The "Magical" Flow of Creative Inspiration

The experiences described by these artists are powerful examples of how the creative process can feel like a kind of communication with something beyond ourselves:

Bob Dylan

In an interview with 60 Minutes, Bob Dylan confessed he didn't know how he wrote some of his early songs. He described the writing process as "almost magic" and pointed to a lyric from the song, "Love Minus Zero/No Limit," as an example of a gift that came from nowhere

Casper David Friedrich - Moonwatchers 1819

Darkness at the break of noon,

shadows even the silver spoon...

A handmade blade, a child's balloon

Eclipses both the sun and moon

To understand you know to soon

There is no sense in trying.

Takeaway: A gift

Paul McCartney

In an interview with the BBC, McCartney talked about the experience of writing the song "Yesterday":

Marc Chagall - Circus with Clown Dancer

"I woke up one morning with a tune in my head and I thought, 'Hey, I don't know this tune or do I?' It was like a jazz melody. I went to the piano and found the chords to it, made sure I remembered it and then hawked it around to all my friends saying, 'Is this any good?'"

McCartney said it was an almost dreamlike state, where the song seemed to come to him fully formed. This made him nervous about playing the song for others because he thought he might have subconsciously plagiarized it.

Neil Young

In his autobiography, "Waging Heavy Peace," Neil Young writes about the writing process for his song "Cowgirl in the Sand." According to Young, he was playing guitar in his apartment when he suddenly found himself playing a riff he had never played before. He immediately started singing along:.

Marc Chagall, 1912, The Fiddler

"I didn't know where the words came from, they just came. It's a strange feeling when that happens. It's like you're not in control of it, you're just there to catch it."

He said that he didn't even fully understand the song's meaning until after it was recorded and released.

Tom Waits

Echoing Young, Tom Waits described the writing process as a "mysterious thing."

"I don't know where the songs come from. It's like a ghost is writing the song, and you're just the medium. You're just a receiver. I still get like that. I mean, I'm very superstitious about writing. I never write after dark. I never write in the rain. It's just a thing that you don't do. You don't go there if you don't have to." (NPR)

Waits embraces the mystery of the creative process, And in another interview with The Guardian, he talked about how he likes to let his subconscious take over when he writes songs, and that, like Neil Young, he often doesn't understand the meaning of his own lyrics until much later:

Marc Chagall, 1913, Paris Through the Window

"I have to trick myself into writing. So I'll collect a bunch of fragments and put them in a cigar box. And then later, when I go through them, it's like, 'Oh, that's what I was talking about!' It's like I'm leaving myself a little trail of breadcrumbs."

Bjork

Björk has talked about how she feels that some of her songs, including "Hyperballad," seem to come from a place beyond her conscious mind:

Chagall - Magic Flute

"It was like it was already there. I felt like it was coming from somewhere else, like it was already written somewhere and I was just picking it up. And I remember thinking, 'This is not normal.' I mean, I've written a lot of songs in my life, and sometimes they come easily, but this was different. It was like it was coming from some other dimension." (NPR)

Björk believes that some of her music comes from channeling into a deeper source of inspiration beyond her own experiences. She has also said she feels a sense of awe and wonder when she's able to tap into that source.

The Romantics

The Romantics, as you can imagine, specialized in this kind of otherworldly inspiration. Some examples:

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote extensively about the idea of the mysterious "muse" and the power of imagination. E.g. In"Kubla Khan," he describes a dreamlike vision of a magical palace.

• Percy Bysshe Shelley saw the power of inspiration as a way of transcending the limitations of the material world. In "Mont Blanc," he talks about the way in which the mountain serves as a kind of spiritual force that allows him to connect with something beyond the self.

• John Keats saw the imagination as a way of accessing a deeper, more profound truth about the world. In "Ode to a Nightingale," the song of the nightingale is kind of portal to a higher realm of experience.

• Friedrich Schiller believed that art had the power to transform individuals and society by inspiring a sense of moral beauty. Schiller saw creativity as a kind of divine spark that could help individuals transcend the limitations of their everyday lives.
  

These moments of "creative gifts"—mysterious, involuntary—demonstrate that the deepest art doesn’t come from control or calculation (or even reason), but from surrendering to something beyond us. This is something that AI will never touch.