--:-- Ryan Hanley: If you're going to take a race across a lake, say a kayak race, for example, when they shout go or they shoot the gun or whatever they're going to do, that's going to tell you it's time to row across the lake. If you do anything other than focus on your stroke and your breathing and the pace so that you complete the thing, if you look left or right, you're gonna lose.
--:-- [Intro music plays]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Let's go. Make it look, make it look, make it look. The goal of this podcast is to share original insights and conversations on the habits, mindsets, and strategies of elite performers that produce exceptional results. Let's go.
--:-- I have some questions about the business of music, but I also want to talk about creativity, your process, and all that kind of stuff too.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: I'm willing to engage anything. Wherever you want to start, wherever you're comfortable, start there. I can do this for you. I love it. I love it. Chico Marx.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You know, it's funny. I know if I practiced at anything, I'd probably be okay, but it's tough when you find out you're just not inclined for something. I love creativity. I love creating. I've been a writer, I've done a tremendous amount on YouTube, and I just love creating and telling stories. I have found over and over and over again that I am sure I could improve if I practiced, but there is not a native musical bone in my entire body. So I find people who have a propensity for it incredibly intriguing. Obviously your career is storied. I don't mean to be so cavalier about it, but I do find it so intriguing.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: Isn't it fascinating that there's actually a difference? I find it shocking that humans can be that different in the way they're wired. My dad was a musician, my sister was a musician, all my relatives. My mom, we used to say mom played the iron. She was like a maestro. And she had no musicality in her whatsoever. It always struck me as odd. How can this not be? What is this? I think it helps shine a little light on the idea that we're very different creatures from one another, even though we all need the same food, water, sleep, but we're very different.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I couldn't agree with you more. A lot of why I do this podcast, I've been doing it for a long time. What I've settled on and the reason I keep coming back, the reason I love doing it, the reason I love having these conversations is I am intoxicated by independent thinking. That doesn't necessarily mean contrarian or off the wall or obscure, just people who have found something that allows them to be uniquely them and dial in on it.
--:-- It's funny. I was listening to a show the other day, the guy's name is Michael Malice, and he was talking about being at parties. There's two types of people at parties. You sit down next to somebody. The first type of person sits down next to somebody, asks them what they do, and they say they handle hamsters. The first type of person hears that and says, "This guy's a weirdo," gets up and walks away. Second type of person sits down and goes, "Tell me everything about hamsters." I have found myself to be that second type of person. I couldn't care less what you're interested in. I just am interested in people who love something and are passionate about it.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: I'm with you. I'm with you on that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Being that I'm a terrible interviewer, I'm going to start in what is probably an odd place.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: How would you have this gig if you were any good at it?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Right, exactly. I want to start in a place that intrigued me. I was researching your new album that's coming out, and you were talking about it. You said you wanted the sound to have a 70s sound, so you put rules – or you didn't use this word, this is mine – guardrails around what instruments you could use. I was intrigued by the idea of rules helping you be more creative. I don't know if people who would not classically call themselves creative would necessarily be able to connect those two things.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: I think because I've grown up with this stuff and done it since I was a very little boy, even played with technology from when I was a very little boy. Anecdotally, I would go to music stores with my father while he picked up saxophone reeds and I'd play the piano. Some music store owner would have ordered some synthesizer that nobody knew anything about, he'd hear me play and say, "Do you think you could figure this out?" I was nine or ten, I'd say, "I think I could." He said, "Okay, take it home and bring it back because I don't know how to sell it. I don't know what it does." So I was playing with technology far beyond anything I could even consider from a very young age. Technology and its evolution has a big, big effect on how you do things.
--:-- I'm a practicer. I've practiced the piano. My sister Mary said when the 10,000 hour thing came up, she said, "You had your 10,000 hours before you were nine years old." I probably did, just sitting at that little piano which is sitting right there, the one I actually grew up with. The technology and the work and all of it, I've been able to qualify in some ways the effects it has on the process. When you go to modern technology, it affords many things, but in doing so, it eliminates certain demands. When the demand is put on you, you have to straighten your back a little bit more.
