“Singers (and possibly listeners of music too) when they write or perform a song don’t so much bring to the work already formed emotions, ideas, and feelings as much as they use the act of singing as a device that reproduces and dredges them up. The song remakes the emotion — the emotion doesn’t produce the song. Well, the emotion has to have been there at some time in one’s life for there to be something from which to draw. But it seems to me that a creative device — if a work can be considered a device — evokes that passion, melancholy, loneliness, or euphoria but is not itself an expression, an example, a fruit of that passion. Creative work is more accurately a machine that digs down and finds stuff, emotional stuff that will someday be raw material that can be used to produce more stuff, stuff like itself — clay to be available for future use.”
–David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries
