Cornering Creativity with The Flecktones

By Seth on February 11 2009

If you happened to watch the Grammy Awards this year, you may have noted that Bela Fleck and his Flecktones won yet another award. Bela is a world-renowned banjo player who, in his 20 years with the Flecktones, has been nominated for Grammy's in jazz, bluegrass, pop, country, spoken word, Christian, composition and world music categories.

How does he corner such an obviously eclectic creative force to focus on building specific projects? In his own words:

"Big Country is one of those things that sort of just arrived, done, in my mind. What I do when that happens is I call myself. I call my machine at home and I sing the melody. I shouldn't be singing in the first place but its the only thing I can do. The melody is going to be gone. In another minute it'll be gone. That's the nature of composition. There's an inspiration factor, and then there's craft. So how do you take that inspired moment and how do you make it into something that's complete and makes sense all the way through?"

Find a way to put your creative idea into a form that allows you to revisit the idea at a later date.

For Bela, calling his answering machine and singing to himself allows him to capture his moments of inspiration for later use.

I keep a new post open in Wordpress whenever I'm reading so that when I do run into an idea I can put it into writing and include a link to the inspiration and give it credit. Josh prefers to write on paper. I'm happy to type.

What about you? Do you have a special way of cornering your flashes of inspiration so they can later be reworked into something complete and beautiful?

Also, if you'd like to share a link to a musician or song you find inspirational, please share that in a comment as well!