555 - Overcome Dead Ends & Open Up to New Directions with Hrishikesh Hirway

0:00This is not an ad, it's a gift. I'm going to be at the Icon Illustration Conference this year in July doing a handful of different things. And I asked them if they could give me a discount for the listeners of the show because I would love to see you there and hang out at the after parties and whatnot. And they let me have a$100 discount to share with you, which is just so generous and so awesome. If you're an illustrator, I highly recommend going to Icon. It's been a magical experience. The times that I've gone, even the first time in 2014 that I went, it was a very scary leap. But so worth it.

0:31Go to icon.creativepeptalk.com to learn more. The discount is automatically applied to that link. icon.creativepeptalk.com. Hope to see you there. has your creative groove become a creative rut this is a thing i think about a lot because it's happened to me a bunch of times where you struggle to kind of find your way you find something that works and then you just go over that thing over you know you're just like treading that path and getting as much as you can from it because it was so hard to get and then eventually that groove just digs down until it's a rut that you're stuck in. It's really easy to get in that place.

1:14Today on the show, we've got Rishikesh Hirwe, the host, creator, and producer of the popular and phenomenal podcast Song Exploder. This is the second time that Rishikesh has been on this show, and we had an absolute blast chatting. And the thing I took away from his perspective with this new album that he has, It's called In the Last Hour of Light. It's fantastic. I've listened to it three or four times. The single Stray Dogs I've just had playing in my mind over and over. It features Iron and Wine. It's just a great, great tune. But what I took away from this conversation was just how many ways he has opened himself up to what he needs to get out of ruts.

2:02whether it's coaching or perspective from a producer or it's a prompt from a musical friend or if it's just opening up to doing things the wrong way this is a huge through line through this whole show and i think there's going to be so many things that are going to help you get out of your creative rut in fact at the end i'm going to come back for a really quick three part creative call to adventure three different options because it was just so much great stuff that came out of this i want to hit all of those um but for now check out this chat uh that i had by the way um richie case is also a composer he did the the soundtrack for the thriller companion from new line cinema and netflix's television series everything sucks and a handful of others he's just got a great CV and he's just as fun to talk to and nerd out about creative stuff.

3:06I had a blast talking shop about all of this. I think you're going to come away feeling open and inspired for your next creative project. And I'll be back at the end with those three prompts. Here's my chat with Rishi Keshe, your way. On the creative journey, it's easy to get lost, but don't worry, you'll lift up. Sometimes you just need a creative pep talk.

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6:18You have an ego? For sure. I have two reasons for asking. The first one is you're kind of famous for cutting yourself out of your own podcast and really like letting the interviewee shine. And then also I feel like listening to your album feels like it's about me. And I'm sure everybody kind of feels like that. Like you really have something very like universal in the stuff that you make. Does that ring true to you? I'm so flattered and thrilled that that is what was behind that question. That makes me feel great. On the music side, especially that's so gratifying to hear because the songs are so specific and so personal to me that I, I sort of went into this being like, yeah, I don't know.

7:11if anybody else is going to connect with these ideas or these feelings, but this is what's going on and this is what I want to write about. Yeah. And that makes sense. And they are very specific and I know they're about very personal things, but there's just something in that, that classic and the specificity lies the universal thing. It really feels like that. There's so many. And I also like that. I think because you're getting so specific, you're teasing out things that aren't usually explored in songs. Was that intentional? But that's just like the dream comment to get. So thank you. It's true though.

7:49It wasn't intentional. Except for the idea that I did want to just write about these moments like I was looking through a photo album of my own life and describing exactly what was in the photograph and where I was in that moment and what I was feeling. Like if you could step inside the photograph again and relive that little, you know, four second, five second moment. Yeah, that makes tons of sense. Does this resonate with you? Because I feel like, so there's problems with this definition of creativity, but researchers often define creativity. Their working definition is often novel and useful.

