“Nobody really knows what they’re doing,” says singer-songwriter Cash Savage after 15 or so minutes on the phone spent talking – or maybe that should be trying to talk – about the difficulty of explaining one’s creative process. See, Savage knows, as so many creative people do, how bloody impossible it is to put your process into words.
Sure, you can talk about the particulars of it all – what time of the day you sit down to write; how long it takes you; how you feel afterwards. But there is something about the actual, practical making of art that doesn’t really belong to language; that eludes it somehow.
“It’s so weird when someone asks about it,” Savage says. “When someone says, ‘What is writing to you?’ it’s very hard to answer. When you’re in that moment of writing, you really have no control. All I ever really say when people ask is, ‘Just make sure you’ve got a pen in your pocket.’ Because you never know when those moments of inspiration come. I don’t think there’s many creative people in the world who say they can manifest those moments of inspiration. They just come when they come.
“I mean, one of my songs I wrote it in a bar, and the lyrics just came to me. I wrote them all right there and I worked out the chords later. I had to furiously type the words all down into my phone, which was tedious, because my thumbs aren’t made for texting. It was an effort getting it out as quickly as it was coming to me in my mind.”
If that makes the creative process sound rather terrifying – like something that comes and goes at whim – that’s because for Savage, it is. The Melbourne artist may have delivered an exceptional record in the form of One Of Us, 2016’s roughly hewn masterpiece, but the thing took work and skill to whittle into shape.
“It’s terrifying, writing,” she says. “It’s completely out of your power. I know there’s writers who sit down every day and write and write. I found when I was writing One Of Us, I needed to just lock myself away in the studio once a week and sit down and write, and that was incredibly productive for me.
“But the studio didn’t necessarily give me the sparks of the songs – it just gave me the time to toy with them, and muck around with them. Yet those little moments of inspiration – if I had a way to create those, I’d be rich.”
While some of Savage’s songs require very little of her, echoing through her head almost ready to be written, at other times she must spend months on them. “One of the songs on the album, the title track, took me a year and a few days to write. And I didn’t finish it until the night that we recorded it.
“I had the words, but how they were being presented – that took me a long time to figure out. Other songs just fall out of me. There’s another song on that record, ‘Sunday Morning’, that I wrote in the time that it takes my partner to have a shower. I just sat down with the guitar and it just happened. It can go that way: songs can just write themselves.”
It’s terrifying, writing. It’s completely out of your power.
As a result of One Of Us’ success – it was rightfully deemed one of the best Australian records of last year – Savage is now in the position where she is turned to as an expert, and finds herself invited to join panels and answer questions about the intricacies of a process she has never once claimed to fully understand.
“When I get asked to join panels and stuff, I always say, ‘I don’t think I know any more than the people sitting there in the audience.’ I have written a bunch of songs, but will I write more songs? I don’t know. I guess all I can say is keep doing it – keep writing. See what happens. It’s the only advice I have, which would make my panel a very short one.”
Perhaps as expected, Savage doesn’t put much stead in those cheap paperbacks that claim to have the answer to every artist’s struggles; the ones that have a habit of amassing at the bottom of bargain bins in used bookstores, promising as they do to unlock the hidden secrets of creativity.
“I’m stubborn and I don’t really want anyone to tell me what to do,” Savage says. “So I just do it my own way. I don’t read books, and I don’t go to panels, because I don’t want to create in that way – that doesn’t really help me. I always say to myself, maybe there’ll come a time when I have awful and severe writer’s block, and those books will become an option. But for the moment, I could think of nothing worse. But that’s just me. That’s how I create.”
Ultimately, when it comes down to it, Savage is battering about in the dark – and that, as far as she is concerned, is the way it should be. “People have been creating for so long, that all the rules that were originally built around creating have already been disqualified just by the fact that people are creating in different ways.” She laughs happily. “None of that really matters in the end.”
Cash Savage and The Last Drinks play Yours & Owls 2017, Stuart Park, Saturday September 30 – Sunday October 1. One Of Us is out now through Mistletone.
