Becoming a Serendipiter: An Intentional Process for Creative Collaboration

Serendipty
Original song arranged and performed by Back to the Garden

Sea glass blue and green
broken pencil
I pocket everything

Flowers, autumn leaves
filled the scrapbook
then you noticed me

I can't fight it
I’m in the tapestry
heart unravels
pulled by gravity
Well, I'm all wound up
this feeling's threading through me
oh, I'm all wound up in you
Yes, I’m all wound up
weaving in a spiral,
gathering heart-strings

Serendipity

Bottled message brings
paper roses
carried by the sea

Lonely sailor reads
from the crow's nest
songs of poetry
I can't fight it
I’m in the tapestry
heart unravels
pulled by gravity
Well, I'm all wound up
this feeling's threading through me
oh, I'm all wound up in you
Yes, I’m all wound up
weaving in a spiral,
gathering heart-strings

Serendipity

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Having been married for nearly 20 years to @marctwang, 8 of which were spent running an art and music studio together, may not make for a convincingly serendipitous revelation to once again combine creative forces, but I swear, that’s what happened. In between projects yet still in a particularly productive mode with too many compositions and not enough songwriting appointments with his go-to lyricists, Marc jokingly asked out loud why he couldn’t just have a lyricist at his beck and call. Having recently completed a university poetry course and missing that collaborative community, I raised my how-about-me hand. And so began another fulfilling extension of our partnership.

An article in the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/opinion/how-to-cultivate-the-art-of-serendipity.html resonated with the both of us. Whenever I came across anything triggering inspiration, I emailed or replied to myself under the subject line “gathering string.” Soon we had a digital scrapbook full of potential themes and stories for Marc’s melodies and moods, most of which he had saved as hummed iPhone snippets.

Our process was for Marc to record a first pass on acoustic guitar, then send it to me in an email. From his bedroom upstairs to my comfy couch downstairs, I listened repeatedly while notating rhythms, patterns and thematic keywords in my sketchbook.

Structuring cohesive verses and choruses around syllables and phrases would take the most time. Marc would take a few passes with the lyrics while playing guitar, making adjustments for ‘sing-ability' while the melody evolved. Now and then we wrestled over word choice.

After a few days of listening, pondering and tinkering, we finalize the song when it feels right to us.

Bringing it to the band https://www.facebook.com/BackToTheGardenBand/
does not mean the song is finished or even embraced. Should the group be excited, or at least interested, the song is put through the magical collaborative sieve in the studio where everyone is welcome to bring their professional and artistic input to everything from instrumentation to general approach. Even after completing the recording of Serendipity, Jim and Sharon took it upon themselves to arrange and add the amazing backing harmony vocals.

Walking together is good for our minds and bodies, and as often happens, a walk on the beach triggered numerous dreams and schemes. While discussing possible do-it-yourself video approaches to accompany the song and its inclusion on a cancer benefit cd, Marc started filming our footsteps on the beach with his phone. This led to discussions on linking a few song videos through walks in various settings or perhaps using time-lapse in a portions of the videos.

The next day, Marc watched the footage while listening to the studio recording and discovered that though totally unplanned, it was nearly perfectly timed. It was obvious that nothing more needed to be done. He had simply and serendipitously filmed just what was needed for our music video. And to make it even sweeter, the tracks we follow on the walk lead us in a bit of a spiral, as does the loop of continuous walking.

Bottled messages continue to bring connections. Six degrees of separation from an inspiring keynote presentation by Lisa Kay Solomon https://twitter.com/lisakaysolomon last summer, brought me to Steemit, which led me to the Isle of Write on discord with a metaphorically celebrated membership milestone https://steemit.com/isleofwrite/@isleofwrite/isle-of-write-community-is-at-over-200-members-message-in-a-bottle-6.

Beyond coincidence, if you carry along in life with one eye open to possibilities, acting as a super-encounterer, you just might unravel the tangles and pocket what you desire, becoming a serendipiter.

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This post benefitted from the @isleofwrite workshoppers.

art and flair courtesy of @PegasusPhysics