Reply To: I’m your Muse, You’re my Muse . . .
You’re totally forgiven this, but since I like to consolidate threads, why not jump to the Helping JoCo thread? (I hope I don’t sound chiding — I think it’s an interesting subject, which I’m glad you brought back up, and I certainly don’t mean that anyone else needs to know all the discussions inside and out!)
You ask:
Does Jonathan accept ideas from folks like us? I know he does covers of other artists’ songs, so I’d wager that he’d be open to ideas from others, if they strike his fancy and give him ideas.
Not to speak for JoCo, but the general pattern has been that when he takes ideas, they’re from people with whom he has some established relationship and with whom he feels more or less on the same wavelength (primarily John Hodgman — see JoCopedia for a list of songs that grew from a JH-JC collaboration). At which point, oh, look, whose horn is that? Oh, it’s (Jinx’s and) mine?
Bry: Do you find that external challenges like that in general act to kick-start creativity in some way?
Shhhh…. Yeah! I mean, having a deadline like that is a great way for me to become creative, because it lets me avoid it for a long time and then work on it very hard at the last minute, which is … how my brain works most of the time.
Bry: And having song ideas set out by Hodgman and Adam Sachs?
Oh yeah, I mean it’s always helpful to get a suggestion that clicks with me. Because that’s the biggest hump to get over, I think, is the finding something that you like, that you want to write about, and so when somebody says “You must write about this,” like — that problem’s solved. Because you have to.
Bry: Do you find that there are things that really don’t click with you? I mean, you must get a lot of e-mails.
Yeah, I get a lot of song suggestions. Some of them are good and some of them are not so good. I mean — but that’s a value judgment, though, which I don’t really mean, because some of them make me think “Oh yeah, I should write that song,” and some of them make me feel “I don’t really want to write that song.”
— from A Talk with JoCo, Part 3 (Thing a Week)
We’ve had a bit of this discussion in the forum thread about the apocryphal Part 6 of that interview, too.