--:-- On this record, I didn't use any modern synthesizers and I didn't use any sequencing that didn't exist in the 70s. I just drew a line there. If it didn't exist then, I didn't use it. So there's no polyphonic synthesizers. There's electric pianos and things that existed then. The one place I took a little bit of liberty is that there was modular synthesis. I have sitting behind you a Buchla synthesizer, which was made in the early 70s. I didn't have one then. This is a reissue of it, but I used it because it did exist. I didn't use it very much, but I did use it. I think those things help define a style, but also a process. If you've got a computer that's doing what computers do now, you don't have 70s music because they didn't have computers in the 70s. It's not a judgment one way or another, it's just the way it is.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I have indoctrinated my kids to what I would call good music from a very early age. I pretty much say that good music ended around 2005. Granted, there have been good songs and good albums since then. But what I share with them is the idea that when you used to hear a clap, in many cases it was two boards slapping together next to a microphone. Or they were finding a way to tap the side of a drum to get a unique sound that the artist could hear in their head but didn't necessarily have a way to make. You hear such unique sounds and integrations because the limitation was the forcing function for the creativity. If you wanted it to be more dynamic, you literally had to invent ways to make the sounds more dynamic. That's why I believe we connect at a soulful level so much more to music that was created in that way, rather than "let me put a four beat over a trap sound with a heavy bass hook, 34 seconds in, beep boop, and then it comes up with 17 different iterations and now I apply a voice track to it." Not that you can't create great music in that way, but the ease in some ways...
--:-- Patrick Leonard: You don't have to be politically correct or careful.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, yeah, no. You turn me loose and you won't even want to know about it.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: There's no requirement to being politically correct, nor am I trying to be.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I know that people in music today are working. I don't mean to diminish that. But there is a... I'll give you an example. The other night, kids were doing something and I threw on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon documentary. I've seen it half a dozen times. If it's on or I catch it, I literally can't turn it off. The music captures me. The way they talk about it, the saxophonist they brought in who plays on it was a friend of a friend of a friend. The only reason he's on the track is because he was the only guy available who could come at the time they needed to record. That unique sound comes from that unique individual in that moment simply because he's the only guy that was available. You're like, "Holy shit, there's so much soul in it." Am I wrong? Where do you stand on that? Have we lost a lot of the soul in music? I miss it, I guess.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: I'll give you an interesting anecdote. This record that I did, I haven't really talked about this at all, it's the first time I'm going to talk about it. I was working on the Dark Side of the Moon redo with Roger and I backed out of it for my own reasons. But I did a record, I did "Amused to Death" with Roger Waters in the early 90s. I worked on "Momentary Lapse of Reason" with Gilmour. I feel the same way you do about Pink Floyd. I was a little boy, 12 or 13 years old when Dark Side of the Moon came out. It was my whole world too. The architecture and the things that just happen because that's the way they happen. Whether it's Floyd or anything, where you don't necessarily have full control over it. You get a bunch of people in the room.
--:-- One of my favorite Led Zeppelin tracks is "Since I've Been Loving You" from Led Zeppelin III. The bass drum pedal has a squeak in it. If you have a decent stereo, you can hear the squeak. They were like, "Well, that was the performance, squeak or no squeak." I think that's vital.
