Keep the Flow

I just got back from my first tour in Iceland with my own band – which, after more than 20 years of living here, was long overdue. This episode is me sitting with what the tour actually taught me. Some of it was small and practical: I left all my CDs and vinyl on a stage in Blönduós and had to drive four hours round trip to get them back. Some of it was bigger – how much a group runs on trust, why...

I'm 77 episodes in, most of them barely get seen, and I'm not sure anymore whether that's enough of a reason to keep going... so I'm just going to tell you the truth about it. I've been doing this podcast for a couple of years now, and lately I've been wrestling with a question I didn't expect to be asking out loud: is the response I'm getting enough to keep going? This many episodes in, most don'...

The Pope wrote an encyclical about AI — and the part that hit me hardest had nothing to do with technology. 📭 The free newsletter goes deeper into ideas like these: https://ktfpod.com I'm not a religious person, but when Pope Leo released his encyclical on artificial intelligence, something in it stopped me cold. He wrote about "authentic encounters" – the bonds we form with each other through li...

I have a confession. I've been using AI to help make some of these episodes... not to write the music, but the show itself. A recent New York Times piece made me stop and ask what I was actually giving up. Studies show essays written without AI contained up to eight times as many new ideas as AI-assisted ones. I also came across a video by photographer Rick Bebbington making essentially the same p...

After years of obsessing over the news and feeling powerless about all of it, I'm finally trying something I've never actually done. For years I was a news junky. Subscriptions to the New York Times and the Washington Post, hours of cable news, BBC on the radio in the car. I told myself it was civic duty. Eventually I realized it was just making me miserable – and I'd done basically nothing about...

You don't lose time to laziness. You lose it to a series of small, completely defensible decisions... and if you're a creative person, you feel every minute of it. Every morning I do Wordle. Then I make an espresso and watch one Colbert monologue. Totally reasonable. But then Colbert went on break, YouTube suggested Kimmel, and I noticed something genuinely interesting: three different comedians,...

The more experience I got as a jazz drummer, the worse my instincts became – and figuring out why changed how I think about every creative decision. There's a moment in almost every creative project where the variables multiply past what you can reasonably think through – and the harder you try to decide, the less clear it gets. I know this feeling from the bandstand: I'm a jazz drummer, and for a...

I've been reading Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anna Lembke – a book about addiction, not creativity... but I couldn't stop reading it like it was about creativity.  Dopamine Nation: https://amzn.to/4tPSkCg  Turns out there's a reason for that. Neuroscientist David Linden found that creative people often have low-functioning dopamine systems, meaning we feel less baseline pleasure than average....

I used to only reach for writing when I was already stuck, which meant I was always playing catch-up. What I've learned — slowly, and not always consistently – is that writing isn't really about being a writer. It's about finding the story underneath whatever you're trying to make: where you are, where you want to go, and what you actually care about saying.  In this episode I get into the sc...

If you've ever snuck away from a family vacation to work on an idea... or spent a board game mentally somewhere else entirely – this episode is for you. I left my laptop at home on a ski trip. Took the iPad "just for movies." By day two, I was writing this episode on it. That moment of self-awareness... putting it down, choosing the board game, then spending the next 20 minutes pushing the podcast...

You've been told to visualize your success, but there's research showing that advice might actually be making your creative block worse. The new album: https://scottmclemore.bandcamp.com/album/subtext-vol-1 There's a piece of advice creatives have been given forever: visualize the finished album, the sold-out venue, the standing ovation. It feels motivating. The problem is, psychologist Gabriele O...

What happens when a jazz trumpeter decides to turn his own anxiety into a chamber music suite... and then the world has a collective breakdown right on schedule? Ian Carey and I go way back. We used to live two blocks apart in Brooklyn and played together before life pulled us in different directions, so having him on felt long overdue. Ian is a San Francisco-based trumpeter, composer, graphic des...

I never set out to become a minimalist composer, but somehow I accidentally stumbled into a creative process that completely transformed my output. What started as a simple experiment with my 2012 album Remote Location—recycling a bassline as a melody—turned into an ongoing game of "what can I get away with?" And here's the weird part: by giving myself fewer options and looser constraints, I ended...

