Episode 54: Creativity as a Spiritual Endeavor with Musician and Author Peter Himmelman

Peter Himmelman is a Grammy and Emmy nominated singer-songwriter, visual artist, best-selling author, film composer, entrepreneur, and rock and roll performer with over 20 critically acclaimed recordings to his credit. His new book, Suspended by No String, reflects on the spiritual elements that suffuse his life and creative work.In addition to his own creative work, Peter is the founder of Big Muse, a company, which helps organizations to leverage the power of their people’s innate creativity. We discuss Peter’s creative process in connection with his writing and music, and how his spiritual path and practice inform his work. 

For our Creativity Pro-Tip, We encourage you to turn off your phone and get your butt in the chair to show up for your creative work on a daily basis. Straight from the man himself!

Credits: The Syncreate podcast is created and hosted by Melinda Rothouse, and produced at Record ATX studios with in collaboration Michael Osborne and 14th Street Studios in Austin, Texas. Syncreate logo design by Dreux Carpenter.

If you enjoy this episode, you might also like our conversations in Episode 3: Creative Polymathy with Musician, Photographer, and Podcaster Michael Walker,  Episode 21: The Walk of Faith and Courage with Shakespearean Actor Warren "Ren" Jackson, and Episode 52: Texas Poet Laureate Amanda Johnston. 

At Syncreate, we're here to support your creative endeavors. If you have an idea for a project or a new venture, and you’re not sure how to get it off the ground, find us at syncreate.org. Our book, also called Syncreate, walks you through the stages of the creative process so you can take action on your creative goals. We also offer resources, creative process tools, and coaching to help you bring your work to the world. You can find more information on our website, where you can also find all of our podcast episodes. Find and connect with us on social media and YouTube under Syncreate, and we’re now on Patreon as well. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave us a review!

Episode-specific hyperlinks: 

Peter’s Website: peterhimmelman.com

Peter’s New Book: Suspended by No String

Peter’s First Book: Let Me Out

Big Muse: Peter’s Creativity Consulting Services 

Show / permanent hyperlinks: 

The Syncreate Podcast

Syncreate Website

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Melinda Rothouse Website

Austin Writing Coach

Transcript

Melinda: Welcome to Syncreate, a show where we explore the intersections between creativity, psychology, and spirituality. We believe everyone has the capacity to create. Our goal is to demystify the process and expand the boundaries of what it means to be creative. We talk with visionaries and changemakers and everyday creatives working in a wide range of fields and mediums, from arts to science, technology and business.

We aim to illuminate the creative process from imagination to innovation and everything in between. I'm Melinda Rothouse and I help individuals and organizations bring their creative dreams and visions to life. At Syncreate, we're here to support your creative endeavors. So if you have an idea for a project or new venture and you're not quite sure how to get it off the ground, find us at syncreate.org.

Our book, also called Syncreate, walks you through the stages of the creative process so you can take action on your creative goals. We also offer resources, creative process tools and coaching to help you bring your work to the world. 

So I'm delighted to have on the show today Peter Himmelman. Peter Himmelman is a Grammy and Emmy nominated singer, songwriter and performer, as well as an award-winning author and the founder of Big Muse, an organization which facilitates creativity for individuals and organizations. So thank you so much for being with us today. Peter, it's great to have you here. 

Peter: Well, it's good. I am in this room, by the way, and it has never looked cleaner and more organized than it does now. 

Melinda: It’s a very creative space!

Peter: You know, I was going to come with a whole clean look and I've achieved it today. This is relatively clean.

Melinda: This is exactly what you were going for.

Peter: No, this has become a storage house for things. [laughter]. Yeah, exactly. 

Melinda: Yeah. Well, I really appreciate your taking the time because I, I have a sense since I've been, you know, immersing myself in your world that you're quite discerning about who and what you get involved with. And I know in our initial conversation on the phone, I sensed perhaps a tiny bit of skepticism. But once we started chatting, I think we realized we were, kindred spirits of some sort. And so you agreed. 

