Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the creative process. I just finished reading Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir by Linda Ronstadt, one of my favorite singers when I was a teenager. Her voice, which sadly has left her, still blows me away. Her song Maybe I’m Right from 1977 still breaks my heart just as much as it did when I was 16.

The book shows just what a serious musician she was. With every recording and every venture, she carefully planned out how she would sing a song, the arrangements she wanted, and the musicians she needed to make the sound in her head come alive. In addition to her career as a rock singer, she appeared on Broadway in Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, sang the role of Mimi in Puccini’s opera La Boheme, made three albums of American standards with legendary arranger Nelson Riddle, and honored her Mexican heritage by recording albums of Mexican music. I’m hard pressed to think of another modern pop musician who embraced such a diversity of styles and musical genres.

Her painstaking approach to making music reminded me of my lifelong fascination with the music recording process. With the introduction of multi-track recording in the 1950s, musicians were no longer limited to capturing the sound of a band performing together at the same time. Modern recording is built on layers of tracks, each track capturing an individual instrumental or vocal performance, some recorded well after the original performance. This is how performers can sing harmonies with themselves, how a guitar solo can sound like three guitarists are playing the same notes at the same time, and how a string quartet can backup a singer months after she’s left the studio. The possibilities for music creation are endless. I find it captivating.

I can (and have) spent entire nights fooling around with Apple’s GarageBand software, recording my fumbling acoustic guitar playing, layering more guitar parts on top, picking out the instrumental parts that come with the software, adding and removing instruments, switching sounds between speakers. I recorded a very short theme song for the video podcast I do for my day job. The whole thing probably isn’t two minutes long. I started work on it one Saturday night. The next time I looked at the clock, it was sometime Sunday morning.

That’s the thing I love about being a creative person – getting so deep into a work that time loses meaning. It’s happened when I’ve been writing, when I’ve created slide decks at work, when editing short videos, and when making music. The joy, really, is in the creating, the conjuring up of words or sounds in certain orders that no one has ever done before. Sometimes the result is uplifting, sometimes it’s pleasant, and other times it just sucks. No matter.

I feel most alive when I am creating. I imagine most people do. I’ll never be an architect, but I can only barely imagine how one feels when the building she imagined in sketches rises up into the sky. My dad loves to work with wood and has built many small pieces of furniture for family members, with my mom providing the coats of stain on top. It must be such a rush to see the finished product. He built a small, flat pirate ship when my oldest son was three years old, complete with gang plank, cannon, mast and steering wheel. Joel played on that for hours. What an amazing feeling that must have been to create something out of lumber and paint that his grandson loved.

I’m never going to write a rival to War and Peace, or record a song to the equal of the most beautiful recordings in existence. Perfectionism isn’t the point. Creating, contributing something, adding to the world’s store of art and literature, that’s the point. We all have creations of our own minds and talents to give. Some write books. Some write music. Some invent machines or think up new ways to make existing devices better. Some create new ways for people to live comfortably or cure their illnesses or reduce carbon emissions. We all live to create, to leave something good behind, to make a difference, to remind people long after we’re gone that we were here and we did something.

Will the world still listen to Linda Ronstadt singing You’re No Good a hundred years from now? Though it should, I have no idea. But it will build on her passion for crafting unique beautiful sounds, just the way the great masters of music did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the way Louis Armstrong, Leonard Bernstein and The Beatles did in the twentieth, and the way some band we’ve never heard of is doing in the upstairs of an old three-story bungalow somewhere in the Midwest right now.

That creative spark, that drive to make something new and better, to solve problems and bring people joy – that’s what should give us hope. The United States has in many ways become a messed up place in recent years, and it will always have issues (because all societies have issues,) but we have creativity. And that will always provide our way upward.

Now, stop what you’re doing and listen to Linda Ronstadt sing Long Long Time. You’ll thank me later.

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