The better I got at my craft, the less I actually created. Sounds backwards, right? In this episode, I share how improving our skills can paradoxically make us more hesitant, more critical, and less willing to experiment. Drawing from my own journey from coffee drinker to coffee snob, I explore why creative growth sometimes means hitting the record button less often—and why that's a problem we nee...

I was completely stuck trying to come up with a better title for an episode when something unexpected happened. 🤟 Come join my creative community: https://patreon.com/scottmclemore The moment I picked up my Apple Pencil and started doodling, the perfect phrase appeared—like my brain had been holding it hostage the whole time. This experience sent me down a research rabbit hole into the neuroscien...

What if the secret to creating your best work is convincing yourself it doesn't matter at all? 📬 If this resonated with you, you'll love my newsletter. I send one email a week with ideas like this: https://ktfpod.com/#newsletter I recently sat down to write some throwaway background music for my podcast. Something pleasant, functional... and totally forgettable. Instead, I accidentally created wh...

A partially blind photographer who can't see what she's capturing just revealed the secret to why creativity might be the most powerful antidepressant you're not using. I've been feeling the seasonal dip lately... you know, those darker days that just weigh on you. Then I stumbled across a video from a photographer who's partially blind and can't totally see what she's photographing, and it comple...

I spent years as a musician, designer, and writer making the same mistakes over and over—here's what I'd tell my younger self to save years of suffering. 📬 If this resonated with you, you'll love my newsletter. I send one email a week with ideas like this: https://ktfpod.com/#newsletter I don't feel like an expert, but when I look back at 35 years of creative work as a musician, graphic designer,...

I can improvise jazz without fear, so why does unscripted speaking terrify me? 📬 If this resonated with you, you'll love my newsletter—I send one email a week with ideas like this: https://ktfpod.com/#newsletter I've been making this podcast with fully scripted episodes for a year and a half because I was terrified of not knowing what comes next. But here's the paradox: I'm a jazz drummer. I impr...

What happens when you lose sight of why you're creating—and how do you find your way back? 📬 If this resonated with you, you'll love my newsletter—I send one email a week with ideas like this: https://ktfpod.com/#newsletter This week I'm feeling lost and questioning what really motivates my creativity. In this episode, I explore three ideas that help when you don't know why you're creating: relax...

The secret to creative success isn't talent or inspiration—it's something much simpler (and harder) than you think. I used to think creative success was about making something great every time I sat down to work. But after years of composing, teaching, and yes—trying to learn those impossible drum patterns—I've realized something counterintuitive: the specific thing you're working on matters less...

This is a special, short episode about how creative people process loss and can move on without ignoring or pushing feelings of sorrow away. Bittersweet by Susan Cain: https://amzn.to/3WwMmar Inspired by the loss of my mother, I felt compelled to make this episode as a way to allow those feelings to come into my work and guide me forward. I forgot to mention that there are many kinds of loss beyon...

What if the creative work that "doesn't matter" is actually the key to unlocking your most important breakthroughs? Grab a FREE copy of my ebook: https://payhip.com/b/RIqQx After 35 years as a professional musician, some of my biggest creative breakthroughs came from projects I almost threw away. In this episode, I'm sharing why thinking smaller—not bigger—might be the secret to unlocking your bes...

What if the only permission you’ve ever needed for your creative work was your own? The waitlist is open for my upcoming course Creative Resilience: https://ktfpod.com/creative-resilience/crwaitlist.html Grab a FREE copy of my ebook: https://payhip.com/b/RIqQx I spent years waiting to be “picked” — for bands, auditions, and even summer gigs. In this episode, I share my own story of setbacks, the s...

Grab a FREE copy of the Wayfinder PDF: https://payhip.com/b/01Adw I thought I was leaving music behind when I moved from NYC to Iceland to start a design firm—but life had other plans. Here's the 4-part framework I developed to navigate back to your creative path when everything feels derailed. Keep the Flow with Scott McLemore is a weekly podcast that looks under the hood of the creative process....