Tyler Childers Rural Appalachia Roots

 Tyler Childers is an artist and creative who I have become fascinated with over the years. Something I have noticed is that he draws heavily on the cultural memory of his region. He was born and raised in Kentucky but draws on struggles of the bigger Appalachia region as well as its sounds and stories. The use of the fiddle, banjo, and bluegrass rhythms situates his music within a lineage of Appalachian folk traditions. He is not creating and writing on his own but participating in a centuries-old practice of storytelling through song and using sounds from the past. I think Fuentes would view this as a form of collective creativity where the individual artist (Childers) acts as a bridge between the past and the present and reimagining old cultural ideas. 

In The Creative Spark by Augustín Fuentes, he argues that creativity is not only about individual inspiration but about the ways that humans can come together to create shared meaning. Creativity is collective and collaborative. It allows groups to pass on traditions and build on culture. This idea resonates strongly with the music of Childers.

In addition, Childers shows how creativity helps hold a community together by giving people a sense of shared identity and pride. One of my favorite songs, Feathered Indians, capture everyday life in rural Appalachia in ways that feel familiar to people who grew up in similar ways. One of the clearest examples of Childers using his platform for broader conversations is his song Long Violent History. It was released in 2020 at a time of racial injustice and police violence, urging listeners from rural Appalachia to see parallels between their own history of struggle and the struggles faced by marginalized communities today. By framing the message through an Appalachian lens (with a traditional fiddle) Childers makes national issues local. This is a powerful example of Fuentes’ idea that creativity can spark collective imagination, helping people see connections across divides and inspiring dialogue that might not otherwise happen.

She Called Him 'Little Fire'

 “Music can draw people out of their suffering, even if it’s just temporary respite”.

As an Australian songwriter, Nick Cave‘s quote above describes creating music as an art form, which is not only evidence for a musician’s suffering but also as a tool for spiritual healing. In Nick’s book, Faith, Hope, and Carnage, he further discusses how his songwriting process had helped him overcome the grief of his son, Arthur, who had passed at fifteen from falling off a cliff. 

Nick’s emphasis on creating imagery and symbolism of Arthur’s life and his relationship with his father made me reflect on other ways I have seen grief portrayed in art.

I was drawn to Tails Jekel’s recent work, She Called Him ‘Little Fire’. Jekel illustrated a family portrait for the passing of Gloria White, who was tragically murdered by her son, Aidan, last Halloween. This memorial represents Aidan’s lifetime struggle with schizophrenia and the love he received from his mother and sister, Allyson, throughout his life. This painting also comments on the failure of the American Healthcare system, which failed to give Aidan the support he needed for his schizophrenia.

Leading up to Gloria’s murder, Aidan had experienced a severe schizophrenic episode. During this episode, Aidan believed he had seen Allyson’s severed and decapitated body in his mother‘s home. Within this state of mind, Aidan had rationalized that his mother was responsible, as she was the only person present in the home at this time. Aidan believed he had to murder Gloria.

A few months later, Allyson reached out to Jekel and asked for a memorial piece to honor the life of Gloria White and to bring awareness to schizophrenia. In Jekel’s ten-part series on TikTok and short documentary on YouTube, they discuss Gloria’s life and Aidan’s struggles. Jekel implements many different images and symbolisms to create this bittersweet collaboration with Allyson.

One quote that struck me in Jekel’s explanation of his three-month-long process is:

“Once I realized that I wasn’t doing that great of a job with my memorial of Gloria, I taped off the bottom of the image so I can focus solely on her. I need to ignore the rest of the painting a while and develop her into a place where she’s a strong focal point. Once I have that out, I can go back and make the whole painting harmonious”.

I was severely moved by how Jekel had built a connection with this saddening tragedy. The imagery that moved me the most was Jekel’s’ depiction of a story between Gloria and Aidan. During an earlier schizophrenic episode that Aidan was experiencing, he believed there were noises within the walls of his bedroom. Gloria, as a demonstration of her endless love to Aidan, had slept in his room to determine if it was a noise from the air conditioning or another explainable phenomenon. Gloria had found that the room was silent the entire night. Jekel painted a scene in which Gloria slept in Aidan’s dark bedroom with cool tones (that contrasts the warm tones in the remainder of the painting).

The most evident symbolism, however, appears to be with the flames that are seen throughout the painting. Aidan’s name – which is the only name Gloria had picked for her children out of her children – translates to “little fire”. Flames are seen radiating around Aidan in an almost embracing warmth that demonstrates Aidan as human and as more than his condition. The meaning of his name also corresponds to the name of the painting that Jekel and Allyson decided upon together.