--:-- I have a funny little thing I came up with when I used to do songwriting clinics. I have my little keyboard here so I can show you. I would do this and ask people what it is. I'd do it again. Some people with good pitch would say it's E. I'd say, "What if I change one note?" Everybody goes, "Beethoven." You go, "Okay, so the most recognizable musical motif, doesn't matter what you play it on, is from one note." It's one note that gives you this thing. That to me is far more important than what it's done on or how it's done or who does it. The content is form should follow it. If you're creating sincere content, it doesn't matter how you do it. But with technology being what it is, it creates content for you and then you kind of apply yourself to it. It's a modern age. I understand things change and I'm good with that, but I'm not going to listen to it. For any reason, I would have no reason to listen to any of it. That's not a bias, it's just my choice. Over the years when people say, "You have to hear this," occasionally I'll listen and I realize I really don't have to hear it. For me, it's in the composition and the performance and the poetry and the organic thing. People are composing and performing and writing lyrics and rhyming things, hence poetry. But you have to connect to it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm curious why you say 2005. I cut off way earlier than 2005. I constitute certain artists in the rap and R&B genre as pulling some of it through to about that far. That might be a little far, but that's about when it went from guys who were... Take that R&B phase from the late 80s to the very early 2000s. There were guys who were creating music, whether you appreciate the rap and hip-hop genre or not, which I know a lot of people listening don't. They hate when I talk about it because no one understands how I can appreciate Wu-Tang's "Triumph" as much as I appreciate Dark Side of the Moon. How is that even possible? That's what people say. To me, there are people who are creating it because they have to create it, and there are people who have decided that they're going to make money creating music. Those are two different things.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: I don't mean to interrupt, but I think it's a note that to me, it's almost a science. I believe it really is to some degree. Human beings form your musical fingerprint, if you will, or your musical reflection from about the ages of nine to about 15. That's it. What you listen to from age 9 to 15 will always be your portfolio that you'll bring with you when you listen to music. If there's nothing in it that doesn't touch something that existed in that period, you're not going to care about it at all. For me as a musician my whole life, I loved studying music and I still do. There's still enough in books that were written in the Renaissance age that I don't understand yet. I'm good with learning more about music and not necessarily studying pop culture. I never studied pop culture. But I think that's a big part of it. If you weren't a teenager absorbing this stuff in your climate and your peer group, you don't relate to it. It sounds a little lame, but it's true.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think that makes a lot of sense. I will say that my eyes were not opened to classical until I was much older. I love classical music and have tried to go deeper into it. I think it all comes back to people listening to music for different reasons. It depends on why you're listening to it. Unfortunately today, my take is that the current mainstream music that is shoved down would be, if I didn't introduce my kids to what I would call good music much earlier, what would be shoved down their throats is music just to numb you from whatever you're doing. It's trap beats and hooks, just getting you through to the next section of the song. It's nonsensical. Half of it you can't even understand. You can tell it's all generated by a computer. Not a single person's fingers bled to make it happen. I don't know how you can connect to that. Frankly, I don't think people do. When people send me songs that are current or on the pop charts, they're not sending me the song going, "This song is going to change your life." Yet when someone sends you Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd or Nirvana or early hip hop, Notorious, Tupac, if you're in that age group, those songs would literally change you. They would hit you and you would be like, "I can never unhear that. That is now in me."
--:-- I'm going to finish this statement with something that absolutely blew me away. Understanding that these are the times, I think it's what's coming and I hate it. Alicia Keys at the Super Bowl, she misses her mark on a lyric. She catches herself. It's a tiny little hiccup in an amazing performance that if it were live, no one would have even thought about it. But you cannot find it online. They digitally changed the performance so that she hits it perfectly on mark. You can't find it online. They changed the recording. What a shame. To me, that imperfection to a digital marketer or a big company like the NFL, they're seeing that as an imperfection. I'm going, "That makes the performance unique." It didn't ruin the song. She's Alicia Keys. She's brilliant. What are we talking about?
--:-- Patrick Leonard: I spent a lot of years with Leonard Cohen, a lot, working with Leonard all the time. There was something we were working on and there was something that wasn't quite right in it. I pointed it out and he said, "The beauty's in the flaws." It's that simple. There was no going back or looking at it again because that's the truth of it. The beauty is in the thing that's not perfect. Once you put everything on the grid, pitch and time, have fun listening, but you're not listening to anything. There's nothing there.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I agree.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: Some sense of rhythm and some sense of... Look, things change. Depending on what you're interested in doing, you can focus on it and look at it or you don't have to look at it at all. I guess that's the beauty of it. I'm busy all the time trying to come up with something every day. I don't care what other people are doing. I don't mean I'm indifferent to it. I mean I'm not interested in it. I'm interested in my own stew that I'm making, what ingredients it has in it, how I feel about it, and how it tastes to me. It sounds a little bit like this couldn't possibly be true, but once I really like it, I don't care what anybody else thinks at all. I don't care at all. Nothing could affect me. I'm after my own painting. Once I've painted the painting and I feel like I've done it the best that I can and I'm satisfied with it, I'm done. I'm good. I think that's what it should be. If you're trying to please somebody else, you're kind of screwed before you start.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What I find very interesting, and we deal with this regardless of whether we are in a purely creative profession like creating music or writing or dance, we also see this in business and entrepreneurs. I see it all the time. What I do for a living is executive coaching and startup advising. I've been an entrepreneur for 15 years. I now try to help people who are stuck or hitting moments or having conversations with themselves that they can't get past, and try to break them free. The thing that is often the hardest struggle to get through is when they are stuck because they're worried about what the rest of the market is doing. "This is the way everyone else does this part of this type of business. Everyone here is going in this direction." Being that you've taught people how to write music and worked with celebrities across all different genres, how do you break someone free? What would be your advice or guidance to start cultivating that mentality of seeing the art as ready when it's ready for you, and not taking in all these opinions, most of which are completely made up in our head and aren't even real?
