I suffered for my art. Now it's your turn.

A friend of mine has said that she thinks she used to write better songs than she does now. The problem, she explained, is that she is now content. In the old days, it seems, her discontent made it easier to write good songs.

I haven't heard enough of her songs to judge - though the small sample I have heard seem really good to me, even if they don't have an obvious "edge" of turbulent intensity (though beneath the surface of some I feel some definate undercurrents...). I think sometimes such "edge" is overrated. It's great to have art with it, but just imagine for a moment if all songs and all other creative works had it. It would be too much to bear, really. Still, I understand where she's coming from. Creativity loves misery for company, or so it often seems. Certainly the works that come out of a context of emotional turbulence often seem more striking and resonant, packed with intensity. Consider Bob Dylan for a moment. In the mid-'60s, when he was doing a lot of drugs and otherwise seemingly on a course toward self-destruction, he wrote and recorded his most acclaimed and famed works at a prolific pace. By the end of the 1960's, he was apparently a contented family man, keeping well away from the intensity that had once threatened to completely engulf him, producing works that seemed forgettable compared to the stuff he'd done at his peak. But then around 1974, with his marriage seemingly in tatters, he came out with possibly his best album ever, Blood on the Tracks - featuring many a searing song about the pain of lives destined to come together and then come apart again. And many other artists too have created their best works in reaction to personal turbulence.

It's not just a one-way steet though, for the demands of an art can contribute to such turbulence. I'm not a professional performer, but even the limited amount of performances I do can provoke sharp mood swings in me - the lines between terror, elation and despair are easily crossed in almost no time at all. Too easily the life of the performer is about getting certain fixes - of adulation, of drugs - as a substitute for the emotional intimacy (families, relationships) that must often be left behind for months on end by those performers who manage to really make a go of it.

In any case, the contribution of emotional havoc to creativity works only up to a point. The problem with heading down the road to self-destruction is that before too long you reach the destination - either you die or you are burned out, finished as a creative force. As for divorces, breakups and other personal disasters, you've got to get over them sometime, or you just end up wallowing in self-pity, which tends not to be a good place to be creatively (or in any other aspect of life for that matter). Believe me, I've been there. I remember at one point, having written a seemingly endless series of songs and other writings about the awful predicament I was in at that time, feeling utterly sick of writing because I was so sick of even thinking about the situation I was in and yet I seemed unable to write about anything else. It was awful - the worst kind of creative rut to be in.

Anyway, emotional intensity is only part of the equation. There's the craft too. And besides, there's plenty of room for strong feelings to be expressed that don't necessarily concern one's personal life. In his liner-notes to Blood and Chocolate (another great "breakup album"), Elvis Costello writes of a time when he attained a level of stability in his own life: "There were many things I wouldn't have to do again. Like messing up my life just so I could write stupid little songs about it."