Original material

I try very hard to make all of my material original. I don't mind so much if my humor or my music or my art reminds someone of another artist, but I don't want to ever be accused of plagurism.

When I was a kid, probably about 11 years old, I pulled a gag that I had seen Rodney Dangerfield do on another kid. He was being a punk and he deserved it, but he got me back good. He said, "You stole that from Back to School," which I had. It made me feel very unoriginal. It was a sensation I really hated and one that I have tried, in just about every thing I do, to avoid.

The difficulty here is that there is so much stuff out there, books, songs, TV shows, movies, poems, art, and real life, that it is almost impossible to know for a fact if what you are presenting is yours. I am very well versed in the things I consider my favorites; my favorite comedians, my favorite writers, my favorite musicians. I would never rip them off because I would know immediately if I wrote a melody or a story line that was too similar to one of theirs. Still, we are constantly bombarded peripherally by pop culture and it is impossible to block it out. In truth, you wouldn't want to. But it is also impossible to take it all in and be certain that you are as different from the rest as you can be.

Recently I wrote a joke rap for some friends of mine. I plan on recording it if I ever get the opportunity. When I wrote it the main line of the song came to me in a flash. I thought it was very funny. Well, I don't listen to rap, but my wife does. As soon as I sang the song to her she said, "Are you making fun of so-and-so?"

"No," I said, and I honestly believed it.

"Well," she said, "Your main line is just about exactly the same as his."

Not two minutes later his song came on the radio and sure enough my hook was one word different. Even the melody was the same. This didn't bother me as much because my rap was intended to be a joke anyway, but it still bothered me. It is the kind of thing I strive to avoid.

About two years ago I wrote a song that also flowed from my pen. It only took me half an hour to write, which is really fast for me, and the melody seemed to come too quickly. I began to wonder if I had accidentally stolen it. Honestly, I'm paranoid about this. I went through each of my CDs, which there are a lot of, but I could not find a song that sounded like the one I'd written. I finally gave up, but I shelved the song because I couldn't help but think that I had stolen it. About two weeks after I wrote the song I found the song I had ripped off. Ironically it was my own song. I had ripped myself off.

Then I began to wonder if everyone has a limitted amount of creativity in them. I began to worry that I had used all of mine up, and now I was just recycling old material. Not long after that I discarded that idea when I went on a fairly significant song writing spree.

Still those two things are important to me. I want to be different from everyone else, and I want to be different from what I have done in the past.