--:-- Patrick Leonard: When you said that, I get an image. I don't know why I get this image, but this is the image that came to mind. I'm probably going to sound out of my mind, which maybe I am. If you're going to take a race across a lake, say a kayak race, for example, when they shout go or they shoot the gun, that's going to tell you it's time to row across the lake. If you do anything other than focus on your stroke and your breathing and the pace so that you complete the thing, if you look left or right, you're going to lose. That's it.
--:-- For me, if you want to stand out – and I never set out to stand out, that was not my goal – but I did want to maintain my own musical identity. The way I did it was by not learning other people's music. I don't learn other people's music. I barely listen to other people's music. I did when I was a kid, but I don't anymore. I haven't for decades, to be honest. I listen to some things and almost nothing these days because I'm busy crossing that lake and making sure I don't get distracted. I think you need to know what the race is. Before the gun goes off, you look up and down and you go, "He looks a little scary. He looks a lot stronger than me. That's a better boat than I have." But once the gun goes off, if you pay any attention to that, you don't stand a chance. Does that make sense? I think that's a very decent metaphor.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It makes complete sense.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: There's a thing that a great man who we've spoken to in another way a few minutes ago. I was doing a show with this man in Spain. He said, "Let's do the traditional band toast." It was champagne all the way around. He said, "Fuck them all." And out we went. Now everything is history and all of it makes perfect sense to me. You cannot be concerned with anyone else and do anything unique. The second you absorb someone else's notion of something, you've diminished your own originality. I know this is bad news to a lot of people and they don't agree with me. I don't care. Hold on to your identity and your beliefs. If you can make them work for you, you'll have true success. If you believe you can't and you start to look at someone else, you might get somewhere, but it ain't gonna last. It's not gonna last because it's not yours. You earn these things. You earn them.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think you're completely right. I think this is the challenge of our time because social media has made comparison not just something you have access to, but literally something that's shoved in your face every single day. It's chronic. What I find interesting, and I share this a lot with my clients and we talk about it on the podcast too, is that all of the examples of people that we hold up as pinnacles of creativity or innovation or success, all of them have these unique, unfollowable journeys. All of them. When you look back, they all did this here and this and this would have never happened.
--:-- A big example is Tom Brady. He just gave his Hall of Fame commencement speech. I listened to it. I'm a lifetime Buffalo Bills fan, so rooting for Tom Brady was incredibly difficult until he left the Patriots. Now I love him because he seems like a pretty decent guy, very unique and hardworking. When you look at his career, this is a guy who was a ho-hum quarterback in college for most of his career. Didn't have great measurables. Never the number one on everything. Gets drafted in the sixth round of the NFL draft. Barely makes it onto the traveling squad for the Patriots. Sits behind a quarterback in Drew Bledsoe who had been a perennial Pro Bowler. There were a million reasons why he doesn't ever get to be this thing. Yet he played the game in a way that no one has ever duplicated. Short, direct, the way he goes about his business. If you follow Tom Brady's path, that's Tom Brady's life, not your life. The number of serendipitous moments that took place for him to have the thing that he has, you can never recreate. The idea, even at face value, not that you can't learn some best practices or training tips, there are things you can learn from people. But at the end of the day, I cannot agree with you more.
