May 13, 2025 · Episode 20
49 Min, 58 Sec 

Summary

What is inspiration—and can you trust it to show up when you need it most? In this episode, Lyndon and Breallyn unpack the myth of the muse and dig into the truth behind creative inspiration. They explore overstimulation, the pressure to capture ideas, and the discipline it takes to keep creating when the spark is nowhere in sight. From ancient Greek mythology to $8 slippers and a soil-licking eco-fiction protagonist, it’s a fresh look at what drives artists to create—and what happens when the muse doesn’t show.

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Transcript

Lyndon: Welcome to Pain In The Arts. You are with Lyndon

Breallyn: and Breallyn

Lyndon: Hazzah!

Breallyn: Your favorite hosts.

Birthday Recap and a Lotto Surprise

Lyndon: Did you enjoy your birthday yesterday?

Breallyn: I did. It was lovely. Yes. I had quite a few nice little surprises and moments during the day. You and I went to lunch, which was good. And then we did a little bit of shopping at one of those home store things,

Lyndon: A home store that has been sullied by lotto.

Breallyn: There was a new lotto corner.

Lyndon: That was weird.

Breallyn: It was, maybe we could have bought a winning ticket. That would be nice.

Lyndon: But it’s also sad because it means that they were struggling to make money and saw an opportunity with having lotto in there. I don’t know how that works, but I assume they get some sort of little commission or kickback or

Breallyn: no doubt.

Lyndon: Something. So yeah, you expect to see that in a

Breallyn: they’re usually in newsagents. Yeah. Anyway, we did find a cute little table that you’ve dubbed the gin table, although I think I,

Lyndon: the G and T table.

Breallyn: thought I could see plants on it. But anyway, we’ll soon see what it gets used for a little bit more. Got both. Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah. It’s quite

Breallyn: small and movable, so that’s a good thing.

Lyndon: Although it is already a plant. The base of it is representative of a palm tree.

Breallyn: That is true.

Lyndon: Like a bronze sort of brassy stand, isn’t it? A glass round, glass top on it. That is, but it has that handy little loop at the top steel loop that you can pick it up and just move it around to wherever you happen to be

Breallyn: having your G&Ts? Yeah, I’m sure it’ll get a,

Lyndon: I’ll take my G&T outside please.

Breallyn: And I am wearing some cozy slippers today in the studio that my son bought, so that was lovely. So yeah. And lovely family dinner and I thoroughly enjoyed my birthday. Next year will be a bit of a milestone birthday for me. And I think I have dropped plenty of hints about international travel where I’ll go and meet French Lyndon.

Lyndon: I don’t think they’re hints when you actually say where you’re going and when. It’s not really a hint, is it?

Breallyn: I suppose not. You’ve got to drop a strong hint for it to be picked up sometimes.

Lyndon: Who’ll be responsible for getting you over there?

Breallyn: I think the first hurdle, you’re dropping hints

Lyndon: to yourself, this

Breallyn: is budgetary. Yeah. And then trying to figure out all of the many things. Yeah. Anyway, all I’m just gonna park that in the back of the brain and not think about it and be happy with my slippers.

The Infamous Slippers

Lyndon: They’ll be worn out this time next year. And you’ll need another pair. And you can just be happy with your slippers then as well. That’s what life’s come down to.

Breallyn: Just being happy with your birthday slippers. Yeah.

Lyndon: Oh, I need some more slippers.

Breallyn: No, you have to wait until September.

Lyndon: It’s hard to find some that you feel like a man in though.

Breallyn: Oh, your current ones

Lyndon: are the worst. You know? What’s wrong with them?

Breallyn: Oh, gosh,

Lyndon: It’s not real sheepskin.

Breallyn: That’s the least of their problems. They look like. I don’t know. They’re horrible.

Lyndon: They were $8 and I actually

Breallyn: $8 too much.

Lyndon: I actually felt, I thought less of myself when I bought them. Yeah.

Breallyn: Let’s just say I don’t like seeing them.

Lyndon: I must have had cold feet that year.

Breallyn: I don’t like seeing you in them.

Lyndon: Why didn’t you tell me initially?

Breallyn: I did. I said get them off.

Lyndon: Yeah, but you probably laughed and made it sound like, ha get them off. Not please, if you wear them, I’m unattracted to you. Get them off now. That’s what I’m hearing. I’ve had ’em for four years.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: What, this is not a good revelation. It’s not the sort of revelation I want.

Breallyn: I just avoid looking at them.

Lyndon: I actually hardly ever wear ’em. Yeah. To be fair.

Breallyn: Never wear them again. Do that.

Lyndon: Why don’t you do what you do with other things of mine? Just make them disappear like you’re the mafia and suddenly things just aren’t there anymore. You could’ve done that with them if you hated them so much.

I don’t want birthday slippers anyway.

Breallyn: You’re getting some. No, that’s the present.

Lyndon: No, just the worst. Good for you though.

