The Kaiser Chiefs’ Creative Process
On Radio 2 this morning, Alex Lester interviewed the Kaiser Chiefs (the inde rock band) about their creative process. It starts with a ‘flash of inspiration’ which may be a guitar or piano piece or some lyrics. This forms the main body of the song. The group then work together, playing, refining and developing the sound until it either works (i.e. it’s sounds like Kaiser Chiefs’) or it becomes clear it’s not going to work. When it works, it can take just two hours to develop a song from scratch.
And yet, even though they were ‘desperate to get another album together’, it took them almost a year to create their latest album, Yours Truly – eight months to write the songs and seven weeks to record them. when they are not writing they are busy playing and rehearsing.
Key components of the Kaiser Chiefs’ creative process seem to be:
- the flashes of inspiration
- being able to tell when what they are doing is working (i.e. it sounds like the Kaiser Chiefs) and when it is not working, which in turn implies that band members have a ‘Kaiser Chiefs sound’ in mind and that they somehow judge their new work against this sound
The process seems to have been motivated on this occasion by the ‘desperation’, which came from having to play ‘b side’ songs in their concerts in order to fill the time.
It would be interesting to know where thoseflashes of inspiration come from, wouldn’t it? And to understand more about how the band members recognise a Kaiser Chiefs sound, when it is also a new sound.
My own ‘flashes of inspiration’ tend to come when I have been mulling a problem or puzzle over in my mind. Suddenly I have a solution or an idea. I have no way of knowing in advance when this will arrive – and sometimes I only recognise that I have been ‘mulling’ when I look back. It seems like all this goes on in the back of my mind while I’m busy with other things. More and more, I’ve come to trust that solutions to problems WILL turn up – as long as I don’t try to rush them!
Posted by Marian
What about you? Where do your flashes of inspiration come from? And what do you call these moments?
And when you are developing YOUR ideas, do you look for a good fit between the new idea and a pre-existing template or model, like the Kaiser Chiefs? Or do you have another way of judging whether something is working or not?
for me a flash of inspiration comes when two or more different ideas suddenly ‘align’ and then make a new thing. its a bit like planets lining up to cause an eclipse. a moment of sycronicity!
in order to judge how successful the created thing is, I have to have a strong desire to express it and it seems that it is most sucessful when it correspondes with something that someone else also needs, that is a desire to consume
such as a painting or song (again an alignment)
Steph
March 1, 2007
Creative thoughts come to me in different ways I think. Sometimes it’s like Steph’s alignment. And sometimes an idea just pops into my head. I don’t know where it comes from, I might guess at it being emergent from some unconscious thinking and feeling and impressions received but not consciously noticed.
When it does, I am very sure at the time that it is a good idea. ‘Ooh, yes!’ I say to myself. The idea has a very short half-life – I like to think I’ll remember it at a later more convenient time and I usually don’t. So I feel have to capture it somehow. Oddly, the capturing (putting it down on paper as words or sketch or mindmap) can destroy it or at least make it mundane and less compelling.
Now I think of it, ‘capturing’ might be the wrong way to do it – think of what the metaphor of capture implies: caging, restraining – the eye of the caged tiger is dull and listless, its movements not so much prowling as pacing.
Maybe it’s too soon to be so concrete in the creative process. I would like a different metaphor and activity that enables the good idea to develop. Perhaps write a story around rather than about it, parallel, creating a context around it.
Phil
March 4, 2007