In watching The Beatles Anthology and the new Billy Joel documentary back to back, I unintentionally created a comic double feature about two very different creative processes. There’s John and Paul filling their songs with surreal imagery and ideas that came to them in dreams; drawing inspiration from art and drugs and meditation; turning accidents, jokes, and nonsense into lyrics; welding two unrelated half-songs into one to create a whole far greater than the sum of its parts. And then there’s Billy Joel… looking around the room and writing down what he sees. Every time he explains how he came up with one of his famous songs, it’s always something like, “I was playing piano in a bar, and there were all these crazy characters there, so I listed them” (“Piano Man”), or “Unlike all the women I’d dated previously, Christie Brinkley lived uptown” (“Uptown Girl”), or “I moved back to New York and was happy about it” (“New York State of Mind”). Honestly, I feel stupid even putting the song names in parentheses there.
And yes, okay, this is a slightly unfair caricature—at his peaks (“Vienna,” “Allentown,” “Miami 2017”), Joel’s lyrics are actually quite good, and even his worst lines usually end up redeemed by the music that accompanies them. But like most caricatures, this one contains elements of the truth: at least in the documentary’s portrayal, Joel just doesn’t seem to struggle that much with his art. He’s a tortured artist, yes—but tortured mostly by his phenomenally messy personal life1 and by the lack of respect accorded to him from the critics and musical elite. When he reflects on his past work, it’s never, “I couldn’t get that song to be as great as I wanted it to be,” always, “I couldn’t get the world to recognize that song for how great it actually was.”
Like everything else about Billy Joel, his relentlessly literal lyrics are easy to make fun of, but I actually find them inspiring. There’s something to be said for looking around the room, writing down what you see, and turning it into art—and refusing to be self-conscious about the result.
Watching the documentary, I was reminded of another, much less famous musician, one who presumably won’t ever date supermodels or sell his house to Jerry Seinfeld for $32 million: Matt Farley, better known—among many other pseudonyms—as The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over.
I first discovered Farley when my friend, who is the CEO of a small company, played his banger “The Greg Song” on repeat in the background while interviewing a job candidate named Greg to see if IRL Greg would say anything. (If you’re thinking that this is incredibly immature CEO behavior, you’re correct2.) I assumed TGWSYNO&O was just another vertebra in Spotify’s long tail of unknown artists, but a few years later, I discovered he’d caught the attention of enough people to at least get his own New York Times profile.
The most obvious take on Farley is that he is, essentially, a mass producer of crap who’s figured out how to make a decent living—a great living for a musician—by hacking the Spotify algorithm. (Spotify has, in fact, repeatedly changed their policies to thwart some of his more egregious behavior.) He churns out more than one song a day on average, many of them exceedingly minor variations on the same core concept, all of them seemingly designed to being the first result for an obscure term that someone types into the search box. Often that “someone” is a small child, as evidenced by the many thousands of songs he’s recorded about poop.
But squint a little and it’s possible to see Farley as a classic outsider artist, one whose body of work challenges our very notions of what art should be. His philosophy of creativity—as outlined in a 136-page self-published manifesto—is essentially that to truly honor your creativity, you must act on every idea that pops into your head, no matter how stupid it might seem. To do anything else is, in fact, an affront to the universe. (I’m not sure why this idea takes 136 pages to fully convey, but I guess that’s kind of the point.)
Releasing 4,000 songs about poop because you have low standards for your own work is lame. Releasing 4,000 songs about poop because you reject the entire concept of having standards for your own work might actually be brilliant.
I don’t think any of Farley’s songs are great art—in fact, I’m not sure any of them qualify as “art,” period—but I consider Farley himself to be a great artist. His art is his entire body of work put together, or perhaps even the way he lives his life. And the fact that Farley exists right on the edge—between laughing at himself and taking his project seriously, between cynical cash grab and genuine self-expression—only makes the art that much better.
After all, you don’t spend thousands of hours recording 1,700 variations of “The Name Song” just for the money. If money’s what you’re after, there are many easier ways to make it.
As a kid, when I daydreamed about being a novelist, or a lyricist for Broadway musicals3, I fantasized less about creating great art than about creating a lot of art. I’d see a shelf of all 58 original Hardy Boys books and think about how cool it’d be to write an endless series myself one day, not realizing that author “Franklin W. Dixon” was actually the pen name of at least 17 different contract ghostwriters.
The positive spin on what happened as I grew up is that I learned to prioritize quality over quantity. But the negative spin is that I just became more hesitant, more self-conscious, too worried about embarrassing myself. I can feel it happen with this newsletter: the less I write, the more pressure I put on myself for each piece to be “good,” which only makes me write even less. And it’s not like my writing actually gets any better as a result—in fact, merely from being out of practice, it probably gets worse.
On the surface, Billy Joel and Matt Farley seem like artistic opposites. Joel is one of the best-selling musical artists of all time; Farley has several thousand songs on Spotify with fewer than 100 plays. Farley puts out something on the order of 50 songs every single month; Joel stopped recording new music in 2001 because he felt like he had nothing left to say.
But they each represent an approach to making art that I find very refreshing. From Joel, the reminder that inspiration can come from anywhere—best-case scenario, you look around the room, write down what you see, and end up with one of the most famous songs of all time. From Farley, the reminder that exploring even your least-promising ideas can be a way of honoring your creativity—and that if you just keep putting stuff out there, eventually you might have a hit like “The Poop Song,” which has likely earned Farley over $25,000 and counting.
After all, no matter how hard you try, you can’t actually avoid being embarrassed by your work. Given enough time, I inevitably end up embarrassed by pretty much everything I’ve ever created, even things I thought were exceptional at the time. So I might as well be like Billy Joel and not stress so much about starting off with a unique or original insight. And I might as well be more like Matt Farley and not worry so much about being embarrassed by what I put out there.
In conclusion: poop poop poop poop poop.
To take just one example: he fell in love with his bandmate and best friend’s wife, broke up their marriage when their son was only three, and then attempted suicide over the guilt—all before he turned 22.
My friend sends the following update on Greg: “It was honestly impossible to not notice but he never said anything. He turned out to be the only employee who ever had to quit out of shame after a holiday party.”
Still haven’t fully given up on that one.