I’m lucky enough to have some very creative friends. I thought I’d share a few things we’ve worked on together.

Music

En Route to Traverse City

I travel a lot for work, and have started toting my musical apparatus with me. This is an idea laid out in a hotel in Traverse City, Michigan.

Immediately after recording this, I walked outside and watched an entire family flop over their canoe in the lake, scream at each other, and then burst into laughter. It was entirely too cold that day to be canoeing.

Liquid Lunch Theme Song

Almost a month ago my buddy and colleague Matt Davis gave birth to the weekly BlogTalkRadio show “Liquid Lunch.”

This little intro piece is musical collaboration with my brother Drew (you’ll recognize the beat from “Frost/Dixon” just below). Everything you hear is either a mouth or a cup of water.

Frost/Dixon

This is a musical collaboration with my brother Drew we began over Thanksgiving. The lyrics are from the Robert Frost poem “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things.” Hence, the bad joke for a title.

I hope we finish it over the Christmas holiday.

Videos

Below are a few videos I worked on with Daniel Miller, Carter Martin, and Charlie Trotter for CTCE’s brand new (massive) in-branch TV screens. Some of you have seen a couple of these on Twitter.

Doodles

And just for fun, here are a couple of doodles snapped with my iPhone.

Lots of you know this by way of Twitter or Dopplr, but in case you don’t - I moved from Dallas to Brooklyn last week.

Please get a load of this supercool graffiti from around my block (snapped with my phone, because I don’t own a legitimate camera):

…and this last one isn’t really graffiti, but either way, I appreciate where the building’s heart is:

It’s easy to be inspired here. I like it a lot.

Deltree had an idea: “Go to a place. Ask fifty people the same question. Film their responses.”

What results is a beautiful patchwork of humanity:

People are awesome. Watch them all at fiftypeopleonequestion.com.

From SexyPow(tm)!

This is an amazing piece of artwork by Blu.

I can’t imagine how much planning and time went into this. I’d love to see something on “the making of.”

Hat tip to Carter Martin for pointing it out.

(I don’t know who took these pictures, but they were emailed to me by my Lego fanatic buddy Carter Martin)

Michel Gondry’s latest film, “Be Kind Rewind,” starts off slow, has a shaky plot, and satisfies at least three or four things from “Stuff White People Like.”

That said - I really liked it. Everything great about the film came out of Gondry’s playfulness and organic style of creativity. A few of my takeaways go like this:

• Create first, analyze second.
• Community wins.
• Just be real.
• Creativity and optimism might be the most potent catalysts ever.

Here are two trailers of movies-within-the-movie. You can watch more of them here.

Robocop

Ghostbusters

Honestly, some people will think this movie is straight-up dumb, but it’s just what I needed right now.

I’m completely enthralled by the work of Barcelona-based graphic designer Máximo Tuja, aka max-o-matic.

(via we-make-money-not-art’s review of “ESC: Enter Spanish Creativity“)

Last November I had a couple of friends who participated in National Novel Writing Month. Their goal? To write a 175-page (around 50,000 word) novel in 30 days. The idea is to fight creativity’s worst enemy, self-editing:

By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down. (nanowrimo.org)

I wanted to participate, but didn’t care to write a novel. So I made up my own version - National Album Writing Month. The goal was to attack my bent towards self-editing, jump-start my songwriting, and write 9 songs in a month.

Here is one of the songs I wrote last November. It’s about some good friends of mine (the lyrics are here):

I ended up writing 6 songs, so I didn’t quite hit my goal, but it definitely got me back into song-writing (it had been over a year since I’d written) so I’m calling it a win.

I’d love to hear your feedback, and would love even more to hear music from other songwriters who might have stumbled onto this post.