Studio Cat Antics

Breallyn: We’re joined today by Nibbles,

Lyndon: the

Breallyn: house cat that at the moment is the studio cat. She’s under the couch.

Lyndon: I don’t like under the cat that’s sitting on. I can’t see her for a start. And there’s wires and leads and she’s not called nibbles for nothing.

Breallyn: True. I wanted to come and sit up here on the couch with me, like I love to have a cuddly animal.

Lyndon: You’re desperate for a therapy cat. Yeah, and I don’t think they’ve ever been earmarked for therapy. They need therapy. My gosh, they need copious amounts of therapy.

Breallyn: I just would settle for a cuddle and a little bit of patting and so on. But the thing is, I always have a problem is that it’s so relaxing and like cozy to cuddle up and you have a cat there and can snuggle in and have little pets, but ’cause I’m allergic to them,

Lyndon: it’s so dumb.

Breallyn: I then have to hold my hands in such a way that reminds myself, do not touch your face. Don’t put your hands anywhere. You have to go wash them. Don’t blink too hard. If you start getting itchy eyes, just ignore them. So it’s quite stressful and not as therapeutic as I would like.

Lyndon: Yeah. I haven’t washed my hands so much as I have since we’ve had this cat, and I don’t think I’m allergic to them as far as I know, but. I’ve seen what it does with its tongue and where it puts it, and then it licks all over itself. When your dad was here, he said that he was allergic to cats. And you had a cat? When you lived at home?

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: So who wore the pants in your home? So your mum, it definitely wasn’t her, she wasn’t allergic to cats.

Breallyn: Why would you have

Lyndon: a cat if you were allergic to Oh

Breallyn: no. Mum was the least affectionate to the cat out of all of us.

Lyndon: That’s well in sight. Maybe behind your back. She gave it a bit of a

Breallyn: No, The cat was my brother’s cat. Her name was Trixie and she wouldn’t let anyone touch her except for my brother.

Lyndon: The cat?

Breallyn: Yeah. And the cat lived outside, told you? Yeah. So she wasn’t in, she wasn’t an inside cat. She pretty much just came to the back door for meals and then glared at us and then walked away. That was the extent of having a cat. It was fascinating creatures. It wasn’t an intermittent experience of pet ownership. I did have a dog and she was lovely. Yeah. But she also wasn’t allowed to come inside, so I just had to spend a lot of time outside with her.

Lyndon: Oh, Nibbles is probably halfway through chewing a mic lead by now. It’s either that licking its butt or just staring at a black bird through the window that it’s never even gonna bother to try and chase.

Breallyn: Let’s just say she’s a lover, not a fighter. Let’s talk about today’s episode.

Defining Artistic Inspiration

Breallyn: Today it’s my turn to bring an episode. Last week we were graced by Ricky Woods’ presence here in the studio, and the week before that, I think you brought one. Today. I thought we could talk about inspiration. What the heck is that,

Lyndon: right? Yeah. What brought you to inspiration? What inspired you to write about inspiration?

Breallyn: I dunno, actually, I was looking for some inspiration about what topic to bring, but yeah, I thought this, the more I thought about it, the more I thought there’s so much in it that we could discuss well today, but probably many times over.

Lyndon: You know what I think choosing inspiration as your topic is an easy goal.

Breallyn: I hope so. Because I thought,

Lyndon: I mind you, I don’t mind considering you, you’ve brought death, funerals. What else have you brought to the table?

Breallyn: I did actually mind you bringing express think. Yeah. Something a little more lighthearted. Lighthearted. So there you go. But inspiration, I was thinking about it and was thinking about a lot of the artists that we know and friends and so on, and when people start to talk about where they’re getting their ideas from or whatever, it’s almost like this hush little thing sometimes that people go into and they’ll look at you a bit sideways and go, oh, it’s nice when the muse strikes and they’ll use these little phrases.

And I’ve found over the years that people talk about it almost like it is this thing that comes and you don’t, it’s like a fairy just gonna flutter on in and drop some pixie dust on you and then fly away again because you don’t know where it’s coming from. When it’s coming, you can’t make it come. You a little bit in awe of it and just, love it, but don’t trust it, that sort of thing. So yeah. It is funny, I’ve picked that up over the years when friends of ours have talked about what inspires them or when they’re getting inspired.

It’s like a relationship with their own creativity and it’s something that’s very precious to them, like where those ideas are coming from, where how they’re nurturing their creative process and so on. And they will hold that very gently and hold space for it, but be very protective at the same time. And we’ve even friends who have chosen not to take their medication for things like depression and bipolar, things like that.

Lyndon: Really?

Breallyn: Yeah. Because they don’t want to lose that sort of manic phase of having the inspiration and being able to get into that art. So yeah. So not recommending that please take your medications, but yeah,

Lyndon: each to their own.

Breallyn: It’s, it just shows how precious that is. Like for an artist, like the place that source of inspiration where the whole process kicks off. But it’s something that I think there’s a little bit of fear about, what if it doesn’t come, what if I don’t have a next idea once I’ve completed this one? Yeah.

