The Joy Formidable

The music of the Welsh band The Joy Formidable has always evoked water to me.  I first heard them live a decade ago, at the Avalon Ballroom in Portland during the 2011 MusicFest NorthWest, and the music seemed to come in waves, rising to crescendos and then receding into calmer passages.  

“I am always daydreaming in the bathtub between recordings," Rhiannon “Ritzy” Bryan of the band recently said.  “That diffuse thinking where your mind wanders freely — I always finish songs when I’m in that state. The idea that your imagination, that escape into another, deeper world can sometimes create a stronger connection with yourself.”

These words seem to point directly to the practical, down-to-earth side of the so-called mystical experience.  The concept that there is "another, deeper world" that already exists inside of us and to which we can, under the right conditions, retreat, or to which we can escape.  Those conditions may be the  warm, watery comforts of the bathtub, or prayer, or meditation.  Whatever works for you personally.

To me, watching Ritzy splash around in a river in the video for their song Sevier continues this watery theme to their music.  "The river Sevier runs 385 miles through Utah," close to where she's living now, Ritzy said.  "It’s a metaphor for love and its journey," she continued. "Are you staying in it, following it through all the seasons, cutting through mountains and canyons through all the hardships, or cutting (severing) loose? We loved the idea of water being a main element in the performance video; the churn of the waves against the calm of still water."

But the takeaway here is that the creative state, that near mystical state where solutions and ideas spontaneously and intuitively present themselves, already exists inside each of us if we can just clear away the obstructions.  It's not something that needs to be learned, or gained, or purchased - it just needs to be realized.