Returning to Nick’s previous quote, Jekel demonstrates how life can be celebrated, even if only for a moment, through a ‘glimpse into time’. Although Gloria’s death is mournful, there can be a short relief from grief through the celebration of her life and her children’s childhood through the love she built for Aidan and Allyson.

This piece is currently displayed for the Grand Rapids 2025 art competition. Jekel wishes that viewers could look at this piece and hopefully learn about the importance of treating mental health, especially early on in a person‘s life. I highly recommend anyone to watch the short series or even the full-length short documentary on Jekel’s YouTube, which includes interviews with other members of the White family.

Michael Jackson: Outside of The Box

    Being one of the most famous musicians of all time, most of us have heard at least one song by Michael Jackson. As an long term musician, he spent his whole life in the limelight, reshaping the music industry. Not only did he change the way people view the artistry of performance with several dances among his signature moonwalk, but the king of pop also forever shifted the way that people think about and make music. 

    Out of sheer musical interest, I spent a lot of time doing personal research on the music-making process of this trailblazer in the industry, and I came to a few main conclusions: 1) His extensive knowledge of harmonies, likely from his family band past, add depth and feeling to all his music 2) His showcase of the upper male range was something that had yet to be pioneered in mainstream music, and 3) Jackson was one of the first to utilize vocal percussion in his tracks (arguably the most important point). The fearlessness to pursue such uncharted waters as these musically are bits and pieces that originally set him apart from his musical counterparts in the time period. Among these things, he was unafraid to perform as a dancer while he sang, a tactic known to be made successful in the industry by singers such as Elvis and his predecessors. As I watched the Thriller 40 documentary in my research, I came to learn how all these pieces worked together in careful harmony, pun intended, to create the symphony known Jackson's career. 

    A large part of the milestones in Jackson's career that stood out to me was the political climate of the time period. Right on the heels of the American Civil Rights movement, Michael Jackson began his rise stardom in the public eye as one of very few African American artists to receive any recognition. He worked in a climate where majority of people looked down upon him, his culture, and his freedom for musical expression. Throughout this adversity, I like to say that good music always finds its way to the right audience, and his certainly did. One of his earliest single music videos, "Billie Jean", was the first video by a black artist to play on MTV on television. This was huge for the Black American community, and it became apparent that most wins for Jackson were wins for us all. 

Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean"

    I've been reading the novel The Code Breaker by Walter Issacson which is about the scientist Jennirfer Doudna and her journey to the nobel prize and the creation of CRIPSR. It might seem crazy to draw comparisons to the story of a famous biologist and a famous musician, but stay with me because it makes sense under the lense of creativity. Through Issacson, Doudna discusses that the development of CRISPR came from two things: the willingness to think outside of the box and the audacity to act on it. These to me are elements of creativity that are often overlooked. There is an inherent fearlessness in bringing an original idea to the table and it is amplified when one proceeds to act on it and share it with the world. Something that will also always connect the two concepts is what is created from them. The way people use scientific ideas to push them forward into discoveries, many artists cover or intentionally model their work after such influential creatives. 

Here is a Justin Bieber song that is very closely modeled after the aforementioned Michael Jackson song:

 

Earl Sweatshirt on Truth speaking and intuition in creativity

 Sunday, September 28th, 2025

    Thebe Neruda Kgositsile, better known by his stage name Earl Sweatshirt, is a rapper and producer who was raised in Los Angeles, where he found his footing in the underground rap scene with the group known as Odd Future. The rapper's first album, self-titled Earl, is a far cry from his music today, but what each piece in Earl’s discography shares is a reliance on the absolute and sometimes brutal truth and intuitive creation in his creative process. 

    Earl released his debut album, self-titled “Earl,” at just 16, which quickly gained a cult following in the underground rap scene. Shortly after, Earl was sent away to Samoa by his mother for what he describes as “behavioral issues”. After coming back, Earl felt the pressure of fans who expected an equally angsty and vulgar album, mirroring his debut release. Instead, they got Doris, my favorite of his albums and one of the most emotionally vulnerable hip-hop releases of this generation. This album showcased Earl’s deeply intricate lyrical talent while maintaining a raw and intimate storytelling component. Reflecting on his time away, Earl said in an interview that “As a kid, and when I went away and sh-t, a thing that I had to fight for was my sense of self and my own voice”. In this album, Earl describes songs like “Chum” as allowing him to articulate his feelings in a way that he otherwise couldn’t. The content of the song involves raw emotional testaments about Earl’s troubled past, which involved struggling with horrible slumps of depression, loss, and the pitfalls that accompanied early stardom.

 

    In an interview with Rolling Stone, the rapper shared that he once scrapped a 19-track album. While he emphasized the amount of work he put in, he felt that the process of creating it felt manufactured or inauthentic in a way. For Earl, music involves “grading things on the truth, however expensive the truth is”, and whether it is succumbing to outside input or to your own expectations of a project, if the process of constructing an album wasn’t reliant on personal truth, it wouldn’t work. This level of vulnerability attracts a diverse range of fans to his music, even though they may not have been present for his experiences. Listening to an album like Doris makes it abundantly clear how sincere the work is, and this sincerity makes it that much more interesting to hear.  

'Doris' - Earl Sweatshirt

   

    Earl’s writing process relies almost exclusively on intuition and feeling to achieve truth in his music.  Rather than having a strict creative process Earl describes that while writing and recording he is “not f–king with it if it doesn’t put itself together, because that's when you know something else is guiding the music y’know.” The sort of intuitive creative process Earl is describing here is what is known in psychology as insight, where ideas seem to emerge from the subconscious almost randomly in the form of an “aha moment.” When someone experiences this, as he describes, it feels as though something else is guiding the music —a higher, creative force. 

    Critics of his second release sighted the work as “incohesive” although technically brilliant. For a listener like me, though, this lack of cohesion seems to manifest as feeling more authentic and novel, like a sort of vision quest where intricate planning is replaced by intuitive creation based on deeply emotional subjects. In the book “Faith, Hope, and Carnage”, which details an interview with musician Nick Cave, there is a similar emphasis on letting the process of recording and writing take you somewhere unplanned and mysterious. Cave describes this process as “surrender(ing) in a way and really just let(ting) yourself be led by the secret demands of the song.” For Earl, surrendering means not being influenced by a specific vision for the end product and instead creating based on intuition and truth-speaking, which can only come as a byproduct of relying on his unique mental and emotional states at the time of writing. 

Making Life into a Work of Art: Lana Del Rey's Ride Monologue

["Ride" by Lana Del Rey]

Lana Del Rey is known for her glamorized Americana themes of her music, often touching on topics like the intersection between violence and romance, nostalgia, beauty, youth, and classic Hollywood or movie star culture. Her songs are more than just music; they vividly create stories and her 10-minute long "Ride" is a perfect example of this, opening with a cinematic narrative reflecting many of Agustín Fuentes' themes in his book A Creative Spark. Her journey through the monologue highlights how she started as being someone who "belonged to no one / Who belonged to everyone / Who had nothing / Who wanted everything" - essentially, a nomadic person with no sense of direction or belonging. 

The following video shots are layered with a vintage-style filter, the cuts being slightly choppy, the colors muted, and grainy sections of the screen. Her music video creates a nostalgic feel, the colors most featured being red, white, and blue and images of an "old" America such as gas stations, motels, and motorcycles creating the setting. She wanders across towns and cities, never having a sense of belonging until she meets a group of men that she joins in search of meaning as she experiences life without any true grounding, existing without conforming to the societal strains of permanence.

The monologue transitions into the opening of her song "Ride," and following the conclusion of the song is more narrative. She writes:

["We had nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore / Except to make our lives into a work of art"] Her sense of community is fulfilled as she experiences life with the bikers that she joins, despite spending much of her life independently wandering from place to place. As she writes that her goal in life - the only thing that would give meaning to it and the only thing that she desired - was to "make our lives into a work of art," she reveals the beauty in creating not a physical product of art that can be displayed and admired by others but rather a beautiful life. She fulfills this by "find[ing] my people," thus connecting with others is what allows life to truly be rewarding and a work of art. Similarly, Fuentes emphasizes how creativity is a social blend of all that came before us. Lana's storytelling in "Ride" narrates how she (or the representation of herself) experienced much of life in solitude or even attachment to others with no more than a fleeting existence. However, each person she encounters leaves an effect on her life, compelling her to stay in a place or leave it, to seek out new people or remain with the same ones; everyone that a person comes into contact with in their life will inevitably alter them as a person or their life in some way. Lana illustrates this perfectly as she creates a wanderlust image of a young girl with no sense of direction, allowing her to step into the fluidity of morals and choices in order to develop herself. Fuentes' assertion that creativity is a sum of human ancestors up and through even monkeys, which he heavily delved into in Chapter 1, is Lana's creation of a meaningful life of art through her connections with others. 

