As an artist I would like to eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color.
When people see me struggling on paper, I think it invites an almost collaborative relationship with the outside world, and that includes readers and other artists.
The poetical tendency of the present and of the preceding century has been divided in a manner singularly curious. One loud and conspicuous faction of bards, giving way to the corrupt influences of a decaying general culture, seems to have abandoned all the properties of versification and reason in its mad scramble after sensational novelty; whilst the other and quieter school constituting a more logical evolution from the poesy of the Georgian period, demands an accuracy of rhyme and metre unknown even to the polished artists of the age of Pope.
There's a bunch of songs that I call B-sides on the record that you could argue could maybe have some potential commercial success with another artist, but for me, they just felt really whack.
Naturally one would rather be a broad artist with power to evoke beauty from every phase of experience--but when one unmistakably isn't such an artist, there's no sense in bluffing and faking and pretending that one is.
My process in making a music video is pretty much a formula of talking to the artist. I've never made a video where I didn't talk to the artist before I wrote the treatment. Basically, I enter into it knowing we are collaborators.