8:35Uh, and I like thinking about that because I, I feel like we over identify creativity and art as novelty. So it has the, it's very, it's about originality. And that's also kind of about the individual, like the specificity element of that. but I feel like if there's this other side, which is the useful, the connectivity, you know, the, this doing stuff for other people. Um, I just, that's one of the things I was struck by when I think about you because you spent so much time deconstructing other people's music and kind of championing it. And then also building your own thing as a musician and a composer, it just strikes It strikes me that you took a more selfless path, which is not often associated with creativity.

9:28And even your presence is often like pretty soft-spoken and grounded. And I just wonder if you feel like that's an accurate portrayal of your journey or if I'm missing stuff behind the scenes. I think that it is accurate, especially, you know, from just outside of my own experience of it. I think hopefully, yeah, the reception of it, if that's how you, how it felt to you, then I don't have any issue with it. Like, I'm like, oh, that's, that's cool. I think for me, there was a lot of stuff and a lot of feelings kind of bubbling under the surface of all of that because I started making the podcast in a moment that I felt was failure.

10:23Okay. Um, I had reached this point with my own music. I had spent, you know, over a decade building my music career. Um, I'd put out four albums at that point and, you know, toured a lot and played a lot of shows, good shows, bad shows, small shows, slightly less small shows, not big shows really, but I had been toiling, I think, um, for, for a long time. And, and it was pretty ego driven, you know, it was just, it was only in the service of me trying to have a career where I'm like, these are my songs. This is my music. um not to mention that like everything that i was making was as diy as i could do it you know where i'm i'm gonna write all the songs i'm gonna not only that i'm gonna produce all the songs and i'm gonna play close to as many of the instruments as i possibly can if not all of them and if somebody else is gonna come in i'm gonna write their parts for them you know i'm gonna do all the i'm gonna do everything so that this end result is as crystallized a portrait of who I am and all of my, you know, I'm going to be the art director for the album artwork.

11:47I'm going to design the logos. I'm going to make them merch, you know, the t-shirt merch, everything. And I had done that for, for a long time. And then I just sort of felt like I hit, uh, an impasse, um, where I couldn't tell if the amount of work going into it was even equivalent to what was coming out of it or what was coming back. Um, I remember reading this really depressing statistic about how much energy it takes to recycle something. Yeah. Yeah. And then like that, yeah, that recycling, um had this like net loss in terms of energy you know and for all of the good intentions and things like that that actually it was an energy loser and i don't know if that stat is still accurate hopefully this is from a while ago hopefully not yeah but i remember just how deflating that was and i only mentioned it because it felt something like that where i was like oh I put, you know, whatever, 3000 units of myself into this thing.

13:00And then like out comes this little, this little, like one unit back or something. Yeah. Which I'm sure lots of creative people listening have experienced just that for sure. Yeah. And I don't know how fair or useful or interesting that perspective on it is, but that's the truth of where I was. And that equation or whatever the way I was looking at it at that time made me feel like I was like, it's not happening for me, you know? Or I don't know how to, how I'm going to get to the next level. Like I've, I've managed to get here and it feels like an uphill battle in a way that it felt like four years ago and maybe it's a little bit less uphill than it was four years before that, but it's still really tough.

13:52And what am I doing and what am I doing wrong? And, and in that mentality, I kind of felt like I needed to step away for the first time. And that's when I made the pilot for the, for song exploder. So my ego was kind of in, uh, free fall a bit already when I started the podcast. So that makes tons of sense. That's kind of the right point to do this sort of project. And it feels almost like a creative hero's journey of going into this world where it's really about you're leaving everything, you know, you're going into this very foreign place that is really about I've even I remember, I don't know if it's the last time we talked or if I've heard you say this elsewhere, It seems like right from the beginning of Song Exploder, you were thinking about how the audience was going to hear this.

14:44Like that was the thing that you were thinking about above all else, like trying to make something that worked for them. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's an interesting thing, you know, to say by taking myself out of it, that reads as like an egoless creative move, because there definitely was still ego behind it because I didn't want to look foolish. Right. Yeah. I didn't want to reveal my inexperience as an interviewer. And I wanted to make something that felt more professional than the truth of its origins might indicate. You know, I'm just like, like the first episode, you know, I'm making in my bedroom, living in a one bedroom apartment with my wife and my computer is in the corner and I'm editing together this, this podcast episode in a way that I thought might feel perfect.