Lyndon: It’s very interesting.

Breallyn: I thought I would ask you what’s been inspiring you at the moment or what. Have you got, we, we spoke about it.

Lyndon: Oh boy. Haven’t you picked the wrong day to ask me that?

Breallyn: Oh, what’s going on today?

Lyndon: So what do you wanna know? What’s inspired me? Recently?

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: I think too many things probably.

Breallyn: Oh,

Lyndon: I’m just tired of being inspired. I think I’m tired of yeah. I’m tired of consuming even good things. You can just have too much of stuff. It’s like going into an ice cream parlor being able to choose whatever flavor and having it, and then having another one, and then having another one, and then going back the next day and having another ice cream. It feels a bit like that where it’s just, it’s too much.

So yeah, I do prefer being inspired by something and then as soon as I can, turning that into some sort of output from it creatively so when that doesn’t happen, I think I’ve spoken before about opportunity, not having the opportunity to create is quite debilitating.

And you nearly have to temper your inspiration if you know that you’re not in a position to turn that into something, or to, yeah. Or to have that sort of move through you. But also, just being over stimulated or over inspired. See how I’ve turned your uplifting topic into a downer. I told you today was a bad day.

Breallyn: Oh, I’m pretty sure we can just about do that with any topic. But,

Lyndon: the sun went behind a cloud, maybe that’s why. All the self-help stuff, all the good stuff, that on one day you can kind of go, ‘this is fantastic stuff.’ Once you get oversaturated with it. Yeah. It’s it just becomes something else, doesn’t it? So perhaps a bit of an imbalance that I’m feeling creatively.

Breallyn: So the ideas that, you’ve picked up something from what someone said or something you’ve heard or whatever, and it’s sparked a little idea in you that you can’t necessarily follow through on.

Lyndon: That happens, but at the moment it’s more just, I need to be getting some stuff out. And getting some things recorded that I’ve been wanting to do for a while, yeah, that’s more what it is, but. It also makes it hard to answer that question, what’s inspiring me at the moment, because I’m trying to switch that off.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: I can get inspired by the most trivial of things though, anyways. So I’ll tell you what I have been doing a lot lately. I’ve been playing a lot of guitar, I’ve been doing a lot of guitar practice, and so that’s been good. Yeah. Sometimes weeks can go by and I feel like I’m neglecting practicing, so it’s hard to get that balance.

Breallyn: It is, yeah.

Lyndon: Like I read this week about balance the idea of balance is unrealistic. You can never have everything perfectly balanced. Not equitably,

Breallyn: I think too balance, I mean it’s, there’s something very static about balance. Like once something is balanced on something else that’s balanced on something else, it’s like those things gotta stay still then. And when are we ever still, when is life ever the same tomorrow as it is today? I don’t think balance is a great word for what we’re all trying to achieve, which is a correct mix.

Maybe it should be called a recipe or a I don’t know, even just a life flow rather than a life balance. Because yeah, it’s, you’ve gotta do the thing that is right for today. Not the same as what’s gonna be the right mix of things for tomorrow.

The Muse, Repetition, and Artistic Health

Lyndon: Maybe too when you’re talking about people not taking their medication so that they remain in more of a manic state. Maybe part of that is because it’s easier to ignore a lot of the other things. Like when you’re in that sort of manness of getting something done, it, you can really be blinkered in what you’re doing and not worry so much about consequences and other responsibilities and things that, you know, things that we would like to be able to just throw off and be able to just concentrate solely on our work.

If you’re taking medication that, that keeps you more regulated and more balanced, let’s say then yeah, perhaps that would take more of benefit then to not say get in that space, but just to be focused in, in that way.

I’m all for it.

Breallyn: I wanted to come back to the idea of where inspiration comes from. When we say, the muse has struck or has visited me, it’s obviously a reference to the nine muses from Greek mythology, which were goddesses who were the influences of all of the arts, like poetry and, music and dance and so on.

And yeah, there was one for each of them, and so it’s like a personification of inspiration, I suppose when you think of it like that. So people still talk about the muse has visited me, or, I’m trying to invite the muses in and stuff like that. But yeah, like the good fairies, little good goddesses do come at different times and from different places.

Lyndon: People aren’t thinking about it like that though. It’s just, it’s the term for inspiration I certainly don’t think of fairies visiting me or whatever, like I don’t, no, I don’t, no, I don’t think that, think of the muse as

Breallyn: no, I guess I wouldn’t say people are literally thinking that a goddess is visiting them. Some might, but the idea that inspiration has, it’s a little bit like a, I don’t know, from a divine source or something that it’s come from outside of this limited gray matter that we’ve each got.

Lyndon: But no one questions it

Breallyn: that it comes?

Lyndon: Yeah. Or that when it comes that there’s anything like, it’s a good thing. Yeah.

Breallyn: Oh yeah, it’s always a good thing.

