Discoveries made through improvising songs
For around 8 years now I have been engaging in a spontaneous songwriting process which results in songs/sound recordings of lyrics+guitar, which I call lionsongs & which I share here in on the lionsongs page.
This whole site is named after the process, and yet it’s been so fluid and ineffable I haven’t been successful at defining it except in stages like this.
Today I’m at a vantage point where I can share a few discoveries. May they be helpful for any exploratory creators.
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My invitation to you: try making a lionsong. Set a timer for something relatively short (somewhere between 2 and 12 minutes), throw your expectations and definitions out the window, and see what kind of song-sound-space-voicings-noises come out during your time slot (silence counts too).
Listen back and see what kind of magic you may have stumbled upon. If it isn’t magical, notice what aspects of your ordinary humanity are there, even if it’s hard to hear them without cringe at first.
Notice how the imprint of your own lifestream is recorded there one way or another. Who is this being? What are they like? What are they communicating?
Note: if this is overly anxiety producing, try a stricter frame. Such as: a shorter time box (10 short songs, of 15 seconds only?) and more takes. Or sing only 1 line over and over again, in different ways. Make the portion of “creative unknown” just right-sized for you.
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My Discoveries
1. There are songs inside of us that want to be sung, who exist fully in their own right. These are alive & wonderful beings, song patterns/body structures who can be accessed when we practice songmaking. These songs love the chance to be vocalized/expressed as breath out of our bodies/containers/vessels/beings.
I believe my songs are parts and portions of my own Self but also perhaps from shared collective/ planetary/ galactic/ universal/ cosmic levels of being. I don’t know for sure but sometimes they say things like “we are plasma” and stuff that sounds like that, so I suspect they have a different type of existence than we might think of as “people”. :)
2. Just start wherever you’re at. My experience has been that if I just start out with something/anything, beginning with naming or expressing wherever I’m at, and keep singing my way forward and through, allowing whatever comes out to come out, that’s enough.
If I get the ball rolling & follow process signals, letting whatever’s there change as desired, more often than not at some point one of these distinct songs shows up, with a real message & resonant “body”, almost pre-completed with lyrics and melody.
This may be the answer to a question, a soothing comment (since I often start out with a statement of some kind of emotional suffering), or another form/body that births out. Those of you who do any kind of improv know this already, but it’s a wonderful thing to realize you can just start anywhere & see what happens, then realize later it was all perfect.
Very often the songs are conversations between the “me personality” or other parts & portions and a wonderful larger them/us/we/Source/MotherFatherChild/aurora/field and so on.
Sometimes it’s just the normal me complaining for a while and that’s it & nothing special or exciting happens during that song.
3. It’s not necessary to mentally know “how” to make music. Music makes itself. I am pretty much self-taught (some piano & saxophone lessons during childhood) and I have been doing it for a while so I do know some stuff, but I never liked lessons or worrying about doing music right, and in truth I have only gotten better by letting go of other people’s ideas about the right way to play.
I don’t need to know “why” something works or doesn’t, but rather follow what WANTS to happen in the music. Until very recently I could not identify the key of a song or know the names of chords I used, but that never seemed like a hindrance to the music making itself through me, if you know what I mean.
I take this as encouragement that if we just follow what feels good to us, or what seems to want to happen in the song, rather than think about what is right according to music theory or whatever, we have everything we need.
Allowing the music to make itself sometimes leads to a state where I am simply plucking the melody and the words off of a tree, they are more or less falling off the branch into my mouth/song and I am not making them, per se, myself (or at least not from the normal “me” state of ego/3D consciousness). This is very satisfying to experience.
4. It has to be ok to be “bad”. To engage with & stick with the lionsong practice has required absolute, total self-loving permission to make “mistakes”, experiment, and make truly, truly TRULY terrible sounding sounds, as well as tolerate bouts of what feel like lyrical drivel, repetition, & nothing coming out, feeling like a knucklehead. This is vital.
5. Kick out the entities. I’ve needed to practice discernment to make sure I don’t let entities & energies come sing through me who I don’t want to have with me. Specifically, I’ve had to CONTINUALLY encounter & find a way of overriding both the inner critic/perfectionist/controller who doesn’t want me to do anything less than amazing for fear or shame & ridicule AND the ego/pride/vanity/astral slimer who is like “Oh my god this is amazing you should be famous” (embarrassing but absolutely true). This is ongoing for me.
6. Do not fear mistakes, there are none (Miles Davis). If we can learn to let ourselves be “bad” at singing/songing, and we don’t mind it so much, we can discover a) the distinctions between good and bad are actually not as clear as we may have thought, and that b) the “bad” parts/sounds/notes, if tolerated rather than pushed away or stopped, have the seeds of the next good-sounding thing in them. So many times I’ve been like “oh boy, now what” as I get myself into some musically discordant or otherwise strange space, but find that if I just accept that now I’m there, it always shifts, grows, transforms (or else goes out with a spectacularly horrible bang, so bad it’s interesting.) There is literally no failure.
7. Superego doesn’t really know what good art is, the only thing it can tell you is what society (particularly your parents) would have accepted in the past. Many times listening back to a lionsong I realize that a portion of the song that felt very bad at the moment or where my inner critic (superego) was screaming at me because I went off-key or rhymed something idiotically or whatevs, actually doesn’t sound so bad to me later on, and might not immediately pop out as a mess up to another person.
