Lennon and McCartney

So there I was in the Denver airport after doing some workshops for the Colorado ASTA Summer Conference and The Atlantic magazine was on display in a gift shop. There was a cool rendering of an image of Paul McCartney and John Lennon from around 1966 with bold letters, “HOW GENIUS HAPPENS,” and below that, “The Neuroscience of Creativity.” The reason I chose music as a career at the age of 10 was because of the Beatles. Now they’re gonna help me with my neuroscience homework? Awesome! They’re the gift that keeps on giving!

The actual title of the article was, “John vs. Paul: The Power of Creative Tension.” The one on genius and neuroscience was another article. Of course the cover looked much flashier and marketable by combining a large image of the two and words like genius and neuroscience.

Neurosell, sell, sell!

Be careful about getting your advice about science and learning from the media. Their motivation is to sell things, not get the science right. In this case it is a small deception, in others it is neuromyth.

I think the article is very interesting, showing how they prodded each other to become better. How their radically different personalities – Paul the charming diplomat and John the boorish rebel – created the fertile environment in which each other’s creativity flourished. Nice, I buy it, good rock journalism and sociological study. I’m glad I read it.

Here is where we can go wrong. I have seen again and again developing musicians and creatives who want to look at the way accomplished professionals do things and then try to duplicate those things themselves thinking that, and it makes sense on the surface, they might get similar results. When they don’t it gets chalked up to something like the magical element of talent.

Talent, whatever it may be, if it exists at all, is not necessary for any level of achievement.

We may argue with a teacher, or someone online, who tells us differently, “Lennon and McCartney did it that way, are you better than them?” Of course the article only describes the creative process by two learned, motivated musicians who had spent thousands of hours over nine years playing, composing, listening, asking – learning.

When I was younger I read about a great guitarist who was so obsessed with the instrument when he was younger that he took it with him everywhere. So I, quite intelligently, thought if I strapped mine on while I walked around town I might be able to get better. Besides looking goofy (not the first, not the last) I do remember thinking, “Now, what do I do?” The reality, of course, is that the budding professional guitarist was taking his guitar with him as he developed because he had many ideas and questions he wanted to work out and was anxious to do so. Just ‘living’ with the guitar without direction would be useless – and it was. Any wonder I wasn’t getting much better despite really, really wanting to?

It would be the same if anyone wanting to learn how to create like McCartney and Lennon tried to do it the way described in the article. The year is 1966. By that time John and Paul had been together for nine years. They had spent thousands of hours performing live and learning material. They played hours long stretches seven days a week in a port town in Hamburg. They had to learn a large amount of material including standards from many other styles at the time. They had to repeat performing these over and over thousands of times. They then toured the world – twice – and that was just part of the hundreds of live performances they played. They spent as much or more time in the studio writing and laying down their parts. They familiarized themselves with all sorts of music from all sorts of cultures. They could, they were world travelers several times over at a very young age. They spent many more hours composing together.

Here’s a great story. The 1963 hit, “From Me To You,” was composed in the back of a tour bus between shows. They were obsessed with getting better as composers for years. Paul McCartney said, “That was a pivotal song. Our songwriting lifted a little with that song. It was very much co-written. We were starting to meet other musicians then and we’d start to see other people writing.” AH HA, how many professional hit writing touring musicians are we meeting and spending countless hours with on a tour bus? That part isn’t in the article is it? McCartney continues, “After that, on another tour bus with Roy Orbison, we saw Roy sitting in the back of the bus writing Pretty Woman. It was lovely. We could trade off with each other. This was our real start.” He says they ‘got their real start’ around 1963 after countless hours playing and writing together over six years.

The both of them partnered with a classically trained musician, producer George Martin, who could translate their ideas into orchestration. He also had significant input into the production of the music, even at the compositional level, influencing John and Paul, who been working diligently and regularly with Martin for four years by 1966. And this is just for starters.

Develop a relationship with a compositional partner and go through a long term learning crucible like that. You’ll get very good, I promise.

We see this in music learners frequently. Someone will ask a professional performer a question about, say, playing scales, or something like that, and they might respond that they don’t do so. You can be sure others, and that person’s teacher if they have one, will hear about that. “Why should I play scales, so and so doesn’t, are you better than so and so?”

So and so is not necessarily a teacher, they’re a performer. There’s a huge difference. Those who can, do. Those who know how it is done, teach. Those who can do both well have mastered two different and equally complex skill sets. Good teaching takes as much development as good performing. If the professional can teach then the wrong question was asked. Don’t ask what they do now; ask what they did when they had as many quality practice hours as you have right now. Perhaps describe the music you are working on and tell the performer what is at your peak level of ability currently. Can you play all of Elton John’s hits really well on the piano, or can you only get through one easier song like Let It Be? Those are two VERY different levels of players who need very different advice. The good thing about a professional, if they also know how to teach, is that they have gone through both of those stages. What did they work on then. Don’t expect to be able to do what THEY do now by doing what they do NOW.

If you are a teacher I think a potential response to a student who asks a question like that might be, “Who cares, I’m a lot farther along than you. Which one of us should be making judgments about what you need to do to get there?”

It benefits everyone who is trying to learn something to understand that they have not built the many, many, many basic skills that Joe Professional built when he or she was at their stage. You didn’t see that part. You only see the performances many years later. If you wanted to become a professional bodybuilder you wouldn’t ask a pro how much they lift and try to do that. You’d hurt yourself. The same way you’re hurting yourself by wasting time on advice that you can’t use yet. You already have a great personal source for advice – if at first you don’t succeed. . .try doing what your teacher told you the first time. And if you don’t have a teacher you should consider getting one, if not in person then online. If not that then find the best trusted sources online you can and follow directions closely. Give it a few weeks/months and see if it’s working. You can add and subtract from what you are doing from there. But I can’t emphasize enough how much time a teacher will save you from making mistakes that you don’t need to make. You’ll still make mistakes, it’s part of the learning process, but a teacher will save you a lot of time.

You should also find someone who can teach, I mean really teach you how to practice because learning how to do things on the instrument is just one thing. Having a comprehensive idea of the really weird ways the best practicing works, and being taught that in the same way you are being taught instrument operation, is the missing link in modern music instruction.

I know a guy who does that. You can find him on my website. People say he’s pretty good at it. Who knows?

And by the way here is a little note for anyone who is studying music formally such as at the college level as one example. If you think your teacher’s advice to you, the student, is inferior because it differs from a what a master performer currently does, then what do you think of all of your teacher’s advice that the master performer keeps repeating, over and over, in masterclasses that your teacher has been telling you for some time?

How well we figure that how practicing works is how ‘talented’ we will seem, but there is no reason to not figure it out. Trust me, it aint ‘talent’ that is holding you back.

To become what they are
Do what they did, not what they do.