--:-- I did a whole episode a couple of weeks ago around the idea that the fear of failure is bullshit. I think it's absolute bullshit. It's marketing copy. It's meant to sell you stuff. What you're scared of is status. That's the problem. The reason I do not follow my art or what I want, the reason I try to become Patrick, is because I'm so worried if I go down my path and decide to play hip-hop banjo because that's what I love doing, and if it's unsuccessful, what is everyone going to say? "Geez, you could have been a successful traveling banjo guy if you had just learned these chords and hooked up with these bands and got this agent." You don't want to be that thing. You want to be a hip-hop banjo guy. Forget about what people think. Forget about the status. Be your own person. But it is such a struggle for people to break free today.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: I see it only in the tiny bit that I see what the media actually contains because I can't look at it. Reflecting back to my generation, which is a long time ago now, everyone was completely individual. There was no reason to want your bands to be similar. The other thing is, I think it's not okay these days for someone to be better than somebody else. I think that's bullshit. You need that. I've always said that where I set my bar for what I wanted out of my musical life, I will never get there. Because of that, I'm still working. I'm still trying. I'm still experimenting. I'm still searching. I'm still intrigued by it because the bar is way out of my reach. That's the only way to do it. This idea that you can't have something that's greater than something else because you can offend somebody with that? That's just sad.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Applying this to a lot of the people listening – I'll give people just a little bit of context. The way that I do my podcast, the fact that I don't just ask the next follow-up question and shut the fuck up, the fact that I put a lot of context for my own life in between questions, I get hate. I get people saying, "If only you did this, you'd be here, whatever." Which we do pretty well. My point in saying that is I have a podcast and people want to tell me all the ways that I should do the show. It's hard sometimes because you have ups and downs. This interview goes well, this one doesn't go as well as you want. You're always trying to improve. But there's this little voice over here saying, "Maybe they're right. Maybe if you did just ask questions this way, or maybe if you did keep your interviews to 20 minutes, or maybe if you did this." I used to go to hell with that.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: I have learned, and I don't know what it is about my disposition. Maybe it's my Irish heritage or whatever. I was born in a tiny little shithole town that I couldn't wait to get out of and have done everything I could. Who knows what it is in my life, my past, or my DNA that I just have this ability to be like, "Don't care. Hear you, don't care."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: However, so many people who want to be unique, who want to be individuals, they fall. They can only hold out for so long, and then eventually they start to fall prey to all these voices. As someone who has been able to maintain your voice, work on your craft, know what your art is and keep pushing for it and not allow those voices to get in, what would you say or what guidance would you give to people to stay in themselves? How can they do that?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I mean, I think this is – I'm going to say this and then I'm going to figure out a way to unsay it, okay? You're either born that way or you're not. Now I'm going to find a way to unsay it. I think that you need your own set of goals – I don't like the word goals – your own marks that you're going to hit.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: Right.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So here, I'll give you an example. These are scales. You get a metronome and it goes tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. It's what it does, just ticks.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: Right.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Mine's sitting over there, and it's still one of these. I don't use my phone. I have a metronome, goes tick, made of wood. When I was a kid, I wanted to be able to do these things at the bottom setting of the metronome. So the metronome's going tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, which is this. And you don't just do that. You start slow and you work and you work and you work, and it takes years to be able to do it. So to put those things out in front of yourself that you believe you need to paint your painting and to have your palette, to put them out in front of you and to achieve them, even something that seems as menial as that. It's not menial because it's exercising your command of your own efforts. Is this cryptic and bizarre? Do you understand?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: No, I understand.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: So there's that kind of dexterity. And then there's – I'll use musical stuff – there's harmony, there's melody, there's rhythm. There's all these things that if you don't know them, if you don't have the vocabulary, what can you expect to accomplish? If you don't know the vocabulary.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: So you can choose to learn the vocabulary even if no one else around you is learning the vocabulary. Because if you want to play that chord, you've got to know something to play that chord. You might stumble on it in a million years, but you're probably not going to. So to see those things out there and to go, "What was that? I need to know what that is." Not "I need to learn that thing." I need to know what it's made of, so it becomes part of my colors.