Fuentes writes that it is our unique ability as humans - a creative species - to "move back and forth between the realms of 'what is' and 'what could be.'" In her music, Lana consistently steps into narratives that allow her to express the blend of old glamorized culture and reintroduce it to the modern world of pop. Her album covers are works reflecting art deco style and vintage frames that lots of music today doesn't encompass, bringing a retro feel back into the modern genre of music. Additionally, her ability to create such compelling stories in her songs allows the audience to experience a feeling of living another life that is not one's own while feeling the powerful emotions embedded into the lyrics and notes.

Ghost and Metal Elitists: Transcending Genres

Being a Ghost fan means getting to hear the most creative and out-there ways to describe a metal band, and I've definitely got favorites. "Putting the ABBA in Black Sabbath." "Ghost is like Scooby Doo chase music but metal." So on and so forth. Considering the variety of the band's sound over the years, I don't blame people for thinking Ghost doesn't fit the mold of "satanic metal."

 

Truthfully, that's the greatest thing about them. With Ghost songs, the average listener can easily tell that metal is the foundation of their songs, but beyond that? Anything goes.

Tobias Forge, the band's frontman, has never backed down from musical diversity. In an article by The Rolling Stone, Forge described "Stand by Him," from Ghost's first album Opus Eponymous, as "a song that combined old new wave with adult-orientated rock and occultism and a little bit of West End." In general, Forge's songwriting process tends to start with anything that appeals to him. In an interview with The Lounge, he said his writing "can start with basically anything, from a drumbeat or a rhythm to a vocal line to just a melody to a riff." One of my favorite examples of this sort of spontaneity and musical diversity comes from their IMPERA album, a song called "Twenties." This song describes the aggressiveness of empires, how they disguise destructive greed and hatred through promises of prosperity. Of course, a song with such an aggressive theme needs the perfect aggressive instrumental behind it. In an interview with Zane Lowe, Forge described how he happened to stumble upon a Swedish music program with a Brazilian rapper performing in a favela:

 

It was like one of the most musically aggressive things I've ever seen, and I mean, I come from death metal, black metal…which is obviously sort of thriving on the idea of being violent and dangerous and all that…Immediately when I heard that it was like - of course I had heard the [reggaeton] rhythm before - but it was like, 'that sounds like a fun way to write an aggressive song that I have never really heard.'

In The Creative Act, A Way of Being, Rick Rubin notes that these sorts of creative experiences can only happen when The Source (of creativity) is tuned into through a kind of detached awareness. When we impose a lifetime's worth of societally crafted expectations on the world around us, we end up filtering out so much that we are left with very little with which to be creatively inspired. When we practice widening our awareness and letting more filter through, we open ourselves up to the creative energy that flows through everything. As Rick Rubin puts it, "Most of what we see in the world holds the potential to inspire astonishment if looked at from a less jaded perspective."

In Ghost's most recent album, Skeletá, the music continues to flourish beyond the boundaries of traditional metal, and it's probably their most significant departure from that framework yet. Every Ghost album has a sort of theme that can be attributed to it: IMPERA is about the rise and fall of empires, Prequelle deals with death and survival, and so on. Overall, pretty dark themes. With the hostility of IMPERA in particular, I, along with other Ghost fans, was expecting a turn towards a traditional, heavy sound. Skeletá is absolutely not that. Forge did not want to write an "Impera Two," as he puts it in The Rolling Stone article. He wanted "more of an introspective, healing record, a new record that shone a light on the innards of my mind."

Skeletá has a much brighter, optimistic sound because it is about humanity. Accordingly, Forge widened his awareness to the possibility of blending other genres, specifically pop, into Ghost's more rock-focused sound. As he told The Rolling Stone, "In the pop world, it’s different because there are no hard rules. The ensemble in pop doesn’t have to be drums, bass and two guitars." As surprising as this sound was to me when Skeletá was released, I grew to love the unpredictability from track to track. Furthermore, it made me appreciate the heavier songs that were on this album, such as "Lachryma," because each song was a new experience rather than the album as a whole.