Peter: Wow. That's interesting. How do you feel I manifested that skepticism? I just like…

Melinda: I don't know, I think you were like, who is this person? And, you know, a mutual, I guess, friend of yours, acquaintance of mine, Danny Siegel, connected us. And I'm sure you had no idea who I was. So I think you were probably reasonable to be skeptical. But. 

Peter: Well, I mean, I think that it wasn't skeptical so much as it was curious. And there was that kind of quizzical phase. But it only lasted 14 seconds. You know, it was very short.

Melinda: Yeah. Well, by way of introductions, I was listening; I know you did an episode recently on the Taking a Walk podcast, which I really enjoyed. And, you were talking about how you kind of help other people manifest their creativity, starting with the words, I am. So having introduced you, and I know Charlotte and I, when we do workshops and things, we encourage people to introduce themselves with “I am” and “I create.” So I’m curious like how would you introduce yourself in that way? 

Peter: Well, no, that's so much easier to talk about someone else than oneself without having a script. Look, I'm a person that is, and probably has been very curious about things. As many people are, and, I kind of follow whatever my curiosity is, is suggesting I follow.

And so there's a lot of things that I get involved in. And that's it. I mean, that's not a very good description. You know, I also love mint chip ice cream. It's one of my favorites, something that doesn't necessarily define me in any particular way. But.

Melinda: Yeah, I love it. Well, I think curiosity, you know, is kind of the seed of creativity, right? So makes sense to me. Right? And that sense of like openness to experience and curious about the world. 

Peter: Yeah. I, I think it is also, I totally agree and I think it, it's. It's curiosity, perhaps. I'm just, nothing I say is data driven, so I, I just want you to know that. I just, there's nothing like, you’re not gonna read about this in some study. So it’s just some basic stuff I’m riffing on all the time. But I mean, it is curiosity married with many things, but the thing that's coming out for me right now is trust. It's trust in oneself. It's trust in one's environment. It's trust in, you know, one’s past and what sees, what one sees for their future. 

It's an eagerness and a willingness and all those things have to do with trust and stability. I always like when I'm getting into a project. It's just like, number one: when do you need it done? You know, I very, like, basic fundamentals. I need to know structures. And only when I'm kind of aware and cognizant of what those structures are, and this is the first time I've ever talked about trust in this capacity, so I'm riffing on new, new ground here in my messy room. 

But once I have those parameters set, that's when I can sort of relax and trust. And the things that I need to get started are so basic. You know, what do you expect? What is the outcome? And some of these times when I'm not working with somebody, I'm saying it to myself, you know. What is it that I anticipate seeing in the future? You know, how can I envision it? How do I envision the feelings that I'll have? 

Melinda: Yes. There's a great coach, Danielle LaPorte. And one of her, like, coaching questions is, how do you want to feel? Which I think is awesome. 

Peter: Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, yeah, and I do, I think that a good question that gets asked these days when so much, let's call it intellectual property for lack of a better word. There's very little lucre in it these days. There's very little chance for it to make money. And so the question and it's a purifying question too… what, so why do you do it? I've written this new book, and somebody I was just in Seattle last week, and somebody asked me, not in any kind of a cruel way, just was very curious, why are you doing this? Like you’re probably not going to make any money out of it. And I had a more ready answer than I've had in the past.

And the ready answer is apropos of what you just said. It makes me feel good. The conversations that I have about it, the process of doing it in particular, makes me feel good. The ordering of the chaos, which is kind of a, metaphoric of ordering the chaos of the world, which cannot really be done by any individual.

But once you string these words together, or these notes in a particular way, or these things in your drawing and, or your painting… You feel that you're ordering something, and it's a very pleasant feeling, I think. And that's, that's the motivation. It was always the motivation. I don't know, very many skillful artists, musicians, dancers, poets. They never got into the game because they thought they were going to get, you know, remunerated in some way. 

Melinda: Right. You've got to love the process. Yeah. Yeah. 

Peter: Right. And it pulls you along because there's so many parts of the process that are so frustrating and unnerving and you're taking your wares to the marketplace, which is also, yields probably, you know, 90% more frustration than elation.

Melinda: Right. And frustration in the process of creating itself. Right. I mean that process of creating can be really fun and enlivening. And of course it has its challenges. But then you have to actually take it out into the world and market it and tell people about it. Right? 

