Keep the Flow

For most of this summer, I couldn’t write anything new. I don’t mean I wasn’t writing. I was sitting down, playing chords, working on melodic phrases. But every idea arrived with the same thought attached: I already have a song like that. That’s a particular kind of frustrating. It isn’t writer’s block. The ideas are there, they just feel used. I tried a few things that helped. I changed the conte...

Last week I listened to Aaron Sorkin's interview with The New York Times ahead of The Social Reckoning , and two things stopped me. He acts out his dialogue so physically that he once broke his nose doing it. And he lives in a constant state of panic that he'll never find another good idea. My first reaction was, come on – you're Aaron Sorkin. My second was that I know exactly that fee...

I watched that finale and cried, which I wasn't expecting, and then immediately started trying to work out why. What I settled on is that the thing that turns Deborah Vance around isn't a person or a speech. It's an idea. She gets a joke, opens her little book, writes it down – and then has to sit with what that means about where she's going. I think that's the whole argument for a creative life....

I bought a camera a few weeks ago, and it changed how I experience a day. I started noticing sounds, smells, the air, my stepfather's ancient dishwasher in Virginia. But the second I actually noticed that dishwasher, my brain immediately asked which one was better – his or ours. That reflex is what this episode is about. Somewhere along the way we started rating everything, and when that filter ru...

When I got my first set of drums, my parents thought I was a natural. I let them think it – it felt good. What they didn't see was the years I spent obsessed with drums before I ever sat down at a kit. This episode is about talent: why we're so drawn to the idea of it, why we quietly trust "naturals" over people who obviously worked (there's a Harvard study on exactly this that's hard to shake), a...

I've been carrying around a tiny bit of panic lately. This sense that I need to get everything done before the AI robots turn up and make it all pointless. I don't think I'm alone in that. In this episode I talk about what happened when I heard the tortoise and the hare brought up on Rich Roll's podcast, and then spent an hour stuck in a line at the recycling center in Reykjavík with nothing to do...

I keep hearing the same fear on repeat: AI is going to hollow out creative work.  I feel it too. I've got kids about to start college, and it keeps me up at night. Then I watched a talk by David Lee, the chief creative officer at Squarespace, who argues almost the opposite: that creativity is the only job left once the machines take the rest.  Around the same time I heard the writer Dave...

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,...