Yes, I think it’s hard to overstate the parallels between a traditional music album and a poetry collection, both in selection and sequencing, but also in the amount of effort that goes into mixing/editing and polishing each track/poem. And everything tied together with a memorable album/book cover design.
I don’t know how music has affected my “process,” but certainly one of things that led me to poetry was looking at song lyrics and thinking about the similarities and differences between lyrics and more conventional page poetry. Recently it occurred to me that another similarity is how musicians typically write music first or at the same time as they write lyrics, and rarely lyrics first. That’s sounds so much like ekphrasis, but where the musician’s own music is serving as the artistic inspiration for the lyrics.
Occasionally someone will do lyrics first, and it’s also worth hearing them talking about that atypical process, as Olivia Rodrigo recently did on her NPR Tiny Desk concert. She describes taking a poem and setting it to music as an “experiment.”
Should be queued up to her explanation (8:30 mark):
Yes, I think it’s hard to overstate the parallels between a traditional music album and a poetry collection, both in selection and sequencing, but also in the amount of effort that goes into mixing/editing and polishing each track/poem. And everything tied together with a memorable album/book cover design.
I don’t know how music has affected my “process,” but certainly one of things that led me to poetry was looking at song lyrics and thinking about the similarities and differences between lyrics and more conventional page poetry. Recently it occurred to me that another similarity is how musicians typically write music first or at the same time as they write lyrics, and rarely lyrics first. That’s sounds so much like ekphrasis, but where the musician’s own music is serving as the artistic inspiration for the lyrics.
Occasionally someone will do lyrics first, and it’s also worth hearing them talking about that atypical process, as Olivia Rodrigo recently did on her NPR Tiny Desk concert. She describes taking a poem and setting it to music as an “experiment.”
Should be queued up to her explanation (8:30 mark):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmh3iruf4RA&t=510s