Peter: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the other thing. A lot of people just can't do that or don't want to do that. Even this room that I'm sitting in, which I haven't been in in months and months. I remember, though, sitting at this desk and thinking while working on this book, for example. And, thinking, oh my God, I'm going to have to redo so much of it. And it was just like, for a while, for a good long moment, it's like, no way. I just can't. Until I sat down and started doing it. And then it becomes so much easier once you're in the process, rather than when you're having assumptions about what the process and the pain it will bear. 

Melinda: Yes. Yeah. So I think that's a great segue to get into the book itself, which is called Suspended by No String. It's just out this month, August 2024. And, you know, you're a singer songwriter. You teach people and help people understand and manifest creativity. And, you know, you wrote a prior book, Let Me Out, about the creative process, right. And kind of helping people understand the creative process, which is kind of my personal mission as well.

And then from what I understand, this book, you know, it's been a journey, right? It started out as maybe a follow up or sequel to that first book, and it's turned into something to me, that feels very much more personal or reflective. Yeah. So, what I see a lot in this book, and I think you talked about it also in the Taking a Walk podcast is, is the spiritual element, the spiritual side of, of creativity and life.

And, you know, this podcast we're really looking at sort of creativity, psychology and spirituality. So this is right up my alley. And tell us a little bit about the evolution of, of this book. 

Peter: Well, this book started out probably in 2008. And I was doing, this was like a progenitor to a lot that's going on now. It’s 2008. So the internet had just sort of undergone this expansive, you know, thing. The connectivity was just starting to spark up and, you know, exponentially greater than it had been in years past. So I did this thing from my studio in California called The Furious World. And we had guests on and we did, music, it was music driven.

And I had a segment in that piece called, Phantoms of the 405, that was called. The 405, for people that don't know, is this, freeway. And it's oftentimes it's, you know, plugged up with cars. So the idea was I would be, I would be thinking about stories and things that had happened in the past. So I started writing for that segment, and it would be this, there was a visual element of me just driving around in slow motion, but these stories would come.

And that was, aside from the music, that was one of my favorite parts of the show. And some of the pieces that wound up in this book are later iterations of those stories. But I originally, the book originally started as a, as you mentioned, a follow up to this book, Let Me Out. You know, how am I going to make another one of these?

And it was frustrating. And I'll tell you in a minute why it was so frustrating. Or as I reflect back why it was so frustrating. I'd worked on it for a while and I finished a whole book, and then I was still frustrated. Something wasn't right. You know, like many people, I'll work on something and I know I'm finished with it because I just don't see anything bad about it anymore.

It doesn't feel, it’s not that it feels right, it just doesn't feel wrong anymore. But this book always felt wrong and I brought it to an editor. Her name is Barbara Clark, and I hired her to kind of give me a sense, a high-level sense of what she thought of it. She was a real editor, not just a pal.

Although she did become a very close friend. She sent me back a 15-page double, you know, single spaced treatise on the book. And she said, you know, three quarters of the way through, this isn't a book about creativity, it's a book about spirituality. And I think you should pursue that. And that one sentence was really helpful. 

But I wrote another book. Almost a self-help book, which seems so paradoxical now about spirituality. And that also felt like crap. And then, you know, it was, it wasn't bad enough that I would just throw it away so easily. It was, it was kind of good. It had a lot of good parts to it. So right when that was kind of finished up, I sent Barbara this piece, probably a 1300-word little piece.

It was called Suspended by No String. And it took her about a week to get back to me because she usually gets back pretty fast. And she said, look, she emailed me back. She goes, “I'm a little, you know, torn about what I'm going to say here, but this is one of the most beautiful things I've read in a long time. And if you have more like this, I think you should leave behind what you've written and start anew.”

And that was incredibly liberating because the piece Suspended by No String wasn't trying to teach anyone anything. Just as my songs don't try to teach and they're not trying. This is what I said I was going to get back to, what felt so utterly frustrating about some of these ill-fated iterations is because my motivation was really, how can I help…

How can this book help me make more money? And not that that's a bad thing. I hope that makes, somehow makes me money, even this book. But for me, at any rate, nothing I've ever done that has been of any value to myself or perhaps to the world was ever formed and made manifest by those kinds of motivations.

And once I understood that it didn't have to be pedantic or didactical in any way, I could simply write whatever I felt like. It was so liberating. And, and as you mentioned, there's all sorts of challenges with just creating things. But there was also this incredible ease with having done it in this way. 

Melinda: Yeah. And that's a big, indicator, right? When that, when there is that sense of ease, that sense of flow. Right? When we're not so focused on the goal. And I love that because one of the things we really emphasize on this show is that creative work doesn't just spring from nowhere fully formed. Right? And you going through all these iterations with the book over so many years, I think is really a beautiful window into what the creative process is really like. Right? So, some things in the… Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. 

Peter: You know, you're also talking about the flow states and so on. But those are pretty rare. Much of it is, even though I said there was an ease to it, there's all these moments where like, okay, is this really a bunch of crap? Does anyone care what I have to say?

And do I even have the energy to do this and to, one of the things that I do when I get really tired or frustrated, I think that I will stop the work, but I won't quit the work. I won't like, quit. I will simply sit. I will say, I am going to set you down, but I'm the one that's doing the setting down.

I'm in charge of setting this down rather than it overwhelms me and floors me. And that happened many, many times. It's like, and then, at some point I will have the impetus to pick it up again, and usually with renewed energy and almost always with renewed insights. When you get these moments that are just so frustrating, know that it's universal.

Melinda: Yes, exactly. 

Peter: And it’s not gonna last forever. 

Melinda: Yeah. Exactly what I was going to say. You know, we talk a lot in the podcast about sort of creative incubation. And the more that we can understand the importance of putting things down and stepping away and then being able to come back refreshed rather than just sort of throwing up our hands, right, in dismay, because I think it is universal.

I think that is actually a part of the creative process. It's a journey through the wilderness. There's no map. You know, we can kind of have some understanding of how creativity works. But for each of us individually, when we're in it, it's, you know, there's an element of the unknown. 

Peter: Well, look, I mean, you're you're making me think of something here. And I don't, I don't want too, like, get too fanciful or too broad. One thing is, for me, the word creativity and spirituality are almost completely synonymous. Number two, this working on a project and coming back and being frustrated. The biggest project and the biggest creative project that all of us have, no one is exempt from.

It is our, our own lives. That is the creative project and within it you have relationships. Which are the most important parts of those, of this grand creative process and with, you know, spouses and friends and children and in my case, now new grandchildren, I had two new grandsons in the course of three weeks.

Melinda: Congratulations. 

Peter: Like what? What? It's a pretty great thing. Yeah. Thank you. And, it's kind of like bearing fruit. I used to have this, there were letters that you could buy, these big metal letters at some hardware store. And for some reason, I picked out, there weren't all the letters. I'd have to spell something really quickly.

And I put out right f-r-u-i-t--s, fruits. And in my studio for like, ten years, it just was this big sign, fruits. You know, it's just “producing fruits” That was it. And children are fruits, and relationships are fruits, and paintings are fruits. So it's all fruits.

Melinda: Indeed. Indeed. So, kind of speaking of this connection between creativity and spirituality, I know in the book you talk about kind of songs as prayers, and I found that very intriguing.

Because I'm sort of, I've got like a little koan going for myself. I did a reading the other day and, and prayer came up and that and, and I'm, I'm not sure what my own relationship is exactly to prayer. I mean, I pray when I'm on a plane, I don't want it to crash. But, you know, prayer is not a daily part of my, existence, but it seems to be a very important part of yours. And I'm curious about this idea of songs as prayers. 

Peter: Yeah. I mean, prayer is a very important part of my day. I mean, I pray many times a day, you know, verbally and quietly to myself. I'm, I'm wishing well for people that I love in the morning. And I have a long list of people that are sick and I pray for.

And, you know, prayers go up to God. And, you know, and I have a caveat in the front of the book as you read why in a book about faith, you might think it's odd that I debated whether to use the word God. Because God is such a loaded term. And it's a, it's a term that, it's an English word that's, you know, it's, it shouldn't really mean anything because once you establish, well what is God, well, then you have a concept of what God is.