15:39If I made it feel more like a documentary film in the documentary film, the cameras only pointed at the subject. You don't even hear the questions. Maybe you might hear the director off mic ask a question or something like that. But for the most part, the focus is entirely on the subject. And since I just was naive about all of this stuff, how to conduct an interview, how to interview someone, I just tried to take a page from that and make it feel as much like that so that people would hear it and think, oh yeah, this is a professional, this is legit. um and all of that i i think um is not apart from ego me take taking myself out of it was a way of sort of um expressing some kind of creative vision it totally makes sense but and i totally validate that that uh it can be a way of you know hiding or deflecting as a different type of ego um but over time as this became a bigger and bigger thing like you spend a lot of time in making from that place.

16:46And so still doing a lot in service to the song and the other and celebrating that. And I just think it's an interesting journey. And also hearing you talking about how you wanted to do the music thing as almost like a documentary where often you don't see the filmmaker. And that was a really unique choice for audio stuff. Even in that, even in that thinking, you're very deconstructionist. Like you're, you're taking apart, like that's a very unique insight that only comes from really having that deconstruction mindset. And I heard you also talking to Alec Baldwin about, um, in recent chat about how you had, when you were early on learning to interview, you are deconstructing his interview style and what he, how he was holding, how he's close to the mic and all these different things.

17:43It seems like that element is just very innate to who you are. And it's a part of the creative process that I don't feel like gets talked about a lot. I don't even feel like it gets included. Do you feel like deconstruction is a big part of your process as a creative? I mean, I have to imagine it has to be given your history. I think that process in general is really fascinating to me. Okay. You know, I have always been someone who loves listening to directors commentaries and, you know, like what watching the featurettes, the making of things on the, on the DVD. and in school going to the crits and listening to the other students talking about their work and where it came from and having to defend sort of the the vision that they had and why they made the choices that they made all of that stuff was really formative to me because it was when i was starting to make my own stuff and think about articulating it you know thinking about the reason why.

18:49Oh, why is my focus here? Why am I printing my photos on this kind of paper? Why am I using this, this aperture? You know, like everything kind of was open to interrogation. And I thought if you had thought about that stuff, then, you know, maybe you have a good answer. Maybe there's in the ideal world, the, the subject matter, um, that you're writing about or talking about or shooting or whatever, anything that you're making that the subject and the, and the execution should be in tricks, inextricably linked if possible. And I think that was just, yeah, that was something I got from school. And then when I left school, I think I looked at things in a way where I was trying to find lessons in them you know like okay I don't have school I'm not in podcast school there's nobody to teach me some of these things okay what can I learn just by I mean it was the same thing with music right like I love this song okay let me start by trying to do a cover yeah of this song and oh I see this is a new chord that I had to learn in order to play this song.

20:05And then later you're like, Oh, I know that chord now. And I could maybe use it for something of my own. I think this hits on this noticing what you notice sort of thing. Like, I don't know a lot of people that speak highly about, I don't know if that's what you're doing, but speaking positively about crits in art school or school. Like there's a lot of people that have no tolerance for that kind of thing. Uh, and I think it's just, it's difficult. Like sometimes I'll hear a comedian or a musician and they're kind of really going into this very specific aspect of life that they have just naturally ruminated on and meditated on.

20:46Just can't stop thinking about it. And sometimes it would cause me to be like, wow, I never think about that. Like, why don't I think about that? That's cool stuff. And what's been much more valuable is to be like, what are the things that like I keep coming back to and to the point where other people aren't even willing to follow me because they're just like, no, dude, no, don't you're doing, you're going way too hard. Like I'm guessing most people weren't as into the behind the scenes of the documentaries and the director's feedback and all that kind of stuff. Like that's that's a huge tell in terms of where you take things.