Conversely moments when the little me-policeman, the superego, told me “yes, yes that’s on point" often sound a bit flat & fake & stereotyped in the end.
A revelation in and of itself. So…don’t listen to the superego, it’s not an artist. It’s a portion of you designed to remind you of what your parents think. More accurately - what your parents’ superegos think.
8. We’ve been robbed of our right to sing! All of this has led me to the conclusion that we have been vastly, vastly, egregiously mis-educated about music, and that in particular by making it a “study” of systems & notation, we may have educated ourselves away from the most basic instinct to musically conjoin together more frequently, because now only the people inducted into the special knowledge of music are allowed to play, & the rest of us have to be freakishly self-confident to dare to think we could be musicians too. This is horrible & breaks my heart.
Music is native to us, given to us by nature. We are built for it, as resonant beings ourselves - otherwise why the gift of vocalization? Why else would we love singing so much, & have so many physiological benefits to it? I do not believe nature intended us only to talk, but rather receive and give song.
The controller matrix doesn’t want us to sing - we must find out why not.
9. I am mainly interested in myself/my Self/my songs. After practicing musicking from within for a while now I want to say that from my current point of view I personally am less interested in the canon of great works and much more interested in banging around experimentally myself. Happy to do it with others, and happy to do it alone, but I want to be part of the music, not sit in my chair and listen to others make it.
I am categorically more interested in my own songs – in the process of them coming out, what they teach me, what it feels like to get a hold of them, and listening back to their qualities – than I am in anyone else’s.
While on the one hand this is very self-absorbed, and I have no problem acknowledging that, practically speaking it is enormously empowering because it means that I have a wellspring of personal fulfillment that has nothing to do with anyone else, that it comes from within me, and is completely validated by me and me only.
I can’t overemphasize how much reconnection with Source has taken place through the lionsong process, meaning that I show up, say my point of view as the first part of the song, often starting out like “I feel awful…”, describing whatever’s up for the day, and then sooner or later Source or a Guardian energy, spiritual family member or friend starts singing/speaking to me/with me/ through me in song, as well.
You could also say, it’s simply me speaking to me, but higher portions/stations than the ego self. All of this seems enormously extraordinary and gratifying to the point of tears. Sometimes I love my songs so much I have to lie back on the bed and cry a little bit about it. :)
This feels revolutionary, and might be my best guess as to why the controller matrix does not want us to sing. Because if we do, we might discover our natural, easy connection to massive feelings of happiness.
10. Other people don’t have to like my music. An important step for me in getting to this stage has been to understand that the fact that others may not be fascinated & interested in me/my music does not mean that I should not be.
In fact, I would not say anyone else has any kind of obligation to pay attention to, or listen to my music, and only those who for whatever reason, all on their own, find themselves drawn to it, should do so if they want to for their own purposes. It is completely in the “take what you like & leave the rest” way of handling it.
It is through falling in love with my own songs that I am freeing little child self from needing anyone else to be in love with my songs or tell me who I am & what I’m worth.
11. We are all music makers and singers (if we want). Lionsongs have reinforced my conviction of how incredibly & awfully distorted our way of relating to music and musicians is now as a culture – that most of us are supposed to be passive consumers & there are only a few who are chosen to be the “gods” who get to be creative, & the rest of us are only there to admire.
This is so deeply wrong it makes me want to yell. We are EACH our own creators & we are absolutely allowed to be in awe of the Source within our OWN selves as it comes pouring out. This discovery is so tender to me. It has also released me from the trap of constantly being in the mode of "I love my own song...but no one else does...I must be wrong about it being wonderful then…I better stop loving it…"
12. We can love our own voices. As a final aside on this topic - many of us artistically oriented people are afraid of being “narcissistic”.
I am, at least at the ego level, completely narcissistically preoccupied - worried that every little thing that happens in life is a sign that I am not valuable enough. Thinking everything is happening because of me not being worthy enough.
NOT allowing any self-recognition & being excessively self-flagellating & self-effacing to try to prevent people from seeing that I have a deep longing to think well of myself has never helped.
That has only caused me to seek affirmation, approval & admiration from others in underground ways (which I still do unconsciously, but don’t when I’m in higher Self stations or when I can neutrally witness the desire for confirmation of my worth in the light of consciousness).
Realizing that I, like all humans, have narcissistic needs - namely to HEAR myself, to WITNESS myself, to KNOW myself, to UNDERSTAND myself, to see a MIRROR image of myself to help me know who & what I am - is what helps me be “less narcissistic” in a pathological expression.
I don’t want to say that I have healed my narcissism altogether. But of course, the fact that it’s conscious is a lot better than unconscious narcissism, because it is only when we are unconscious of our shadows that we can be possessed & taken over by negative forces through the entry point of our wounds.
It is through understanding, forgiving and loving my great need to be worthy of love in my own eyes, that I have been able to move past some key narcissistic preoccupations which caused me to try to extract admiration from others all the time (more classic narcissistic behavior like “Hey look at me, pretty special, right?”), which still happens sometimes.
And anyway, underneath all narcissism, in my opinion, is a wounded human who was deprived of the facts: we are all of us, always and no matter what, unconditionally & gigantically worthy. We are a cell in the magnificent beautiful body of life, and life’s inherent, abundant, beautiful nature is our own as well.
Thanks for reading!