I was listening to an interview on the radio last week with Phil Collins. Whatever you think about him today, the man was a mega-star in the eighties. After departing the band Genesis, he recorded his first solo project called Face Value. He said in the interview that if he hadn’t gotten divorced, he would have never written that album, or the outtake, throw-away piece that never made it to the final master called “How Can You Sit There.” That song was later reworked and renamed. You know it as “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now),” his first #1 song in the US. Seriously. Up from the ash and rubble of a divorce, springs a 25-year, successful, solo music career.
Great for Phil Collins, you’re thinking. But it doesn’t do me any good. Really? You mean you never heard that (or another) song on the radio and wanted to turn it up and cry your eyes out because the one from high school that you knew was more than a friend told you she just wants to be friends? You didn’t secretly sing the words to yourself when your college sweetheart called things off? Or, sitting in your car, after another night of questioning life and trying to make sense of why you have to let go of all those memories, you didn’t wonder how Phil Collins could have found such insight into the nature of love and pain when he wrote that song? You could swap out any song about unrequited love in any genre and I’m willing to bet there’s an equally painful story behind it.
Mostly, the Phil Collins story is about redemption, to me. To be honest, I don’t know anything about Phil’s faith, but when I hear a pop song on the radio about love (or lost love, most often), I am instantly transported to the pain and hardship it required to pen those words. Words that transcend time and space and elicit memories and emotions and pain and joy in another person. Words that represented HOPE to the artist. I think about the divine process of art. Art, the Story, is something created by God and He uses whom He chooses to tell it. This process takes the pain, hope, tragedy, joy, shock and mundane of life and makes magic out of it. It shares an experience that heals both the artist and the recipient. But it’s not just about the finished product.
When Noah landed the ark, most people think it was just a few days before he and the animals walked down the ramp to a brand, spanking new earth. Unfortunately, it takes a lot longer for floodwaters to retreat than for the rain to fall. According to Genesis, they waited on the ship for several months before the bird returned with an olive branch. That’s a long time to hope. I imagine Noah and his family saved a plank from the ship, or maybe the original olive branch, as a testament to what they had been through. Something that lasted for generations to remind people of God’s faithfulness. A keepsake.
Some songs are like that.
But to me (and many other artists I’m sure), art born from pain is more than a keepsake. It represents Ground Zero–the starting point, not the ending point. The arrow that points back to an intricate, inexplicable process that has brought me to today. And if nothing else, it’s the buoy that subtly reminds me of an imminent, hope-filled shoreline just beyond the fog.
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