Swing Your Swing
Once, after watching a bunch of long, complicated videos on the technically perfect golf swing, I stumbled on a 98-second video of Scottie Scheffler, the number one ranked golfer in the world, detailing his swing. In the short, simple video, Scheffler says, “If you’ve seen my swing before, it’s not very orthodox.” His swing is unconventional. It’s a little wonky, a little weird-looking—not the swing you’d swing if your form were engineered to be technically perfect. “And so swinging your swing is an extremely important part of the game,” Scheffler said. Having good fundamentals is also important, so I make sure my grip is correct and my base is solid…But then from there, like I said, I just swing my swing,” which he then demonstrated, hitting a long drive down the middle of the fairway.
Swinging your swing—doing things your way, even if it isn’t technically perfect, correct, popular, or conventional—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
No, No, No, I Did It That Way On Purpose. I Like It.
When he was 13, the future multi-Grammy-winning music producer Finneas O’Connell called his friend’s dad, who worked professionally in music production. Finneas had just discovered a tool called a limiter—something music producers use to help control the volume of sound—and after some experimentation, he wanted to know, “Am I using it correctly?” “Finneas,” his friend’s dad told him, “listen, it’s really important that you understand the delineation between the correct way to do something and whether you like it or not. There’s always going to be someone in the music world to tell you why you did something incorrectly, why this is too that or that is too this. So it’s really important to like something or not like it…If somebody tells you, ‘That vocal is too compressed,’ that might be true…But if you say, ‘No, no, no, I compressed it that way on purpose. I like it,’—if you like how it sounds, then it’s the correct way.”
There Was Some Essential “Me-Ness” In It
For years, the writer George Saunders tried to write technically perfect stories. “I wrote story after story,” Saunders writes in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, “and everything I wrote was minimal and strict and efficient and lifeless and humor-free, even though, in real life, I reflexively turned to humor at any difficult or important or awkward or beautiful moment.” Publishers, editors, friends—everyone always reacted the same way to all of those stories: “the type of reaction writers dread: my stories were ‘interesting,’ there was ‘a lot going in there, for sure,’ it was clear that I’d ‘really worked hard on them.’” One day, on a conference call at the engineering company he was working at, “out of boredom,” Saunders writes, he started writing short, whimsical stories, then illustrating them as cartoons. By the end of the call, he had around ten of these cartoons, “and because they weren’t my ‘real’ writing,” Saunders writes, “I almost threw them out as I left work that day. But something stopped me.” He took them home and dropped them on the kitchen table. Later, from another room, Saunders heard “the sound of genuine laughter”—his wife at the kitchen table, reading those little whimsical cartoons. “This was, I realized,” Saunders writes, “the first time that anyone had reacted to my writing with pleasure.” The next day, he wrote a story in that new mode—“allowing myself to be entertaining, setting aside my idea of what a ‘classic’ story sounded like,” swinging his swing. “When I finished the story, I could see that it was the best thing I’d ever written. There was some essential ‘me-ness’ in it.” Others too saw that it was the best thing he’d ever written—after all those years of publishers and editors taking no interest in all those technically perfect stories, the story with some essential George-ness in it became the first story in his first published book, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.
You’ve Ticked Every Box, Like A Good Studio Executive
Shortly after James Cameron submitted a cut of Avatar to 20th Century Fox, he met with the studio executives. (At one point, there’s a 3-minute flying scene). “Why is the flying scene so long?” one executive asked. “It doesn’t advance the narrative or the character.” “You’re right on every count,” Cameron replied. “You’ve ticked every box, like a good studio executive…But guess what? I want to see it.” (In several interviews, I’ve heard Cameron say some version of, “The way I write is I work backwards from the shit I want to see.”) “And if I want to see it, my cognitive leap is there are going to be other people that want to see it too.” “Well,” Cameron said in a later interview, “it turned out that the flying is what the audience loved the most, in terms of our exit polling and data gathering.”