Lyndon: Yeah. I never go, oh, hang on, inspiration’s here. Now what am I gonna do?

Breallyn: No,

Lyndon: I don’t even think about it.

Breallyn: I had here a quote that’s, it’s, I think it’s a truncated quote ’cause I don’t think he ever expressed it like this, but it’s often attributed to Pablo Picasso and he says “to copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.” And I think it comes from a conversation that he had with a friend and where he expressed that to copy yourself, it’s more dangerous than to copy other people because it leads to like just a loop like sterility in your creativity.

Yeah, sorry for the bad quoting there because I don’t think we can actually find the original actual wording.

Lyndon: But no one was there recording it with their iPhone. Who recorded it in the first place and then got it wrong?

Breallyn: It was, it was part of a conversation, but it’s been the idea’s being distilled into a quote that’s easy to put up on an Instagram tile,

Lyndon: I just imagine back then. There’s two people having a conversation in private or maybe at a coffee house. So one of them afterwards has gotta go in their diary. Oh, I was conversing with Pablo today. And he said this and I thought that was super interesting.

Breallyn: Yeah. Quite possibly. I don’t know where, how it was recorded, but yeah, I dunno.

Lyndon: I reckon maybe my mum was there. She overheard them chat.

Breallyn: I reckon if I was chatting to Picasso, I’d probably remember what he was saying.

Lyndon: I guess so.

Breallyn: But I think that the idea of like always searching for something new maybe rather than just, trying to do the same thing again that you’ve already done, put out another book that was as good as your other book, that,

Lyndon: so are you saying if you are repeating yourself or just copying the way that you always do something, then inspiration is no longer required?

Breallyn: Yeah. Maybe yeah. Inspiration’s kind of not part of that process anymore. You might be serving other gods.

Lyndon: I don’t know. I do think though that there’s different things isn’t there that come into play? Like if you are doing something creatively because there is no other way for you to operate then perhaps you are always searching for the horizon line that you can never get to. And you’re seeking inspiration all the time because it’s informing your work as much as everything else is. And so in that case you’d go, Pablo’s interested in the the health of the artist. Yeah. And their capacity to continue doing art.

But an artist who was toiling away for 5, 6, 7, whatever amount of years, and then stumbled upon their style that actually was being received really well and was starting to generate money for them. And so they went, I’m gonna do more like this because I can continue, I think doing my artwork. Yeah, no, I think that’s, you go, that’s probably a good thing.

Breallyn: That is, no, that is a good thing. ‘Cause it’s, they’re continuing their expression. And I think, out of all the artists whose art is pretty recognizable, just because you’d look at it and go, I know who did that one. A Picasso would be one of those things.

Lyndon: Picasso and Ken Done,

Breallyn: poor Ken. He gets so much crap from everyone.

Lyndon: Does he?

Breallyn: Pretty much. It was the tea towels. Ken. We were all for the art prints.

Lyndon: Yeah. Is when they

Breallyn: get onto our tea towels. Yeah.

Lyndon: Good on him. No, they were good. The modern day Picasso. Ken Done.

The Value of Boredom and Creative Discipline

Breallyn: You were talking before about, you’ve been consuming a lot of things and a lot of ideas come from that and there’s so many good influences and so on out there that are just at our fingertips, like great music or self-help things or whatever. I was thinking in contrast to that, the role of boredom and like pushing away from all that stuff and creating a vacuum where there is nothing in there and allowing inspiration to come from that.

Have you been able to do anything like that in recent times. I know we’ve talked about how very crazily busy we’ve been for many years just with responsibilities and so on. But I dunno, it seems to me we are coming to maybe a little bit of a different shift in our lives where we can make way for better creative practices. So boredom was one that I was thinking about today when I was thinking about this.

Lyndon: I agree with that for a start, that you can create a vacuum through boredom or through starving yourself of, even the opportunity to do something. Yeah, I think maybe, it’s a bit like when you have a shower and ideas come to you in the shower, you can’t do anything about them. Yeah. The same. When you go away on holidays sometimes you get a whole lot of, you get refreshed and you get a whole lot of good ideas. But you can’t necessarily do anything about them then either. So I don’t find I’m ever bored.

I never feel like I’m bored ever. What I feel like is that times when I’m not being obviously constructively creative that I have to tell myself that’s okay. So we’ve spoken about that before and even you just saying how busy we’ve been, it it grates against me because of always feeling I’ve gotta tell people that I’m busy and I’m busy doing this, I’m busy doing that because when they just see the output of all my creative endeavors, they go, what’s he do with the rest of his time?

It’s all the other stuff that you tell people that you’re busy with. You can’t say, oh, yeah, Monday to Wednesday I did bugger all really however, in between doing bugger all, I was doing three hours practice a day. And I was working on a song. I couldn’t get a melody right that entire time. And so it consumed my thoughts for the entire week. Yeah. It’s that doesn’t make sense. No. So you say, oh yeah, no, I had to do this. And then I, yeah. I was all the busyness of life stuff. So

Breallyn: little bit more concrete and Yeah. Yeah.