--:-- [Patrick leans forward, his tone becoming more intense]
--:-- Patrick Leonard: I think in a sideways way, back to what I said: you're either born with this quest built into you or you're not. But if you're not built with it, what I'm saying is the truth, and there's no shortcut. If you want this thing where your body and your mind feels like you're achieving something beyond yourself, and so you can emulate somehow this notion of greatness, if you don't bleed, you're not there. I don't give a shit. I don't care. You're just not. And so bad news, maybe, but that's it. There's no other way.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: And that's what I would say. I'd tell people, look, if you want this, first you have to look out there. Where is it? Look out there somewhere and see what it is that you hear or that you see that you feel is worth the journey upwards. Because the bar has to be way up above your head. Or what's the point in running in a straight line? Everybody can run in a straight line. You only need legs to run in a straight line. So set it way up there and spend the rest of your life going for it. And you'll always be satisfied. And you may be good at it and you may not be good at it. But the second you follow, you're dead. You're dead. What are you doing? Who gives a shit if it's been done a million times and you can do it too? I'm sorry. I mean, that's as harsh as I'll get. But I really believe that there's truth in that.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: And when I look out and see what's going on, it breaks my heart. Because I know there's people out there that have this in them. And because they're doing this all day and whatever else they're doing, they're not even looking there. And it's not here. It's not here. It's not here. It's not out there. It's this and this and these and ours.
--:-- [Patrick gestures to himself and Ryan]
--:-- Patrick Leonard: My kids, I told you, I got two kids, 10 and eight, two boys, and they play video games. I don't have a problem with it, done regulated in certain amounts of time. That being said, sometimes they'll tell me about their video games and I have this hiccup that they hate when I say this, but I think it's sinking in. I tell them video games are fine. Optimize your real life, not your fake life. Your real life is out here. I think it's fine that you enjoy this video game. You want to tell me about it, it's all good, it's fun. But do not over-optimize that life. That life is meaningless. This life out here is what's important.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I want to surmise what you said, and then I have one more topic that I want to dive into. What I heard you say there, and tell me if you think this is wrong or I'm misstating it, is that our guiding star, our guiding destination, should be where our curiosity takes us. Because if we're curious about something, we will walk through the swamp. We'll chop down the tree. We'll climb the mountain because we have to know. We have to know how to play this chord, play this chord on this rhythm, play this chord on this rhythm with this type of beat. We have to know because we're curious about it. We can't get enough of it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What happens instead is we're taught, "Go do this thing, make this money. This is what your life should be. Someone who's from this town or this background or this class of person goes and does this thing." And then we end up 40 years old looking at our life going, "Oh my God, maybe I'm making enough money. Maybe I'm not, but either way, I got a case of the Mondays."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I told my team all the time when I had my company, if you put "I have a case of the Mondays," "It's hump day," or "Thank God it's Friday" into any of our communication channels, you and I are going to have a one-on-one talk after this, because this might not be the career for you. Because if you are showing up and the first thing you say to everyone is "Happy hump day," this is not the place for you. And I don't mean that in a negative way. It means that you don't enjoy being here. Something about this is not grabbing you and pulling you in and capturing your attention and making you interested.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I've made this mistake. I've had parts of my career where I was places that I didn't enjoy going. But I feel like now I wake up every day and I love what I do, but it's because I'm curious about people like you. And I get to wake up every day and have conversations like this and hear you and listen to the cadence of your voice and the topics that bring you passion. I just wish more people had the balls to follow their curiosity and not let what their community or their family or their spouse or society tells them it's supposed to be. Obviously we all have obligations we have to take care of. I'm not saying that. But even if it's a hobby, be curious about something.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: Something you just said made me think something too. If I was born right now, who knows? It's when I was born and where I was born and who I was around. It's such a different generation. To look at it and go, all accolades or accomplishments or whatever you want to call them, if I was born now, I might have gone right to a video game and the porn channel and stayed there for the rest of my life. Who knows? I was obsessive about what there was, so maybe it's a little bit of an indictment of the times more than the people.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think that's true. I do think that's true. I don't think that humans have changed. I don't think that changed at all. I think that technology and society has changed, and I don't know if it's a net positive. Certainly not, in my opinion, for most aspects of creativity and general joy day to day.
