Music Video Before The Song

It's funny how ideas come to be especially because when it comes to my songwriting, they never seem to come the same way twice. One song might be inspired by a title I wrote down two years ago, another might be inspired by a movie I just watched, another may come about because I'm annoyed that there's no milk for my morning wheat flakes and banana. Because of this inspirational inconsistency it becomes tough sometimes to get things together and focus on writing a tune.

Two nights ago an even weirder scenario played out as I tried to go to sleep. As I doze off toward sleep is a common time for my brain to decide it wants to work and in turn it's one of those times where I lose what at the time seem to be the best ideas that have ever come to me. This particular flash of "inspirado" as Tenacious D might put it didn't come in the form of song, it came in the form of video.

I closed my eyes and there it was, the music video for a song yet to be imagined. I watched it play out in strange clarity as if I was watching MTV on mute. (Maybe not MTV, they hardly play music videos anymore, but you get the point.) It took me a while to find sleep as the ideas continued to cycle, adding clips of footage here and there, characters changing and camera angles correcting. But overall the concept stayed the same.

I woke the next day with a surprising remembrance of the yet to be created video for the non-existent song so I decided to take some notes and draw a picture that more or less summed it up. The exciting part is that the video that played behind my eyelids was pretty simple, a concept that actually could be a possibility for me to create. Now if I only had the song to go along with it.

That leads to inspiration idea #598 (random number here to exaggerate my point): Get ideas and write a song based on the music video for that song.

This has to be screwing with the time/space continuum somehow.