Well, how can you have a concept of what is by nature ineffable? You’re already wrong. So it's certainly not, you know, a guy in a cloud throwing candies when you're good or spears, you know when you're bad or lightning bolts. It's just, I guess for me, I mean, there is no definition to it. I just, a lot of my friends that are musicians and the best of them, they're very, you might say, in some sense very religious in a way. In the sense that, as creative people, they understand that the gifts that they have, and these are people that are not ostensibly overtly religious. But they understand immediately with a sense of grace and humility that their abilities are not solely their own development. There is some attribute that is beyond themselves, however they describe it. 

If I see a somebody that gets up on the stage and sits down on the drum set, I already know a lot about that person, how they how they touch the sticks, how they sit on the throne. And one of the things that I will see in the best of musician, is very quick and just sort of an osmotic sense of how it's done.

I'll see a twin, a somewhat of a duality. On one hand, there'll be a, just a elitist arrogance, like, “I'm the shit, I'm going to do this.” And then on the other hand, there is this humility that's just like, you know, “I'm going to be a channel.” And it sounds like a treacly thing to say, but only for people who have never felt it.

You know, there's not a musician or artist that I've ever met that was worth anything that didn't have that experience. It's not something that they want to talk about all the time. It's a little embarrassing. But among friends, it's just a standard. It's just a normal thing. So in terms of prayer, I, you know, the prayer, there's a couple kinds of prayer.

One is you're asking for something and, you know, who knows if you'll ever get it? You know, there's another prayer that allows you to center yourself within the cosmos. And within this framework. My understanding is in a, in a very rudimentary way, is that the world, and I write about this with a few metaphors in the book.

And I'll mention one of them from the book, which is a metaphor. It's an ancient metaphor where there's a guy standing in front of a window and he sees a rock being thrown. He's just known as a simpleton, this person. And he says, “Wow, a flying rock.” The rock flies past the window, and the wise person says, “Well, the rock isn't flying. It appears to be flying. And when the force of the thrower is no longer, is exerted upon the rock, the rock will fall to its natural condition of flightlessness. And that's the end of the story. But the metaphor is, the world which we perceive as existing is metaphoric of that rock, which is being willed into existence. It's being thrown.

And should the force of the thrower cease to be exerted upon the universe, the thrower with a capital t h, everything would, would disappear like a dream disappears when we wake up in the morning. For me, that's how in integral, the creator of the universe is with its creation. Again, not not an anthropomorphic somebody painting something. And a big guy with a beard. 

Again, it it's, it's hard for me to conceive of anything existing by chance, which is the way that I, the way that I grew up and where, I've come from a very Jewish family, but no one ever talked about God. The standard in our house was just like everyone’s standard was, you know, it's random. It’s the Big bang. 

How did that get there? Well, nobody had an answer for that. And I don't think that I can ever prove the existence of God. And I can, and I will admit that it's a weird idea to think of, but please, if you're in the random camp, please tell me that you feel the same about randomness.

It's also pretty effing weird too, that this glass exists and that we're speaking and that my heart is beating and I'm in space in time. Just allow that the two sides are equally as weird and pick your, you know, take your pick. But don't think one side is rational and the other is irrational. And I won't do the same for you. You know?

Melinda: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, you know. Yeah. 

Peter: In all fairness. 

Melinda: Yes. Right. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a miracle and a wonder, as you say, that we're here at all. And I think as creatives, you know, one of the things that we're sort of attempting to do is to kind of celebrate that, you know, there are these moments in your book where you have these moments of, I don't know, clarity or, you know, where you're just doing something mundane, right?

Like getting a glass of water in the kitchen and all of a sudden it's like, wow, how amazing that we are here at all. And everything becomes so vivid, right? And so alive. And I think that's, when people talk about enlightenment, I mean, you know, it's these moments of just like sort of waking up out of our stupor as it were.

You know, we often go about life just kind of, you know, focused on our little tunnel vision or whatever our concerns of the day are. And then just these moments where we open up and go, wow, this is actually amazing. 

