The Atlantic has posted some great videos from two creative icons; David Lynch and Donavon.

Here’s David Lynch on ideas:

It’s like there’s a man in another room with the whole film together, but they’re in puzzle parts. And he’s flipping one piece at a time into me. At first it’s very abstract I don’t have a clue. More pieces come, more ideas are caught, it starts forming a thing. Then one day there it is. It’s LIKE it existed before. But ideas are like fish. You don’t make the fish you catch the fish.

On the “suffering artist”:

Suffering is really misunderstood. A lot of artists think that suffering is necessary. You can see why they think that. So they can tell the story, so they can make it real through their own experience. But in reality, the artist doesn’t have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand the suffering. Any kind of suffering cramps the flow of creativity.

View the whole video for more snippets of inspiration:

One of the coolest things in the following video is a clip from 1967 of a very young and very clean cut Donavon playing a song for Bob Dylan, who says, “Hey, that’s a GOOD song man!”

Here’s a few more choice quotes:

How did I know I could [write music]? I didn’t. I just knew I was a voice. The very first songs I started writing spoke of this early bohemian lifestyle that would take over popular culture.

I meditate because I always wanted to find out how. [...] As soon as I got it, my songwriting became deeper. I became aware of where I’d come from.

Going around the patterns of music with no thought in mind and slowly it’s opening this portal … where if I step back on not concentrate too much … I start hearing these melodies. You could catch them. I would catch a couple, and that would become a melody. And then I would be feeling something and that would become the words.

These songs come out when you open the portal of creativity. I could open it magically with music.

He goes on to talk about a conversation with a Pagan priest that sums up the concept of affecting people with your music nicely.

You’ll have to watch to hear it though:

Wanna see more songwriting videos?

Click the video tag below for more cool songwriting videos in the BloggingMuses archives: