Mark C. Samples | Musicologist
“…ear-opening and
wide-ranging…”
—John Covach, Director, University of Rochester Institute for Popular Music, Professor of Theory, Eastman School of Music
Solie Award-Winner
For Outstanding Collection of Essays, awarded by the American Musicological Society.
About Mark
Dr. Mark Samples is a musicologist who studies how practices of promotion (branding, marketing, advertising) influence the cultural history of music in the United States. He also teaches entrepreneurship strategies to professional musicians across the country. He is an Associate Professor of Music at Central Washington University.
“A man wants to walk across the land, but the earth is covered with thorns. He has two options—one is to pave his road, to tame all of nature into compliance. The other is to make sandals.”
—Indian proverb
Josh Waitzkin, the chess prodigy turned world-champion-martial artist, has faced and beaten the world’s best.
And at the highest levels of competition, there are always dirty players. Waitzkin encountered them in his chess career as a fifteen-year-old.
The space where you create matters. The office or coffee shops where you write. The studio where you produce music or paintings. Your editing suite.
Create an environment that summons your best work.
Michael Lewis, bestselling author of Moneyball, The Blind Side, and over a dozen others, recently shared the two main factors that he covets in his writing space.
First, he says to fill your space with love. For him, this comes from the pictures of family he has hung up around his writing room.
A sense of urgency flows throughout the entries of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. He is constantly reminding himself to act. To stop delaying. To focus. To live.
“Concentrate every minute like a Roman…on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice.” (2.5)
“Human life. Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim. Condition of Body: decaying. Soul: spinning around. Fortune: unpredictable. Lasting Fame: uncertain.” (2.17)
“Don’t make room for anything…[that] might lead you astray, tempt you off the road, and leave you unable to devote yourself completely to achieving the goodness that is uniquely yours.” (3.6)
If you could have seen me just before I sat down to write this, you would have thought I had lost my mind.
And let me tell you, to an on-looker, I must have looked like a complete fool.
The cringe-factor was at eleven.
The scene was so awkward that if you had been walking into the room to say hello to me, once you saw what I was doing you would have quietly turned around and tip-toed away hoping that I hadn’t noticed you were there.
So what was I doing?
Today I want to share with you Rick Rubin's nine approaches for getting unstuck. In the book he applies these strategies to the Craft Phase of the creation process, but most could be applied to the earlier phases as well (Seed Phase, Experimentation Phase).
Before abandoning a stalled work, Rubin says, "it's worth finding a way to break the sameness and refresh your excitement in the work, as if engaging with it for the first time." (185) As a record producer, Rubin sometimes suggests exercises to his collaborators to encourage this experience. Here are the nine strategies he uses:
ou and I have talked about Rick Rubin's book, The Creative Act, before. Over the course of the book, he describes four phases of the creative process: Seed, Experimentation, Crafting, and Completion. Use these four phases to clarify your own creative process.
The Seed Phase.
Throughout the book, Rubin talks about creative ideas as “seeds.” In this phase, you collect as many potential ideas as possible.
The creative process is anything but obvious—a truth that the outside world can never truly understand. The daily struggle. The adrenaline. The second-guessing. The blood, sweat, and joy.
The myth of the genius artist and the flash of insight is just that, a myth.
It’s only part of the story.
As a creator, you know that the creative process is never just one thing. It’s never just insight, or just hard work. The creative process is made up of intervals, like breathing in and out.
In the spirit of deepening knowledge through the process of review, I want to re-share an essay from this newsletter last summer, on July 10, 2023. At the time, I was deep into an exploration of the creative act through reading Rick Rubin's book.
There are moments in life where you can step out of time and touch awareness. This essay was the product of one of those moments for me. I hope it encourages you today. To collaborate. To relate. To seek out creative partners in unexpected places.
Indifference.
It’s one of our greatest fears as professional creators. We pour our heart and soul into our work, and gather the courage to share it.
And the response is…silence.
Non-response.
Crickets.
The opposite of indifference is remarkability.
Remarkability is the quality of work that gets people talking. It’s when people feel compelled to share their experience of your work with others.
But how can we make remarkable work? I want to share with you two ways.
More from Mark
After trying to convince radio host Howard Stern that he wasn’t born a good singer, Ed Sheeran offered up some cold hard sonic evidence. He had them pull up a YouTube video of him singing when he was fourteen years old. They played it right there in the interview. It starts out not half bad, but pretty soon it gets hard to listen to.
“You weren’t kidding,” Stern says.
“No I wasn’t.” Sheeran goes on, “This is what I play to kids, and I’m like, look, this is me at fourteen. I wrote The A Teamat eighteen. So four years later, I made The A Team and recorded it. And in four years, I learned harmony, I learned how to sing in tune, I learned how to perform, I learned how to do it in time, and you can do it.”