Peter: Yeah. I mean, I should say, you know, just, I should just be transparent here, and I hope it doesn't come across otherwise in my book, I'm 99.9% of the time not in these quote transcended or enlightened phases. I'm, I might have had just the tiniest glimmer of something like that once, but it becomes indelible. And so the way that I'm writing in the book isn't to say, hey, I'm this guy, and I see this, this, and you can too. It's no, it's like, I am struggling throughout the book to get another glimpse.

Even in, let's say, a marriage where the marriage could be going fine. But how often are you focused on the unbelievable gifts that you give from this person? It's very rare. And I guess I'm in a, I'm in an effort to try to get more of them. Yeah. How do I get more? How do I, why, why isn't that the norm in this kind of tunnel vision thing or whatever you're talking about?

Why is, why is that, you know, why isn't that the minimum? And maybe it's just the way it is. What if, what if you had this transcendent thing and that was what your, your baseline was. And all the sudden you slap, snapped into this mode where, where you were just like, uhh, you just didn't care about that for a minute.

You you had a whole embrace of a mundane reality. You would think that that was unbelievable. And the contrast between the two is so great. 

Melinda: Yes. Yeah, completely. I mean, and I think we have these, these practices like prayer. 

Peter: I sound like one of these guys in high school whose got high. Talking into the night in. 

Melinda: [laughter] There was one of those in the book too, right.

Peter: You can imagine what I was in high school. 

Melinda: [laughter] Exactly. So just kind of picking up from there, you know, it strikes me that we have these, these, these practices, these tools like meditation, like prayer, like poetry and song that are, you know, kind of ways of reconnecting with that, or we're communicating that experience, perhaps. And I'm curious, I do want to talk about your music as well of course. 

And, I wanted to share with you, I was talking to my business partner, Charlotte, who, is a fan of yours, and was really excited that we were going to be talking. And she shared with me that she was, getting into your music. She was living in Denver at the time, some years back, and that was when she and her husband first got together.

And that your music was kind of part of the soundtrack of their early relationship. So I thought that was fun. How does that how does that feel to hear that? 

Peter: You know, a lot better than a kick in the trousers as they say. [laughter] No, that's really sweet. That's nice. I like to hear that. Great. 

Melinda: It’s really sweet.

Peter: I mean look, you'd like to hear that something that you do in your, you know, something that goes on in your basement and you write something and then it has an effect on somebody else. It's really the ultimate joy. 

Melinda: Yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe even more so than certain honors and awards. And, you know, just knowing that you've, you've touched people's lives. Amazing. So I'm curious, you know, you've got this huge body of…

Peter: Yeah. That's the only thing that matters. 

Melinda: Yeah. And you've got this huge body of work, you know, you've been, you've been putting out albums for, you know, quite a while now. And I'm curious how you see your work, your, specifically your song writing and your music kind of evolving over time. I know you have a new single out as well.

Peter: Well, I mean, that would imply somehow that there's some sort of intellectual process or, not that it's bad, any, or that there's a sort of a goal to achieve. Sometimes I'll just think to myself, it's time to make another record.

I feel like, I've accumulated enough songs along the way. Or more often I feel like making a record. So I'll just go through this whole writing phase. Like for the new record that I have now, there's probably 13 songs on it. But there were like 50 songs that were pretty new, and I'm not even sure how I chose those.

I kind of shared them with a couple friends of mine. There's like a little, maybe 2 or 3 people that I like send them to, and what do you think, and you know, and get some feedback. So, it isn't an evolution as much as just a continuation. And I'll write about whatever I'm thinking about at the time or going through.

It’s that kind of thing. Or I feel like the song needs to be more aggressive. And here's a really quiet one. I'm not, nor was I ever like, looking at, well, what was Bruce Hornsby doing? You know, what was R.E.M. doing? Just they were in the in the background and, you know, you heard it and whatever comes out comes out, you know? That's how it works. 

Melinda: Yeah. I mean, I think that's, I'm a songwriter as well. So I, I feel, you know, that that resonates for me. But I did hear you speaking about how, that, documentary about John Coltrane kind of influenced your writing on one of your prior albums.

