Inspiration – Lucas Murray Music

This morning I read a profile in the New Yorker about the writer William Melvin Kelley (pictured above). There are many remarkable things about Kelley’s life and personality— the fact that he attained literary success with his 1962 debut novel A Different Drummer when he was only 24, that he was a black man who often wrote from a white perspective in order to expose white America’s contradictory views on African Americans, or that he essentially coined the term “woke” that we all use so much today. But the thing that I admire most about him is that every day he sat down at a desk facing the wall and wrote— first he would write in pencil, then he would edit his draft with a pen, and finally he would type it on a typewriter. He repeated this ritual everyday, even after he fell into relative artistic obscurity later in his life. The man simply loved to write. As I tackle this task of writing and recording a song everyday it is helpful to draw inspiration from other figures like Kelley who have gone down a similar path. I really don’t know where this path is leading, but I do know that, like Kelley, I just love to write and record music. Hope you enjoy this week’s work.