost the ability to be creative, writers block is horrible and it's really crushing the longer it goes on and I can only imagine how hard it is for someone as complicated as Thom Yorke who is also under pressure to be great all the time.

People inspire me, people I love and people who I don't, if someone impresses me with an act of compassion or  if someone is just downright disrespectful to me or someone else there is something in those moments that trigger enough emotion to open the 'creative' door as well. If you know me personally you know that I'm sunny side up and will always try to look for the best in people but occasionally I meet someone who is really beyond salvation and even these people inspire me to write the darker tunes....People I love make me write tunes and songs with good grooves and major key riffs. If you listen to classic albums such as 'Rumours', 'Dark Side of The Moon', 'Abbey Road', they are emotively very powerful and they carry the vibe of what was happening around the artists.