21:23You know what I mean? I love that. Yeah, I love the idea that it's like, oh, what are your hang ups and how have they defined you? That's true. It's totally true. And the other thing is, I think that it reminds me of something I think that's been really essential for me is just an openness to not just experience, but openness to coachability or learning something or trying to find the lesson. And sometimes that's difficult because there's a lot there. I think there are a lot of things in creative process that you can pick up from people. And then there's a lot of it that's intuitive or accidental.

22:04And it's really difficult. There's not really a takeaway. But I think getting in there is worth it. I have picked up so much from just having the attitude of maybe there's something here. i've been thinking a lot about the ways in which i misconstrued the act of creation and and my whole way into music and creativity and i think speaking of hang-ups that have defined you you know sometimes they define you for the for the better and sometimes they define you for the for the worse. And on this exact sort of axis of trying to apply a school kind of mentality to creative work, I think there are things that I got out of it that have been beneficial, but I think there's also been this kind of dark cloud that I'm only just starting to recognize.

22:58Maybe that's too dramatic of a visual, but I think that one of the reasons why I got into trouble in the first place and stopped making music and and the reason why all this stuff continues to still be so hard for me is because school and like the idea of basically like getting an a getting a perfect score yeah was something that was so drilled into me and something that i accepted as like an important achievement that i it like defined my worldview you to the extent where I, I'm like, Oh, did I get an A on this? Did I get a perfect score? What did I do the right thing in all, in everything, including in art, you know, uh, with a capital A where not only is it not applicable by, by applying it, you might actually be making stuff that's not as good or preventing you from, from reaching things that you would have made if you just had the freedom to be like, like if, if art isn't on the spectrum of, uh, you know, a letter grade or a hundred to zero, which I think it is not, then, you know, what, what can you make?

24:18I feel like I've been so constrained by this kind of school view where I was like, oh, I can't do that that's wrong or that you know I would I would pre-edit ideas and and and instincts even um because I was so caught up with the idea of making sure I did the did the thing the right way did you what what do you think unpicked that from your mind i think i still have that hang up but this album was so interesting and painful and educational because it struck exactly at the heart of that thinking um because i met the producer of the album, Phil Weinrobe, who really wonderfully and clearly articulated the opposite view.

25:21And I think I kind of really needed to hear that. I had been so convinced of the kind of rightness, the rectitude of my own thinking, because I'd built a career from it and it came naturally. And there's just so much evidence to support, to support that. Um, even if that meant, you know, a by-product of it was, oh, I guess I'm not making music anymore because obviously I don't know how to make the right thing. Cause if I did, then I'd be more successful. You know, even with all of that, nobody had really convincingly to me articulated the, the opposite perspective. And he did where he said, so in specific terms, he said, we're going to record this album live, including your vocals, which means that your ability to go back and edit the thing.

26:18And, um, in my mind, fix it, you know, is impossible. And for him, the idea of like fixing it. That's not the appropriate language because not only was fixing it, uh, beside the point, it was to him the opposite of how you get to something that's exciting and interesting to listen to. Um, his feeling was that there is a spontaneity that happens when a group of musicians come together in a room, learn a song, start playing it and are playing it. And you can hear the newness and the freshness in the performance and it's kind of intangible. Um, but there is a moment where you lose that excitement after playing it too many times.

27:11Yeah. And if you, um, record take 15, um, as opposed to take four, you're going to have something materially different. And, and he said, you know, oftentimes worse. And the idea of having infinite choice by recording everything the way that I was used to, which is one layer at a time, or at the very least, if we're recording everything together, we're all, um, you know, in separate spaces, the amps are in different places. The drums are in their own space so that if you have to go back and be like, oh, I flubbed that one note on the intro. Everything else is great. Let me just go rerecord the intro, right?

27:55Like that's what you need. You need to have that because otherwise if everything's all together, you can't do that. You'll screw up the recording. And his whole perspective was there are worse things than mistakes. There are worse things than singing out of tune, which was the thing that really, really, I was most obsessed with and focused with because I think, you know, singing is the most personal thing. And, and it felt so vulnerable to me to sing any, anyway, the idea of singing it live and just being like, well, that's what happened. And here we go. And now that's on, on the album felt crazy, but he really, um, he convinced me enough to give it a shot.

