Regarding the song Juli states:
The creative process is mostly unexplainable and unique in that it’s not repeatable. Anyone who’s dabbled into art making will identify with the feeling of not knowing how you got to something and not being sure you’ll ever be able to make anything like it again. That is perhaps what makes this process so magical.
In music, songwriting specifically, phonetics or stream of consciousness words that come out might lead to an idea that becomes transcendental. Sometimes, I find my subconscious knowing what I really think and feel before I do. Just like in Jonathan Haidt’s theory of the elephant and the rider where the elephant is our subconscious and the rider our consciousness, (the logic with which we retroactively justify the elephant’s behavior) I too find ways to justify my brain’s phonetics or random word choices as ideas that may have existed in my subconscious.
Finding what fits my gibberish is a process of imagination. That’s how I came up with ‘Terminal Woes’. If a melody comes into existence with a certain sequence of vowels, I have a sense that it must live there. When I came onto the phrase ‘Terminal Woes,’ it spoke to me and sparked all these ideas around what it entailed. It spoke to my fears of the future in this planet, to my rage against corporate greed, to my love for nature and to my fear for an entire future generation/the thought of having children.
“who’ll dance at the break of dawn, when the heat’s begun, when our mother’s gone?
last chance! every living thing, every breathing being, everything that’s green
it’s not just a human’s world, just a human’s world just a human’s world
we’ve got to reverse this flight for our future child, for continued life”
Nico had produced the marching like beat and once we had the verse and “terminal woes” phrase we knew there was an idea worth developing. In a thrift store, I’d picked up a record of Ravi Shankar playing his Concerto for Sitar and Orchestra alongside the London Symphony Orchestra. It played on repeat and I think some of it’s spirit seeped into the vocal melodies on this song (and some guitars in other songs on the record.)
Check out "Terminal Woes"
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