Lyndon: So I find when I’m doing something that isn’t creative, that I have to tell myself that’s ok this is okay. It’s healthy. You might not really want to go out and be sociable and then you end up going out and you talk to someone who happens to be really interesting and you’re like, oh, actually I’m really enjoying this. And then that conversation inspires you. You wouldn’t have got that had you just stayed at home. Yeah. So it’s not really boredom as what you are suggesting,

Breallyn: I’m more sort of thinking of boredom in the terms of, rather than filling up every empty space with, pick up your phone or turn something on, allow those thoughts to just meander, and get to the end. And then there’s nothing. And then you wait or you think something else, or you write something else down and then all of a sudden you’ve gone down another whole avenue that you might not have had. You filled that space with one of the usual kind of go-tos, the usual busyness and activities and.

Lyndon: Potentially increasingly harder to do when there’s so much demand on our attention. Yeah. I think, maybe it requires even more discipline than ever. It is interesting. I think artists are generally seen as being carefree, free spirits, irresponsible in a way, and also undisciplined. And when I think about how much discipline it takes to actually get stuck into serious art making and work, I feel like I’m really undisciplined and it certainly makes it really challenging.

I think some of the really great art that we’ve seen over the years, music or otherwise, has been from people that are highly disciplined in how they go about creating their work.

Breallyn: Oh, I would agree. And I think the approach is incredibly disciplined because it’s a work that you need to come to so authentically, so vulnerably. And there’s, I think, almost always an element of autobiography in almost every artwork. I might be wrong about that, but that’s something to explore another day. But what other, if you are selling cars in a car lot, you don’t have to bring that to your work. You just can come and do the job.

But when it’s about bringing all these nebulous ideas and wrapping it in the forms and the skills that you’ve built up over a lifetime and you’re bringing yourself, your authentic self to it. That’s a lot of high-end kind of discipline as you were saying. And a work ethic that is just not required a lot, I guess in, in other, not in all of the other forms of work.

Lyndon: Yeah. Nathan Cavalier really good post on Instagram this week where he realized what he was calling an energy leak, he realized that. All the little thoughts and challenges that he holds in his head while he is at work as a musician and as a music producer. When he leaves the studio to go home, yeah. He’s turning off all the equipment, shutting down the songs, closing the door, turning off the lights, and he said, but all the thoughts and the problems and the creative threads are still in his mind when he is at home.

And so he’s in that process of going, oh, I need to change my perspective. I need to deliberately switch off the. Switch off that part of my brain so that I can leave work at work, which is what you’re saying. It’s probably a much easier task for someone who, yeah, let’s just use your example of a car salesman. He’s not taking the cars home with him. He might take some of the problems, but in his work, he doesn’t have to put in like threads of himself, the art of selling a car. I suppose quite delineated. He could be quite removed from that. Yeah.

Whereas for someone like Nathan the artistic endeavor demands that you are bringing your authentic self into that moment and into every moment. And so it does make it a challenge to. To then leave that space and not take fragments of that with you. Yeah. So is that what you’re talking about?

Breallyn: Can’t remember.

Lyndon: What’s the topic?

Finding Inspiration in Nature: A Writing Exercise

Breallyn: The topic we are talking about today is inspiration. And I actually thought I would bring a little example of when I needed to complete a piece and so I took myself to a place where I could get that inspiration. And it was, it’s was just like a nice example and memory that I have of setting myself up to be able to complete this piece. I was writing a speculative fiction.

Lyndon: So inspiration didn’t come to you, you went and found it?

Breallyn: I had already had the ideas for this piece. It’s, it was eco fiction, but I wanted to capture some sort of authentic details about a place. ‘Cause I was writing about a place, this character had come somewhere. So I wanted to like, have the experience of the place I went. I actually went up to Mount Dandenong. I took a day drop the kids to school and went for a drive and knew I had to be back by three and all that.

So I drove up there and I, ’cause I wanted to feel like how steep are these hills that I remember from when I was a kid. I wanted to feel that steepness in my ankles when I was walking up and down. I wanted to really touch the surfaces and all of the textures and so on in this part of the forest. So I just spent a day immersing myself in that part of nature.

And while I was there, I was able to write the sections for the piece that I had been writing, but. What also happened was that I suddenly was hit with all these other ideas that I thought, oh, this piece that I’m writing which I had started out writing as a short fiction. I, I suddenly thought it could be a novella or possibly a full novel. And that was really nice.

So that inspiration it came when it wasn’t, I wasn’t expecting it to, ’cause I was just trying to think about the immediate problem that I had of making some authentic details and I thought for something different, I might actually read a couple of the paragraphs that I wrote as a result of that experience. So as a little bit of background, the character has come to this place set in Mount Dandenong. But she’s a human character who’s never been on earth before. So there’s her background

Lyndon: and Mount Dandenong is. Mount Dandenong are ranges.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: On the outskirts of the city of Melbourne. How far away do you reckon? 45 minutes, maybe an hour. From the heart of the city?