It Was This Creative Outpouring After All The Years Of Writer’s Block
In a rural part of America, Maggie Rogers grew up immersed in folk music. She started playing the harp when she was seven, picked up the banjo not long after, and throughout her teens, she wrote and produced her own folk songs, piecing together instrumental and lyrical elements in a way that was instinctive, playful, and spontaneous. At 18, Rogers moved to New York to study music engineering and production at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. There, she gradually let go of the playful methods of her youth to adopt the professional techniques she was learning in class. As she strived to meet her teacher’s expectations, conforming to the polished sounds of mainstream music, she suppressed her musical tastes and instincts. And for two and a half years, Rogers struggled to produce a single song. “It was just awful,” she said of the years-long creative block. The frustrations persisted until eventually, Rogers quit music altogether, transferring into NYU’s journalism school. “I thought that instead of telling my story in my music,” she said, “I could just tell other people’s stories as a journalist.” After the school year, over summer break, Rogers went on a hiking trip in Alaska, where she used her phone to record the sounds of the Alaskan wilderness around her—birds whistling, leaves rustling, gravel crunching, and water flowing. After Alaska, she visited some NYU friends studying abroad, and in Berlin, she was introduced to house music. Dancing to house music, with its repetitive beats and upbeat tempo, reminded Rogers of the meditative feeling she’d felt hiking the trails in Alaska. Back in New York, reinvigorated by her experiences in Alaska and abroad, Rogers decided to re-enroll in the music program. To graduate, she had to complete a senior thesis, writing, composing, and producing an original song. As she thought about the project, Rogers thought about the elements she’d been drawn to throughout her life—the storytelling of folk music, the sounds of nature on her phone, the tempo of house music, and the rhythmic qualities of both hiking and dancing. It was an eclectic mix of source materials, but instead of suppressing her tastes and instincts as she had in the past, Rogers decided, “Okay, all of these elements are pointing me to the fact that I have to just make music that sounds like me. I’m not going to worry about where I fit in.” With this decision to just swing her own swing, the years-long creative block slowly lifted. One day, patting on her jeans, a pair of Levi’s 501s, the rhythm caught her ear and she started snapping her fingers along to it. She recorded the patting and snapping, layered in some ambient sounds from her collection of natural noises from the trails of Alaska, and added a driving beat with a steady pulse in the spirit of house music. Then, she started improvising lyrics. “I picked up the pen,” she said, “and all the lyrics came out. And that’s exactly what happened. It was this creative outpouring after all of the years of writer’s block.” The result of this creative outpouring was her thesis: a song called “Alaska.”
You Just Have To Be Willing To…
On the day Maggie Rogers presented “Alaska” in class, the Grammy-winning artist and producer Pharrell Williams was there to listen and critique the students’ work. Before “Alaska” played, Rogers told Pharrell about how it came to be: from growing up around folk music to making music with her banjo, those years of being creatively blocked, that time she quit making music, the hikes in Alaska, and the house music in Berlin. “And I just started making music again a couple of months ago,” she told him. In the making of “Alaska,” she said, she tried to “kind of combine folk imagery and harmony with natural samples I picked up while hiking over the last couple of years with the sort of backbone and energy of dance music.” “I can’t wait to hear it,” Pharrell said. Then “Alaska” began to play in its entirety, and almost immediately, Pharrell’s eyebrows raised. He looked to his left at someone off camera, and then he nodded and smiled. When the song ended, he said, “Wow. I have zero, zero, zero notes for that. And I’ll tell you why. It’s because you’re doing your own thing. It’s singular. I feel like your whole story—I can hear it in the music. I can hear the journey. I can hear your background. I felt it…And that is such a special quality.” And then Pharrell turned to the rest of the class: “I want all of you guys to know that you possess the ability to do that for yourselves. You just have to be willing to use elements that are not necessarily popular. You have to be willing to melodically sing things that are not necessarily popular. You have to be willing to have music in your songs that doesn’t sound popular.”
You just have to be willing to swing your swing.