And I'm, I'm just curious, I guess, kind of about influence and how that, you kind of spoke about it sort of, you know, urging you to go deeper with your own writing. 

Peter: Yeah. Like, that would go under the heading that we talked about before. Something doesn't quite feel right. Something's a little off here. It doesn't seem like I've, like, in the, in a performance, for me, which is, it's a very self-serving thing for me to perform.

Where I'm doing it primarily for myself. I mean, it's, you know, but I will never be satisfied until the audience is quite satisfied. And so when I'm making an album, I just want to make sure that I get to this one place. It’s indefinable. But, you know, did I, did I come to a place where it makes me feel really good?

It makes me feel like a tiny part of this giant cosmos. That's one part of it. Where I feel a sense of awe about something. Otherwise, it's just kind of skimming the surface. And it's not interesting to me that way.

Melinda: Yeah. Yes. Right. Yeah. That makes sense to me. Well, I know there's so much more we could cover, so maybe we can do this again. But I usually like to end the, this…

Peter: Next time!

Melinda: Next time! …with a, what I call a sort of a Creativity Pro Tip. You know, something that people can, can, you know, run with and, and try out on their own in terms of their own creativity. And I know you work with individuals and organizations on creativity. I'm sensing that you mentor other songwriters.

So, like what are tips that you give to people who are maybe struggling with their creativity or, or trying to reconnect with it? 

Peter: Well, if I whatever I'm going to say next, I don't mean it to sound glib. So and it, and it might, but I mean, the big tip I would give somebody is, there's two tips.

One, there's an off switch on this on your iPhone. A lot of people don't know even how to shut the phone off. And most people don't. They put it on silent. I would, I would learn where the off switch is and don't switch it off, you know, forever, but switch it off for several hours a day.

And leave it off. Maybe four hours a day. And this is where it may sound glib. Don't wait for ideas. You don't need ideas. You need to sit your ass in a chair and start writing. Start working, start painting, start planning. No ideas are necessary. The ideas will come, but they will only come when you are willing to show your willingness to work, which is simply sit in a chair.

I've got a friend of mine. His name is Kenneth Turan and he was the, still is that movie critic for the LA times who's also, you know, he’s a great journalist. I think he told me he gave a class once at USC on writing, and I, and I think this was real. He said to the class, sit down in a chair and start writing. 

And he left. That was the class, and if he did that, I completely understand it because it had a lot of impact. I'm sure he did it with a humorous bent. But that's it. Don't write when you have an idea. I need an idea. You don't need anything. You need to sit down and allow yourself to just write a sentence. It doesn't have to be good. It just has to be. Third thing, you can't fix nothing. You can't fix nothing. 

Melinda: That's right. Yeah. So putting the time in.

Peter: You have to have something to fix. 

Melinda: Yes, yes. And creating the conditions.

Peter: It only, it could be five minutes.

Melinda: Right. For sure. It doesn't have to be a huge amount of time, but just creating the conditions for something to arise. Yeah I love that. Well Peter thank you so much.

Peter: And just write, you know, first sentence you know. 

Melinda: Yeah. Yeah. 

Peter: Well thank you for having me. 

Melinda: Before we completely wrap it up… So, where is the best place for people to find out more about your book, Suspended by No String, about your music, your other creative activities? 

Peter: Well, I would say the book is easy to find anywhere. Suspended by No String. It's in like Amazon. It's everywhere. Probably some bookstores now. There's peterhimmelman.com, which has all that stuff. And then there's my Substack, which I write on 3 or 4 times a week. It's peterhimmelman.substack.com. And that's something that I'm very invested in. 

Melinda: Beautiful. Great. And then also Big Muse, your organization. So we didn't even really get into. But maybe we'll touch on that more next time. Thanks again to Peter Himmelman for joining us today.

Find and connect with us on YouTube and social media under Syncreate and we're on Patreon as well. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave us a review. We're recording today at Record ATX Studios in Austin, and the show is produced in collaboration with Mike Osborne at 14th Street Studios in Austin. Thanks so much for being with us, and see you next time.