--:-- [Ryan shifts the conversation]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I do want to ask you. You have the new album coming out. I wrote down, just preparing for this, and I tend not to prepare too much because I like to be very in the moment with you. Having no musicality, as we talked about at the very jump, when do you know you have a song in you? What is that like to someone who has never woken up in the morning and gone, "I have a song in me"? How do you know you have that in you? Or is it always in you and it's the discipline and it's just always coming out? As an artist, how do you know you have a song or an album in you that should be packaged up, that there's a narrative, that there's a story to tell? How do you know when it's that time?
--:-- Patrick Leonard: That's a good question. That's a lot of question. Me specifically, I have my own template, my own paradigm for this. Somebody else, how do they know? I wrote two songs this morning before eight o'clock for a musical I'm working on with someone. Two finished, recorded them, sent them off. I've been practicing for playing live and looking at stuff I wrote with other people. A couple Madonna songs, a couple Leonard Cohen songs.
--:-- [Patrick moves to the piano]
--:-- Patrick Leonard: If right now, here, we'll just do this just for the fuck of it. I'm just going to improvise.
--:-- [Patrick begins playing the piano, improvising a melody]
--:-- Patrick Leonard: If I kept going, I might get into something. I might find a rhythm. I can do this all day. I've done it all day my whole life. So I'm never at a loss for what to do. If you right now put some words up on the screen, I could write a song to it, because that's what I'm an expert at.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: I think what it comes down to is you acquire the tools so that you're an expert in your field. If you're going to be a songwriter and a piano player, if you can't sit down and just play whatever there is and just make music without any notion of what it's going to be, and let yourself and your fingers and your ears and your heart and your experiences guide you through this, then I wouldn't do it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What's wild is you were playing that riffing, and what was going on in my head was a young man walking through the woods. And then when you hit that beat change, it was like he stepped onto a city block. That visual was going on in my head when I was listening to you. I was like, "Man, this sounds like I'm walking through the woods." When you're playing, because your fingers at this point have become just – you're obviously not thinking about your fingers. You're thinking about the sounds that you want to make. I'm assuming.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: I'm not thinking about anything.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Are you picturing a scene in your head and this is the song that goes along with the scene?
--:-- Patrick Leonard: I'm not doing anything. I can talk and do this. It doesn't. I'm not doing anything. I can do it all day long, but it's only music when you make music out of it.
--:-- [Patrick continues playing softly]
--:-- Patrick Leonard: As an example of something, there's a couple of things that I've done that are fairly recognizable. I would sit down in the morning and I would do this all the time. And then one morning, you sit down and you go...
--:-- [Patrick plays a familiar chord progression]
--:-- Patrick Leonard: And you go, "Oh, that's nice." And that's "Live to Tell," the Madonna song. Or you go...
--:-- [Patrick plays another progression]
--:-- Patrick Leonard: And these are things that occur, and then you grab them as they go by. But they only occur if you have vocabulary. They only occur if you have enough skill to be free in what you're doing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: There's a meme, and I don't want it to sound trite, but I honestly think it's some of the most sage wisdom that's come out of our modern society. It's kind of like "walk around and find out." Get out there and mess around and see what happens when you push this button, pull this lever, make this decision, take this action. I feel like so many of us, so many people, we wake up every day and it's just like, "Tell me the answer. I don't want to do the work. I just want to get the answer." But you don't really own the answer or how to apply the answer if you haven't actually done the work to acquire the skill and the knowledge. Like you said, if you're not bleeding, what are you doing?
--:-- Patrick Leonard: Also, you need a skill set and you need a vocabulary. In this case, the thing of noodling around on the piano, you need a musical vocabulary and you're not born with one. You don't come with a vocabulary. You have to put it in. So if this is going to be your expression, then you should do that. If you're going to be a lyricist, you need to be able to read. You need to be able to process what you're reading. Otherwise, how good are you going to be at this?
--:-- Patrick Leonard: The idea that the technology can give you the rhymes you need and the computer can play chord changes for you and that you can be the artist on top of that – you can call it art if you want to, but I wouldn't. Not with a clear conscience. I know that pisses a lot of people off. There's probably a lot of people who actually have very artistic hearts and this is exactly their process, and I'm not going to say they're not artists. It's just that they're not going to create something that's theirs. All they're really doing is manipulating other people's notions.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: I know that's a very unpopular thing I'm saying right now, and people don't like it. I really go there because I'd just as soon leave everybody alone to do whatever they want to do. I'm fine with it. The truth of it is I am fine with it. Why? I don't have to listen to it. I won't listen to it, because why would I? Not that what I'm doing is any better, and maybe it's worse as far as they're concerned. But I'm okay with it, just like they're okay with what they're doing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think I'm copying out of everything right now, but you're good, Patrick.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The new album is "A Walk in the Woods"? No, this has been one right. New album is called "It All Comes Down to Mood."
