tune in

We make music for different reasons. We listen to music for different reasons. We listen out for different things in the music. Most people listen to a song and they listen to the words and the song in their car and they're singing the words to the song and there's a story—I don't listen to the words. I don't listen to the singing. I listen to the riff. As I'm fond of saying, I don't know the words to any Beatles songs, but I can sing you every Ringo drum fill.

These are the words of Stewart Copeland, best known as the drummer of The Police. He's talking about his relationship with Sting, and how these artistic differences, these tensions, worked for the music and the band, until they didn't.

The idea that we can get totally different things out of art, or anything, according to our own personalities, is easy to forget—especially when we're so passionate about what we get out of it.

But this is an intriguing way of conceiving of individuality, and our own natures, in general. There is so much of us in what we pay attention to, in the things we notice.

In art, such noticing is often what counts for vision (or depth, or insight)—seeing through and into something in our own way. We value the way artists or writers see (or make visible, or articulate) something we wouldn't necessarily notice on our own; the way they tune into something we wouldn't think to hear.

Sometimes, for the artist, this activity seems all-absorbing, like nobody else exists. More than originality or uniqueness, it's about curiosity, fascination, and the work itself—letting it take them further, so they can delve deeper, exploring the implications and the possibilities.

Sometimes, though, we're driven to create because we want others to see what we see, to feel what we feel.

Maybe we shouldn't delineate too much what we get out of art, simply for having decided what is or isn't to our taste. Better to remain open to, and challenged by, new experiences, new perspectives, sensibilities that are somewhat alien to our own.

But sometimes we don't pay attention to anything or anyone until we are given a reason, or until we encounter them along our own strange paths.

So I'm going to be honest with you. Beyond a couple of songs, I know nothing about The Police. I wound up watching that video, and listening to Copeland at all, because of Spyro the Dragon.