Photograph by Frazao Studio Latino/Getty
When my wake-up call came, I was groggy and hungover. I’d spent the first night of this trip to New York City checking out a few bars and nightclubs. I thought leaving an 11 a.m. wake-up call would allow for sufficient recovery. It didn’t. I felt like dawg.
I went downstairs to get coffee at a corner shop, then returned to my room with two cups. I had just finished the first cup when I happened to glance at the clock. It wasn’t 11 a.m. It was seven. The desk clerk must’ve misheard my Southern drawl. By then, it was too late to go back to sleep—the caffeine was already kicking in.
I was meeting friends for lunch and had nearly four hours to kill, so I walked. As I went through the Bowery on my way to Greenwich Village, the city felt cold and hard. I was tired and the people passing by were absorbed in their own worlds. I felt like a stranger in a strange land, and I was at a point in my life where I feared my aspirations were going to remain teasingly just out of reach.
After I turned down Bleecker Street, a song began to play in my head—a song I’d never heard before. A song that was writing itself in my mind. The first verse and melody and even the arrangement arrived fully formed. Then came the chorus: “And I’m just looking for / The land beneath my dreams / If I could only get a whole night’s sleep / And find the land beneath my dreams.”
The next two verses came to me as if I were listening to someone else’s song. I didn’t have a pen or paper, and I spent the next few hours walking around the Village singing that song to myself over and over so I wouldn’t forget it. I knew immediately it was the best song I’d ever written (an admittedly low bar). When I got to the restaurant, I borrowed a pen from our waitress and frantically scribbled down the lyrics on a napkin before I even said hello to my friends.
Songwriters will tell you that sometimes a song simply presents itself out of the ether. In introducing a performance of “Clay Pigeons,” a song written by Blaze Foley, John Prine noted that he didn’t often sing other people’s songs. But when he heard “Clay Pigeons,” he told himself, “My god, this sounds like I should’ve stayed awake [some night] and wrote that.”
There’s the story of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers playing a half-written song in the studio for the first time. Petty had no idea what he was going to sing when it reached the chorus—he had yet to write it. Then, out of nowhere in that moment, it came to him: “Baby, even the losers / Get lucky sometimes.”
I’ve always felt the song I wrote that morning was intended for someone else, that I somehow intercepted it before it got to them. It was not in my usual style, musically or lyrically. Yet it came from my life and my experiences, and expressed exactly where I was emotionally at that moment. My spirit was speaking to me.
Tom Petty thought songwriting was spiritual. He believed the songs were out there, waiting to be received. “It’s just a matter of . . . getting yourself into a place where you can receive, where you can get your antenna out there [so] you can get that signal,” he said. “You never really get the results if you try to force it that you do if you just let it come in.”
That creative process isn’t unique to songwriters—it spans every artistic discipline. In this month’s issue, we take a deep dive into the mysteries of creativity. We talked to artists in multiple disciplines about how they ignite their creative spark, how they take an idea and craft it into a finished work, and how they reset their minds to focus on the business side of creativity—earning a living from their art.
For all the challenges of creation and commerce that follow, the creative spark itself often starts with something wondrously simple: You can be going down a street feeling bad and all of a sudden, a song comes to you . . . if you’re listening for it.
This article appears in our September 2025 issue.
