Terry Allen in The Creative Independent
It’s a necessity to confront your curiosity, confront the idea of mystery. When you throw yourself into making something that has never existed before and certainly in your own mind. It takes so long, especially the older you get, to breach your habits … You try to breach them to get to that mystery spot where things actually happen and you come out on the other side … and you might have as many questions about it as anybody else does, but it has become what it is. To me as an artist, that’s your job. Whether it’s a song, a sculpture, drawing, whatever it is.
Yeah!
The last thing in the world I ever thought I would be interested in doing is making bronze sculpture. And I got an opportunity to do a piece in LA called Poets Walk and I happened to meet a guy here who had a foundry who had asked me if I ever wanted to come in and work with him. I had no idea that I would ever take him up on it, but I did and literally went to school at that foundry on my own trying to learn how to do that, working with clay, making the mold and casting, really getting interested in it.
I feel that way about so many mediums and ideas: yuck, I would never want to spend time on that. But from Allen and others we know that sometimes those are the streets most worth stumbling down… You’re allowed to change your mind, or at least to test out whether your repulsion is really so repulsive.
My first car had this white Naugahyde in between the seats. I would start thinking of songs and have a ballpoint or pencil, trying to write stuff down while I was driving. I had it written all over the Naugahyde. It comes from boredom, the motion of tires, the rhythm of it. It’s always been conducive to lyrics starting to happen and rhythms, melodies.
I would love to see that car.