--:-- Patrick Leonard: The single is "A Walk in the Woods."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The single is "A Walk in the Woods." I had it backwards. I'm sorry.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This has been one of my favorite conversations I've had in a long time. I'm so glad to have met you. I can't wait to dig in. It's funny, in research I started listening to your stuff and I'm like, "Oh shit, he was involved in that. He was involved in that." I just didn't know. I dig what you're doing. I dig your mindset. I hope what the audience has taken from this is obviously the application to pure arts, but that these concepts, these ideas, this idea of owning exactly who you are and making your art – it could be your coffee shop, or it could be how you just execute your task inside an organization. I love this idea you shared of understanding the vocabulary, understanding the core pieces, the ones and zeros of what you do, so that you can make it unique to your own.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I appreciate you. I appreciate your time. Where can people go to get the album? Where can people go to learn more about you, connect with you, follow along with what you have going on?
--:-- Patrick Leonard: There's a little social media starting now that I won't be managing. I tried Instagram about seven years ago and I did it for a little while and went, "This is distracting me," so I stopped. But now there's somebody who will do it. The album is coming out on vinyl in July, at the latter part of July. I think the 27th or 28th. "A Walk in the Woods" is coming out digitally, I think on the 28th of June. The album will be available digitally after it's released on the vinyl, or I think it may even all be the same day. It's an old school thing. It's an old school record. I really designed it to be a vinyl. But I think it's a good listen either way. I like it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'll leave the audience with this. My dad gave me about a hundred of his original prints from the 70s and 60s vinyl records. I have Queen, "A Night at the Opera," so I have "Bohemian Rhapsody" on original print. I played the Spotify version of the song and my kids love it. Who doesn't love "Bohemian Rhapsody"? Then I said, "Okay, you've heard that version. Now listen to this." I have some old school speakers. They're not old, old school, but they're less digitized and less compressed than a lot of the new stuff. I said, "Now listen to this," which had to be pushed through a receiver, which most don't anymore. I played the vinyl and it was like blowing their little minds. You could tell even at that age. We're not a musical family, but you could just see them reacting more to how the vinyl captures the full scope of the music.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: We don't have to get into the technicalities of it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: No, I would love to hear it. We can finish with this. I love it.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: It's so simple and it's beautiful. When you have a vinyl, you have grooves that were cut into this material, this plastic vinyl. When you put the needle in it, the needle is moved back and forth. It's vibrated by those grooves. That goes into an amplifier that vibrates the speakers in an extreme way, in an amplified version of what the needle is doing. This is 100% physical. When you're listening to music that's on your phone or digitally, you're listening to zeros and ones that are telling your brain this is music. It's the same zeros and ones that are telling you your movie's a movie. It's the same zeros and ones that are telling you your pictures are pictures. There is only zeros and ones, and it's how fast they go and how they scramble, and your brain registers them like that.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: Vinyl is an organic reality, and your body feels that right away. One is out here and the other one goes in. I just listen to vinyl these days. Once I set up the vinyl and decided to make a vinyl and went back and listened to a lot of my old vinyls and re-bought a lot of them – they go back to the 70s and they don't really play anymore on that warm-up – I sat and listened. It's like, "Oh yeah, that's right. That's right. This is a whole other thing." It's certainly not a contemporary notion, but it's a great way to consume it. So why not? If I can do it, I'm going to do it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love it. I'm right there with you. Patrick, I wish you nothing but the best. I appreciate you sharing your time with us, and we'll see you down the road.
--:-- Patrick Leonard: Thank you. Be good, man.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Thank you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Every week, we share the ideas, stories, and insights of elite performers that you can use in your business and life. Be sure to subscribe wherever you're listening or watching and leave a comment on YouTube to keep the conversation going. This is the way.
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