Don't Give In to This
There’s a moment in the song “The Story,” written by Phil Hanseroth and sung by Brandi Carlile, when the beat stops momentarily. Out of the quiet, Carlile suddenly scream-sings the line “All of these lines across my face.”
Coming about two-thirds of the way through, it’s the emotional high point of the song. A stirring jolt that grips the attention in the way that great music can.
In the song, Carlile is singing about how our scars tell our stories. How our imperfections make us who we are:
All of these lines across my face,
Tell you the story of who I am
So many stories of where I’ve been
And how I got to who I am
In the 2007 recording of the song, produced by T-Bone Burnett, Carlile’s voice cracks viciously when she sings this line. As she shares in her recent memoir, it was during this time that she was using steroids and intermittent vocal rest to fight hardening polyps on her vocal cords.
I seem to remember reading at the time about how they selected this take. That they did other takes, but in the end, it was this one they selected—because of the crack.
It was simply the truest take.
The imperfection of Carlile’s voice didn’t keep her and The Twins from releasing the track. It was a signature.
The world is filled with almost art. Almost finished, almost shared, almost beloved. How many drafts of songs, paintings, scripts, books—how many are there in drawers, hidden in journals, locked in old hard drives never to be surfaced again?
Some of these artworks were abandoned for good reason. Some died from neglect. Some were plowed under by irreconcilable egos. But others were victims of that reliable executioner: perfectionism.
Perfectionism has withheld untold numbers of great artworks from the world. Yet imperfections are what mark an artwork as human.
The subtle variations in calligraphic lettering that tells you it’s not a font.
Camera light leaks in analog photography that expose the film in unintended ways.
The double exposure effect when a photographer doesn’t advance the film.
Jackson Pollack dripping or splattering paint on a canvas to create an abstract expressionist work.
Or a crack in the singer’s voice.
These are all imperfections. Beautiful imperfections. As Leonard Cohen has sung:
There is a crack in everything;
That’s how the light gets in.
Listen to “The Story” on Spotify. This article was originally sent to my email list subscribers on The Creative Process Newsletter. Put your email in the field below, or sign up here to join other creators and get insights every Monday. Want to see past editions first? Click here.