Tame Impala and creative solitude

I've been listening to a lot of Tame Impala recently. My Spotify listening habits flit between the urge to listen to one particular thing or desperately scrolling my home page to find some fresh inspiration from the algorithm. A few weeks ago, the algorithm - not always the most imaginative of muses:?"you liked x, why not listen to MORE x?"?- smiled on me. A QOTSA, desert rock-inspired playlist threw up an early Tame Impala track - "Half Full Glass of Wine". It didn't sound like my mental picture of Tame Impala - as my friend Rich said, "kinda psychedelic indie with a lot of keyboards and leftfield instrumentation".

This was dirty and fuzzy; loping and lurching along, constantly changing pace and sounding like the whole thing would fall apart at any minute. I loved it, and hence the obsession with Tame Impala.

Tame Impala, in case you're unfamiliar, is a band but not a band. Leading man Kevin Parker writes all the music and plays all the instruments on the albums. He puts the Tame Impala band together for touring. He is, quite literally, a one-man band. He even has a song called "Solitude is Bliss ". Clearly, like a lot of people, Kevin's energy comes from being alone. You might have read about this during one of the COVID-induced lockdowns - people tend to get their energy from being alone or being around others. For those that fall into the latter group, lockdowns were hell. The former, not so much.

I find myself sitting somewhere between the two. I rarely do any kind of focused work without headphones and music. Music helps me reach that elusive "flow " mode humans often search for. But conversely, I don't like being truly alone. WFH, I'm lucky enough to have an office for some solitude, but I find it emotionally and mentally uncomfortable to be in the house alone.

Similarly, I like being in the office but still use headphones to create an artificial barrier between myself and my pod-mates for that day. In fact, I love a Friday in the office - not many people around, so not much distraction. But there's just enough natural ambience to create the environment I like for productivity.

I don't think I'm alone in this enjoyment of being around people while not necessarily constantly engaging with them. Lockdown saw us give a name to places we missed where knowledge workers can plug away around other people. They're now "third spaces"; not home, not work - something in between. Various developers made sites where you could put?the fake ambience of an office or a coffee shop ?through your headphones in lieu of being able to visit them during lockdown.

It's probably not surprising that some of us like to be around people, even if we get our energy from working alone. We're a social species, and thousands of years of evolution have bred us to crave the reassurance of our tribes and groups. But we're also paradoxical creatures, wanting to be alone while around other people. Our tolerance for spending time with others falls on a spectrum subject to change. Unless you're at the extreme end of the spectrum, you probably like a blend of environments, and it probably depends on what you're doing.

For lots of people in our world of agencies and communications, the work they do that suffered most from enforced solitude during the pandemic was creativity. I worked on a few pitches and loads of creative sessions during those 18 months - some were OK, but most were incredibly painful. Bouncing off other people's ideas on Teams is clunky. A physical creative session in a room creates a vibe and energy you can't find on a video call. That energy is infectious and makes the session fun - even if that doesn't necessarily correlate to better ideas.

Many scientific studies show that brainstorms are statistically bad for generating great ideas. The best ideas come from?forcing the brain to iterate repeatedly ?on a subject.?Uncomfortable environments ?that feel like a slog also generate more exciting ideas. Working alone or in small groups and then sharing and critiquing each other's thinking is a proven methodology to generate great creative.

That act of sharing is a crucial one. An idea often sounds good in your head; it can often sound OK when written down. Explaining it to someone is something else. Speaking it through makes it change and shift and come alive - and it might come alive to take flight. Especially if you're working with a tight group that can see the potential in the kernel of an idea and help build it into something good.

Kind of like how I imagine the songwriting process might work in a band (disclaimer - I was in one band when I was 16 with my friend mentioned above, Rich. He wrote the songs, and I sang them). Bouncing off each other like John and Paul or Morrissey and Marr to make something good even better.

So how does Kevin Parker do it, then? How does he manage to make consistently great music when he's the only brain involved? Well, a quick look at some interviews shows Kevin may write and record everything himself, but he does have outside support. Regularly playing music with friends, inviting esteemed producers in to mix albums as he couldn't get the sounds he wanted. Even if you do most things yourself, in the end, there's always some kind of feedback loop to lean on - whether that's colleagues, clients you're presenting ideas to, or the general public. Somewhere along the line, someone else gets involved and lets you know what they think.

The hardest part is the sharing part, whether you are a comms person or a world-famous musician. It's an act of bravery to play someone a song or share an idea. And it can be tough to translate what's in our head into words, whether verbal or written. How often have you heard musicians bemoan the fact that their recorded output doesn't quite match the sound they have in their heads?

As Mandy Brown puts it?in her excellent blog ,?"the hardest thing any of us ever does in our work lives is also the thing we do all day long, often without a lot of attention or intention: getting information from one body into another."?It's tough to get people to understand your idea or how you want your music to sound. To quote Mandy again, we need to adopt?"the mindset that lossiness as a fact of life"?but that it also has benefits. Someone might not completely understand your idea the first time, particularly if they're not actively listening but thinking of their own build. But that lack of understanding could be a benefit and lead to something much better.

Or you'll need to go back to the beginning and explain your idea again. Perhaps more slowly and deliberately this time - with some questions to check understanding. And then, hopefully, you'll agree, and a great idea will flourish.

Otherwise, it'll likely be a case of your (temporary for that creative session) band splitting up due to creative and musical differences. Then you'll either need some new bandmates or get comfortable with being like Tame Impala, for whom "company's OK, solitude is bliss".

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