28:42I'll say I relate to it. And one thing I've been trying to do is I have my equivalent is for my picture books. And when I do comics and illustration, I, I have the process of drawing. I kind of treat them almost like logos. That's how, like how, how perfect I want them to be in a very specific way. Cause I, I'm, I make messy work, but it's just a certain kind of thing about the composition and the shapes and whatnot, which means I will do like sometimes five to 10 drawings of the same thing, like with a light box going over it. And the thing that I've learned to do is to stop with the sketches, the step before I go do the final so that the last one, when I'm doing the final marks, I'm still having to be fully present and make it right so that I'm not just tracing it, you know?

29:38Um, and so I totally relate. You're not memorizing something, you're not reciting something that you've memorized. Yes. So I definitely relate. And the funny thing is I could be mistaken, but I feel like last time we spoke, I think you said that the biggest takeaway from song exploder was that there isn't one way and that, yeah. And so it feels very akin to that. Like the, and I don't know if this is your experience, but this album for some reason strikes me as a really big moment after this huge journey you've been on with the podcast. I know you've released other music, but there's something about this one that just felt, felt big.

30:17And it's cool that even, even though you knew that on some level, like I've got to do this, there isn't a right way. There's not a right way. There's the way that this thing works, that you needed that kind of guide in the moment to be like, remember, you've talked to hundreds of these people and they've all convinced you there is no right way. And then this becomes this like manifestation of that. Yeah. I think when, when I put out the EP a few years ago, after having not put out music for so long, I think now I can look back and say, okay, hey, what I was doing there was really kind of like picking up where I had left off, you know, at the time, a decade earlier, trying to like just reconnect with the idea of making music at all.

31:09And I think it sort of felt like, like my muscles had atrophied, you know, like I'd been in a bed for 10 years and forgot how to walk or something like that. And I had to kind of like retrain my muscles to just say like, yeah, this is something that I have done and I know how to do. and I can get back to it. And then I put that out. And then I think with this album, my hope was, what's someplace new that I can go? Now that I can walk again, what comes next? What happens if I walk over here? Or can I start even running? Can I do something that I haven't done before and not just sort of be where I'd been in the past?

31:52I love that. That's a good, I think I had experiences where the first I've been doing the show for 10 years or something, a little over that. And the first five years, it became a real primary focus. And I was still doing illustration, but I put a little bit more on the back burner. And that was surprisingly powerful for all kinds of ways to just not be so precious about it and diversify and all that. but tons of people are going to have that experience where some part of their creative identity that they used to hold really tightly, they've become a strength with. And it's, it's an interesting prompt to be like, instead of thinking, if I'm going to pick that back up, I've got to be even better than I was.

32:34You could think about it. Like this is a crawling project. This is a walking project. I'm literally, this is personal training for just moving again. And then the next project I'll go somewhere with that mobility. I really like that, that, that I like, that's a good way to frame it. Yeah. Because it really was so different. It was just some, I'd never imagined working this way. It was so contrary to how I'd thought. I thought the sort of next evolution of what I was doing was going to be a quantitative one, I guess, you know, like work in the way that I've been working, but like have more resources or, you know, not more resources because it's still DIY, but like more resources in terms of my knowledge and like in involving other people and yeah, just being more sophisticated about the approach.

33:21But instead of quantitative, it was qualitative. It was, um, okay, well, if you're gonna, if you're gonna say there's no right way to make music, um, here's a way that you, you could have never imagined. And what happens if you apply everything that you've done and the person who you are and put it in this whole other box that you didn't even know existed. That's really interesting. And I've heard researchers talk about these two ways of being in our head. There's the achievement brain and the awakened brain. And it is really interesting. You need a relationship with both in order to have a creative practice.

34:01But I think it's important to realize how seductive that achievement brain is and how necessary it is to get into that other side, which is beyond right and wrong. It's, you know, it's something hopefully that transcends that. So I'm inspired by you kind of walking us through that.