Breallyn: Yeah. I grew up in the foothills of the valley, below the, yeah. Mountains there. Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful forestry area, like ancient eucalypts and stuff like that. All right. Here is two paragraphs of my piece.

Myra enters a grove of knee high ferns overhang. With high Eucalyps. Many branches have come down and with nothing to stop their slow progress back to the earth. They hang linking arms with the still standing trees. They have come from and form a middle layer of growth. Bright line Moss grows on many lengths, and Myra rests her cheek against a lush patch. It’s soft and fiery and feels like her father’s favorite cardigan.

Myra appears at the tiny fronds of moss that line next to her nose. She enters their complex micro world and remains there tracing the feathery lines of repeated pattern until a bird call makes her remember the world beyond the moss. And she’s unaware of how much time has passed while she’s been captivated in that magical land.

The Sphagnum Musk still fills her nose sliding downhill beneath the grove of tall trees. Myra’s feet sink deep into rich brown soil. Tiny insects hover above it. Myra sinks to her knees and bends her face to their level. The smell of dirt fills her head, not like a rot in the organic garbage chute, but a wholesome loam. Hinting at the layers of progress. As leaves, decompose and release nutrients, she picks up handfuls of it, cool dark crumbs, saliva suddenly pulls below her tongue and Myra licks the dirt in her hands.

The smell fills her mouth with richness, the textures crumbly and grits squeaks in her teeth. And when she swallows, she’s left with a metallic iron on her tongue. Something about the mineral richness makes her crave more and she stuffs in several more mouthfuls of its wholesome rot.

There you go. So that was my experiment on Mount Dandenong.

Lyndon: It’s different to my experiment on Mount Dandenong.

Breallyn: Pray tell?

The Ongoing Quest to Capture Ideas

Breallyn: The other thing I wanted to ask you, Lyndon, is what do you do when you have an idea? I know we’ve talked about this

Lyndon: so many questions today.

Breallyn: Oh, sorry. We’ve talked about this before, like just not on the podcast, just from time to time. Like in the sort of, hair tearing out phase of oh, I had a notebook, I’d written something down, I can’t find it. Just that process of capturing ideas and having some kind of discipline behind them.

Lyndon: Normally what happens is throughout the mess of scattered ideas captured on all kinds of devices and in notebooks on receipts. I tell myself, oh, this is how I know I’m an artist, because this is what we all do. So I don’t know how many creative people ever get this right. And I would then question I would, I’d wanna see, I’d wanna see their creative passport if they don’t have this as a ongoing battle.

Breallyn: It is. Why is it such a struggle?

Lyndon: I don’t know. I think it’s like me, but back at high school where I go, I know I’ve got the intelligence to be able to do this subject. If I just apply myself, I could do really well. And so I think I have this idea that I am, I’ve got this idea that one day I’ll be, I’ll master this organization thing. Yeah. And then a new app comes along and you go, oh, this app will be my savior. And I don’t do that anymore.

I just go, you know what, I’m pretty happy with the systems I’m failing at, the moment, and I’ll just keep those. Thank you very much. Yeah, I put down look what I need to do is remember my systems.

That’s the, that’s my biggest problem. And also to know that they’re not always gonna be at my fingertips. The cardinal sin is to not capture something. So to go, oh, I’ll worry about that later. I remember. Yeah. Yeah. And there has been times where I’ve really gone outta my way to remember an idea that later was not a good idea.

Breallyn: Yeah. Yeah.

Lyndon: So it happens all the time.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: But the idea of that room mic that I have up there, as I said in my video, I did a little behind the scenes video shoot, which is on Patreon little seven minute tour of the studio and the room mic up there is to have on during pre-production so that it’s always recording what’s happening in the room.

So if you play something when you’re just trying to figure something out or you’re just mindlessly noodling on the guitar or whatever, or just humming a melody, it’ll all be captured. You can always go back to it. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, the way I capture things is I use my phone a lot like everyone these days for that.

Breallyn: Yeah. It is good. It’s always there. Back in the day we were encouraged to carry notebooks and pencils around.

Lyndon: I spent hours and hours trying to work out. This is once I ditched any apps that weren’t the ones that came with the iPhone because I just got tired of this continual search. And then you find an app and then iPhone does an update and one of their stock apps now does that. Yeah, Thing that the app you paid for, did you know? Yeah. So I got tired of that.

But I did spend hours trying to work out how to attach a voice memo into a note because the voice memo didn’t allow me to write down the lyrics in it. But somewhere in amongst all of that, I did get an app called Session Studio, which I can recommend because it does all of that and more, it’s designed, actually, one of the guys behind it is I think Bjorn from ABBA.

Breallyn: Yeah. Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah. So it sees you right from that inspiration through to the completion of a song.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah. There’s a place for that in my workflow as well. But yeah, so all this stuff doesn’t mean that I don’t have things written down on a piece of paper.

