Covers

"no reason to get excited
the thief he kindly spoke
there are many here among us
who feel that life is but a joke
but you and I, we've been through that
and this is not our fate
so let us not talk falsely now
the hour is getting late"
-Bob Dylan, "All Along the Watchtower"

(Before you go reading the rest of the post, follow the above link to a live concert performance of the "All Along the Watchtower" cover by Bt4 and Bear McCreary - it is one of the best pieces of music I've ever heard.)

It's my birthday today; I've now been in mortal flesh for 33 years (well, somewhere between that and 33 years and 9 months, depending on whether you believe life begins at conception.) I'm thinking today about music and collaboration. I've always been so scared of what people will think of my talent (or, more often, lack thereof) that I haven't been willing to engage in a lot of musical collaboration. It's sad, because the older I get the more I realize that the most fun I have playing music is playing music with others, and frankly that you get so much better when you're willing to push yourself and play with others.

This extends to songwriting and composing, too. I'm not a great composer (I'll leave that moniker to those who actually have the chops, like my friend Michael LaCroix) but I know enough about music to realize that most great works involve taking something somebody else started with, but for some reason, they didn't see something in it you see. That's certainly true of the song "All Along the Watchtower", one of the most covered songs in commercial music, with not only iconic versions like Hendrix and the one I linked above from the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack, but even U2 and the Dave Matthews Band, and I think I like every version. Many of my favorite songs are covers, and I'm not alone. A great cover manages to inspire even the original artist. From the Wikipedia entry of "All Along the Watchtower":

Dylan has described his reaction to hearing Hendrix's version: "It overwhelmed me, really. He had such talent, he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn't think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using. I took license with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do it to this day."

So, why mention all this today, on my birthday? I've been thinking a lot this year about my life: for a long time I've wanted to create - most of my hobbies are attempts to create things in one form or another. Not everybody is that way, but many are - I don't claim this as unique - and for a long time I've known that this creative instinct in us is one of the ways we are made imago Dei.

Where I have been frustrated is that it seems even my very very best creations are really rip-offs of others: I can't claim anything very original. What is starting to bring me peace about this is the realization that this is one of the ways in which we must be different from God, and, I think, one of the reasons He is excited about us as a creation. He doesn't have to borrow or copy - He is (to abuse an old philosophical concept) First Songwriter. The rest of us are just covers.

At the same time, what a wonderful opportunity. Rather than being merely carbon copies of the original Adam and Eve, God makes us different people by the pressure of perspective. This causes us to create the same things over and over, but differently each time, in beautiful and powerful ways.

One image that is powerful in my Christian walk is the image of re-creation, and while it's not etymologically accurate, the relation of that image to the word recreation isn't lost on me. What is new to me is how that doesn't just speak to God's regeneration of me, but my own regeneration of other things, doing the kind (though not the scope) of the work He takes such pleasure in.

How beautiful to be imago Dei.