Late

Okay, so technically it's already Wednesday, but I'm going to count this as Tuesday's post because it's only half an hour late.But because I want to go to sleep, it will be short.

I just want to recommend Song Exploder to everybody. It's a podcast that has been recommended to me several times over the last month and which I finally checked out yesterday. I listen to a lot of podcasts - too many - but when a new one gets its hooks into me, I binge on it hard. Song Exploder, with episodes running only ten to twenty minutes, makes bingeing easy.

The premise is simple: every episode, a musician or group of musicians takes a song of theirs, breaks it into its component parts and explains the thought process behind each one. It's fascinating. I'm not a musician by any means, but I like music and I especially like listening to different parts of songs that I know well to try to hear new things each time I listen. Song Exploder appeals to that part of my brain. Better yet, it works even when I don't know the song or the artist, which is almost every episode, because my musical horizons are horribly limited. In that way, the podcast seems like a great way to hear new stuff.

Over and above the appreciation for music, though, I just really love listening to talented people talk about their creative process. I can't exactly explain why. It just reminds me that any artist is first of all a person and like any person, anything they create is a mixture of careful planning, wild experimentation and blind luck. I find that comforting.