Alex Kapronos of Franz Ferdinand was interviewed on NPR last night. He's released a new book, Sound Bites, that collects the food reviews for The Guardian that he wrote while on tour.
His end of the interview is very good, with stories about how the band started over a bottle of stolen vodka, how some of the bandmates worked in a kitchen together before succeeding, and how cooking professionally is like playing music professionally. (The interviewer continually feels the need to remind us who she's interviewing.)
One good bit of the interview covers the creative process for Franz Ferdinand's songwriting. The process is surprisingly methodical in its own way, with a strong adherence to a stated aesthetic.
Working with creative people in ad agencies, I've met a few who have been resistant to articulating the reasoning behind their creative work. It's as if being able to articulate why something is good will instantly make its power evaporate.
I understand their point of view. Some of my creative heroes (like Bob Dylan) have refused to speak about their work, but even Dylan finally caved in the last few years to authorize a documentary and a museum retrospective.
Maybe it's more a matter of being able to articulate your strategy properly for yourself. I'm reminded of Michael Jordan's comeback years; it seems as if he had decided that he couldn't play near the basket any more in the Shaq era. He built up body mass to defend against the bigger, younger players, and then he perfected the fade-away jumper to shoot over them. He went from being Air Jordan to being a giant killer. Or maybe I'm just making all this up, and his aging knees just couldn't take the slam dunks anymore and he changed the way he played to slow things down.
Either way, when watching a great performer change their style in mid-career (as Dylan did when he went electric) is to watch coherent strategies at work.
If we're talking about an ad agency, then, the ability to articulate what's good about a creative idea is deadly important because of the number of people involved in the process over time. I think about longstanding creative work like the Absolut Vodka campaign at TBWA and how not understanding what was really happening in that creative work led to a decade of creative inactivity. It was easier to say, "If it ain't broke don't fix it" without realising that things were actually very broken. Hopefully the new work sets things back on course.
Here's a link to a recording of the interview. It's also available on iTunes.
