The Embrace of Influence

Letting go of the anxiety of originality.

My whole life, I've had a strong desire to feel I'm carving my own unique path. Maybe that’s putting it too mildly. I’ve wanted to believe that I, and everything I make, sprang into life sui generis, from sheer creative force of will. I don't know much about astrology, but my friend Jess, who is an astrologer, told me that this is very Aquarius of me. Great. So not even my desire to be unique is unique.

It’s not a particularly fun desire to carry around, because it gets dented at every turn. As soon as you put anything out into the world—especially music—everyone will tell you what it reminds them of. I have to stop myself and remember that there’s a way that those kinds of remarks could be taken as compliments. But I’ve expended so much futile energy trying to run away from the possibility of comparison.

I’m slowly, slowly starting to give that up. Of course, I concede without argument that everything exists in a continuum, and I will gratefully credit my influences. I just want to feel like I’ve taken all those influences, put them in a blender, and turned them into a one-of-a-kind goo that…wow, I just grossed myself out with my own metaphor. What I’m trying to say is that things are changing for me, albeit glacially, but every now and then that progress is given a little boost. The most recent boost came from the Song Exploder episode that came out today, with English singer/songwriter Sam Fender.

All three of Sam Fender’s albums have gone to #1 on the UK Album charts. This summer, he sold 82,500 tickets to his show at London Stadium—the biggest crowd the venue had ever seen. He’s enormously successful. If you’re not familiar with him yet, I genuinely think you’ll love him after listening to him tell the heartfelt story of making his song “People Watching.” While I was editing the episode, even with the critical, meticulous, clinical part of my brain in full gear, I found myself getting choked up a few times listening to his words and music.

The comparisons one can draw to Sam’s music are immediate. By this point, it’s practically a cliché to say his songs sound like Bruce Springsteen. But what’s especially noteworthy to me is the way he doesn’t shy away from his influences. In our interview, he described incorporating those influences into the making of the song overtly, un-self-consciously, gleefully, even. He cites Dire Straits in both a guitar part and a keyboard part in the song. The song itself was co-produced by Adam Granduciel of The War on Drugs, whom Sam approached specifically because The War on Drugs had been so important to his musical evolution. As a listener, you can identify all of those strands of DNA that he’s braiding together.

And the result is…well, I think it’s a pretty great song. Rousing, anthemic, and with a backstory that is making me get a little choked up (again) just thinking about it.

In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot wrote, “no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone,” and yet there is evidence that we want to see them otherwise in “our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles any one else.” The main idea that Eliot wants to make, an idea that I absolutely love, is that influence, or artistic tradition, moves in two directions. Yes, an artist is necessarily going to be the result of the art that came before them. But their art can retroactively reshape the way that we see that lineage. “What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered.”

The loftiness of this notion is a wonderful thing to aspire to, imagining that your work might live alongside your heroes’ work, a new island in the archipelago. But even without that dream, in moments where the haze of my Aquarian ego clears away a little, the more evolved part of my mind thinks: Honestly, who cares? Who cares if people can tell who your influences are? No two people would ever—could ever—write the same song. Everyone has a blender that’s being fed the art they take in, and their entire life and memories, too; every laugh, every stubbed toe, every misheard lyric; and we are all, in fact, churning out a goo (oh my GOD, I’m so sorry) that is unique. (Hey, Austin Kleon! instead of calling your bestselling book Steal Like An Artist, did you ever consider the title Churn Out Your Goo? No?)

Everyone holds their pencil a little differently, everyone sits at the piano differently. Even if you try to write a song like Bruce Springsteen, fortunately or unfortunately, it will always be yours.

So, let me go back to Bruce Springsteen. By the time his third album had come out, he’d been compared to Bob Dylan, the Yardbirds, Pete Townshend of the Who, and more. The New York Times said “Each year, numerous rock music performers receive good reviews; occasionally a newcomer is compared to one of the rockland giants. Hardly ever, however, does a performer emerge who is compared to all of them.”

Now, Springsteen’s own legacy is so immense that countless modern rock stars, from The Killers to Jack Antonoff to Arcade Fire, all carry the weight of it. So what does The Boss have to say about it?

Well, in 2012, he spoke at the SXSW festival himself about the lineage of music that made him who he is, including Elvis, Roy Orbison, The Animals. He prefaced it by saying, “I'd like to talk about the one thing that's been consistent over the years, the genesis and power of creativity, the power of the songwriter.” And then continued, “We live in a post-authentic world. And today authenticity is a house of mirrors. It's all just what you're bringing when the lights go down. It's your teachers, your influences, your personal history; and at the end of the day, it's the power and purpose of your music that still matters.”

Thirteen years later, I listen to that and it feels like he’s speaking directly to me. Just like the best songs (past, present, and future) always do.

—Hrishikesh

P.S. Hope to see you at the live Bon Iver Song Exploder event this Friday in LA, or at the Good Things book release events with Samin Nosrat in SF the following weekend! (Hey Samin, did you ever consider calling your book Goo Things?) The full list of live events is here.

P.S. As I was trying to put together my thoughts for this, in the small hours in the wake of finishing the Sam Fender episode, I googled to see if anyone else had put T.S. Eliot and Bruce Springsteen together while talking about influence and creation…and of course someone had. Please check out this piece entitled Springsteen, Tradition, and the Purpose of the Artist by William I. Wolff. I believe he has made all of the same points I have and probably much more eloquently and in greater depth. I have only skimmed it so far. I will read it properly when I’ve recovered from being, once again, so entirely unoriginal.