Breallyn: Yeah. I know in the past I’ve had much better habits where I’d have a, yeah. The notebook beside my bed, so that if I woke up with an idea, I could jot it down or I could journal late at night or just different things like that. And I’ve, I have done a bit of that recently, but I haven’t been in a good practice for a while.

But I feel like with this podcast starting and I have commenced working on a novel that had stalled for quite a long time. Feeling like it’s a new era. And I was, before you started talking, I was hoping that, I was like, I’d been thinking, oh yeah, I’m actually gonna get into, I’m gonna have it all sorted out this time. I’m actually going to get it all together.

I don’t know why I thought that, because as soon as you said, yeah, no, it’s just never really happens perfectly. I was like, oh, of course it’s not, I’m still gonna get, I’m gonna lose the notebook. I’m gonna forget. I’m gonna do all the same old, wrong things that I’ve always done.

But anyway, it doesn’t matter. Like you said, just capture it somewhere, write it down. You’ll come across the right bits of paper when you need to. And if not, just get a new idea, yeah, there’s plenty of ideas. I think that’s the thing, like I feel like that inspiration, it’s always bubbling away there somewhere. And it’s more about creating the time for it, letting it happen.

Lyndon: I think that’s one of the hard things with ideas, is that sometimes it’s just not the right idea for now. And so you have to put it away knowing that it might have a place later in your life. But my fear with that is will I remember or be ever be able to find it. Yeah. I’ve gotta probably do a co-write tomorrow and in preparation for it, I want to go through a lot of my notes and notebooks and things. But it’s like, how far back do I, how far back do I go?

Breallyn: Are you just trying to gather a couple of starter ideas to take in? So there’s the beginning point. Yeah. It’s things just called song starts.

Lyndon: Yeah. Which I have loads and loads of them, I just need to set aside enough time to go through things. As soon as I hear something I’ll know. No, that’s not something I wanna take along. But yeah, if needed, I don’t wanna be sitting there going, oh, I know I’ve got something, and then be scrolling through stuff.

Breallyn: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s

Lyndon: just the thing to do.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: Like I was saying before, that’s when you know you’re an artist is when you know everything is a bit more disorganized than you’d like it to be. And yeah, it shows you’ve got your priorities in the right place. Where, when it comes to artistic endeavor, I think so it’s a bit heartening, it’s all mountains and valleys, the life of anyone, but the life of an artist speaking from personal experience, sometimes it doesn’t take much for you to feel like, oh yeah, I’m doing it.

And then it doesn’t take much for you to go, what am I doing? Who do I think I am? And so even in that’s how you know that you’re probably doing the right thing. I really I can’t remember who said it I should find it and put it in the show notes but the guy was saying, how do you know you’re on the right path? Because there’s no path in front of you.

Breallyn: Oh,

Lyndon: If there was a path in front of you, then you’re not on the right path. Yeah.

Breallyn: I think that’s a good spot to leave our episode on. Inspiration. Wow. Walking out into

Lyndon: I did something

Breallyn: into great unknown.

Lyndon: Yeah. Yeah.

The True Nature of Inspiration: Action Over Waiting

Lyndon: Just on the idea of inspiration and inspiration coming to us, and, I was saying that we don’t question it, really. And we welcome it with open arms and sometimes we get preoccupied with being able to recognize when it’s there and whatnot. Yeah. But it seems to me universally the greater challenge is to be creating and continually moving forward when the inspiration isn’t there.

Breallyn: Yeah. When it’s dried up a bit and. Yes. Yeah. Not strong sparks something and to not

Lyndon: be relying on it, Yeah. And to be doing the things, that you need to do, like inspiration is literally, oh gosh. If I was to put a percentage on it, of the act of creation or creative endeavor, I would think inspiration is probably one to 5% Yeah. At the most. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And so it’s fine to get inspired by what someone said or a conversation that you had or inspired by a post that you saw on Instagram or inspired by something incredible, or a life event or a tragedy. Whatever it might be, I think that sort of stuff is everywhere.

If you don’t feel like inspiration is coming to you, it’s pretty easy to go find inspiration. Yeah. I don’t think you have to look far, but if you’re waiting for lightning to strike or something, magnificent and earth shattering, that might come once, twice in a lifetime, or you might get something sizable annually, who knows?

But that’s that out of the world inspiration, where you go, where did that come from? It only comes to you when you’re in the process of working and putting, is it your nose to the grindstone? Yeah, that would hurt. But that’s when the inspiration strikes you. You can’t just be sitting there with your hands up in the air or meditating, even waiting for the inspiration. That’s not how it works. And like even, sitting there letting your own thoughts swirl around that’s not inspiration either. That’s a different process.

Breallyn: Yeah. Often you have that inspiration come and it’s not convenient ’cause you are working on something else or Yeah. You’re hands deep into something Yeah. Doing your work and, yeah.