As Rick Rubin puts it, "Art is confrontation." With Ghost, there is plenty of confrontation and disagreements to be found. One day, they'll have stadiums screaming about the rise of Satan with "Year Zero," and the next they'll perform "Mary on a Cross" (a TikTok favorite) under dazzling, colorful lights. Ghost's identity, in my opinion, is based on their shifting identity, from Papa to Papa, album to album, and genre to genre. At its core, though, Ghost is a satanic metal band, and that label can be more of a blessing than a curse. With genres, Rick Rubin notes that "as soon as you use a label to describe what you're working one, there's a temptation to conform to its rules." Forge, as well as any Ghost fan with eyes or ears, is well aware of the metal elitists who rave about Ghost's nonconformity. In one particularly funny moment with Metal Hammer, Forge talked about how the song "De Profundis Borealis" was intended to sound like a black metal song, before he quickly cuts himself off and says, "I know it’s not a black metal song, so you don’t have to fucking get going" (emphasis added).

At the end of the day, I'm still going to tell people that Ghost is a satanic metal band if they ask what genre they fall under. Even when they stray from that label, I don't care, because as Rick Rubin put it, "the most innovative ideas come from those who master the rules to such a degree that they can see past them."

Tobias Forge's Interview with The Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.co.uk/music/news/ghost-interview-tobias-forge-skeleta-48893/

Tobias Forge's Interview with The Lounge: https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/general_music_news/tobias_forge_details_ghost_songwriting_process_explains_how_early_pink_floyd_really_fucked_up_his_music_writing.html

Tobias Forge for Metal Hammer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIXHSDrrEBU

Tobias Forge for Apple Music (with Zane Lowe): https://youtu.be/pkaovFj710o?si=837vhPU_wsHplpL9

Jane Goodall: The Amazing Discovery

 

    Dr. Jane Goodall, also known as Dr. Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall, is a world-renowned primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist who was born in Bournemouth, England, on April 3, 1934. As a child, she loved the outdoors and animals. Jane was unable to afford college, so she attended secretarial school in South Kensington. Though Jane had no college degree or scientific training, she still managed to travel to Africa. In March 1957, Jane boarded the Kenya Castle ship to visit friends and family. While visiting, Jane met famous paleoanthropologist Dr. Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey, who offered Jane a job at the local natural history museum. Jane worked at the museum for some time before Leakey sent her to the Gombe Stream Game Reserve in Tanzania to study wild chimpanzees on July 14, 1960. While studying at the Gombe Stream Game Reserve, now known as the Gombe Stream National Park, Jane made a discovery that challenged the normal scientific ideas. She witnessed a chimpanzee, whom she named David Greybeard, using tools. She observed the chimpanzee sticking blades of stiff grass into termite holes to fish out termites. Excited about her groundbreaking observation, Jane told Dr. Leakey, to which he responded, “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans”. Jane stayed in Gombe until 1975, where her research changed the view that humans were the only species capable of tool use, emotions, and complex social structures. Jane’s creative product is not only the groundbreaking research of chimpanzees, but also reshaping primatology and introducing a new way of seeing primates.

    

    We can see the creative process in Jane Goodall’s discovery through the Geneplore Model. In the generative phase, we see Jane spending months observing chimpanzee behavior, naming individuals, and noting differences. She allowed herself to consider the possibility that chimpanzees might be more creative and inventive than initially expected. In the exploratory phase, Jane repeatedly made observations by documenting repeated instances of termite fishing and behaviors among chimpanzees, refining her observations, and eventually publishing her research, which challenged the normality in the scientific community. Jane’s methodology reflects the creative process as she generated striking new ideas from observation, exploration, refinement, and then communicated them. 

    Jane’s findings relate to my focus book, The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional, by Agustín Fuentes. As Agustín argues, humans’ creativity emerged from earlier primate behaviors, such as tool use, social interaction, and environmental adaptation. Specifically, Agustín said, “The primate spark of creativity emerges from the way that primates have made social lives and social innovation central in how they deal with the pressures of the environment…in the use of objects as tools and, more important, in the creation of novel social behaviors.” (Fuentes 22). Agustín points out that primates exhibit sparks of creativity through tool use, problem-solving, and social learning. Jane’s findings reflect Agustín’s ideas through her observations of chimpanzees in Gombe using twigs to “fish” for termites. She viewed that primates could solve problems and even pass techniques to others.  Her work connects modern primate creativity to the emergence of human creativity. 

    

    Jane Goodall became increasingly active in conservation and activism after witnessing widespread deforestation in Africa and worldwide. She continues to advocate for the protection of chimpanzees and habitats through the Jane Goodall Institute, founded in 1977.

Appleton, Sarah. “Jane Goodall.” National Geographic | Education, education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/jane-goodall/. Accessed 28 Sept. 2025. 

Pruitt, Sarah. “How Jane Goodall Changed How WE Study Animals.” History.Com, A&E Television Networks, 30 July 2025, https://www.history.com/articles/jane-goodall-research.