If there’s one question I’ve been asked more often than any other (beyond do you want fries with that, to which the answer is always A THOUSAND TIMES YES), it’s where do you get your ideas? It seems to me the deceptively simplest question that can be asked of a writer, musician, or artist of any stripe, since their ideas (and how they execute those ideas) comprise their stock in trade.
But the thing is, for me at least, I find it hard to answer that question, in general and specifically for This Must Be the Place. When I started writing it in the summer of 2006, on weekends as I toiled nine-to-five at a job in financial services marketing, it was an escape for me: a way to juice up my creative impulses, which I’d spent my entire educational career refining and which were getting flabbier with each cubicle-dwelling day. It was a way to play, a way to daydream about the things I’d left behind when I grew up: the places I’d been, the things I’d discovered, the music and the movies that had instilled in me a healthy sense of cornball wonder at all the strange and lovely forms life can take.
While many elements are based on experiences I’ve had—I never ran away to Jersey, though I did spend several summers there (nerd alert!) as a bassoonist in a high school concert band—This Must Be the Place is in no way autobiographical. It’s more of a collage of souvenirs of the first act of my life; and it’s only fair that I give credit where credit’s due: to the artists and the weirdos, the musicians, the places, and the people who were there and who helped me, whether they knew it or not, grow up.
Ray Harryhausen’s Official Website
Joseph Cornell on Mark Harden’s Artchive
The Beatles Official Website
Pixies on Wikipedia
Un Chien Andalou on the Internet Movie Database
