David Bowie’s Creative Exercise

David Bowie is a true Creative Champion. Not only is he a brilliant musician, but he spent a lot of his life inventing and constantly re-inventing his own creative process.

One of the best techniques he developed was how he wrote lyrics for songs.

Novelist Rick Moody, who has been privy more than once to details of Bowie’s songwriting process, wrote about it in his column on Bowie’s 2013 album The Next Day: “David Bowie misdirects autobiographical interpretation, often, by laying claim to reportage and fiction as songwriting methodologies, and he cloaks himself, further, in the cut-up.” Anyone acquainted with the work of William S. Burroughs will recognize that term, which refers to the process of literally cutting up existing texts in order to generate new meanings with their rearranged pieces.

You can see how Bowie performed his cut-up composition in the 1970s in the video below, in which he demonstrates and explains his version of the method. “What I’ve used it for, more than anything else, is igniting anything that might be in my imagination,” he says. “It can often come up with very interesting attitudes to look into. I tried doing it with diaries and things, and I was finding out amazing things about me and what I’d done and where I was going.”

Watch the two different video’s below and think about how you can start your next creative session using existing inputs.