Lyndon: And I’ve found too, over the years musician, even when I was really young, like I’ve, when it comes to practicing, I’m really terrible at staying the course and staying focused. And in a way it’s because what’s happening when I’m practicing is what happens when people are working and then inspiration hits them. What happens when I’m practicing something on guitar or trying to work out how someone has played a piece of music.

After about, I don’t know, five minutes, 10 minutes, whatever it might be, I get inspired by whatever’s happening under my fingers and the sounds that I’m hearing, and I just go off in my own little world and, so I’ve, I’m really terrible at copying other people. But I think that’s how inspiration works. You have to be doing. You can’t be

Breallyn: I just wait for it. Yeah. It’s not coming. If you just wait, you can’t

Lyndon: be static or,

Breallyn: yeah. I think too it’s important to embrace bits that you get. ‘Cause it’s not always a complete idea and a way to work everything out. Your entire plot doesn’t always come in one big lightning bolt. It can be a little thread here and there. And sometimes you follow those things and they don’t really work out. It just doesn’t mesh with the whole rest of the project you’re doing. But yeah, sometimes they are little bits of gold that you go, oh yeah, that could actually, that’s how that’s gonna work in. Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah. So there’s that responsibility that when inspiration comes at whatever time in whatever form that you note it down and that you record it in some way. But then not to think that that’s the be all and end all, because inspiration can keep coming at you for the same project or whatever it is that you’re working on. And if you hold too tightly to that initial inspiration, you miss the other stuff.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: And there’s been many times where what I thought was a good idea and was the inspiration for something got superseded by other

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: Other inspiration and other ideas along the way, and I think that’s something that’s exciting about collaboration is being able to take on other people’s ideas and just see how something can grow from that.

Breallyn: For sure when I was writing a lot of plays and then rehearsing them and performing them with a theater group, the phrase we used for that, of when the thing that inspires you ends up not working with the whole rest of the play, we’d say, all your babies must die. Yeah. And yeah, that sort of became a bit of a thing that we had to remind ourselves of all the time to just Yeah. Kill those lines that worked initially, but now they’re just holding the whole scene back

Lyndon: That strays into editing, doesn’t it?

Breallyn: That’s true.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Breallyn: That’s a topic for another day.

Lyndon: Yeah. I’ve got Your heart’s on your left, isn’t it? I’ve had these chest pains, the whole conversation. What? On my right side?

Breallyn: Something you probably should have mentioned. Oh, it’s on your right. Other’s. Okay. It’s on my right side. Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah. But I’ll be right. Don’t worry about me. You’ve been listening to Pain In The Arts where the pursuit of meaningful art meets the unpredictable demands of real life. Speaking of unpredictable demands, Brea.

Breallyn: Yes,

Lyndon: speaking of predictable demands.

Breallyn: Yeah. Here we go.

Lyndon: I demand you to spruik our website. Www Pain In The Arts life You can read episode transcripts More blogs are coming. Brea, you gonna write some blogs?

Breallyn: Yes, I am. Pick up some of the threads we’ve been talking about and yeah, you can have a quick read through. And hope that they inspire you. Lyndon, how are people gonna find us if they wanna get more involved in Pain In The Arts?

Lyndon: You can go to Patreon.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: patreon.com/painintheartslife. Now it is Pain In The Arts. You probably know that if you’re listening podcast, if you’ve found Yeah,

Breallyn: we were actually speaking to your sister the other day who we hadn’t really told about our podcast and we mentioned the name of it and it, I think it took three goes because she went, oh, I thought you were just saying pain in the ass.

Lyndon: Three goes in 15 minutes later. ‘Cause she goes, oh, it’s a really good name. And I thought, yeah, it’s a pretty good name. But she heard that wrong. Anyway,

Breallyn: I wonder what she thought you were talking about. Just, I don’t know anything generally annoying.

Lyndon: Yeah. We ended up talking about cause she does, she’s a yoga instructor doula. So she lives a very creative life but yeah, she’s also having to transition a lot of that stuff to the online world. Running courses and whatnot. So we were talking to her about some of the ways that we use technology to help us do some of the heavy lifting when it comes to creating this podcast or anyway, it got us thinking about that. We’ll probably do an episode on that in the future. Yeah.

Breallyn: Our favorite tools,

Lyndon: These are a few of our favorite tools. I’m a bit of a tool. Am I your favorite tool?

Breallyn: You are my very favorite.

Lyndon: Yeah. So maybe that’s something we’ll collaborate on rather than doing a surprise topic. We’ll do a Oh yeah. We’ll do an episode on how we leverage AI.

Breallyn: That would be another good topic. Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Breallyn: The world is changing with that stuff. Yeah. And we can use it too. Assist us or we can tear our hair out over it. But yeah, I think the way forward is to certainly just figure out how we can use it to free ourselves up to do more of what we love.

Lyndon: Pretty much. That’s the plan anyway.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: So thanks for listening And you’ll catch us next week.

Breallyn: Thank you for joining us today.

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