Dear friends,

As far back as I can remember, I have been fascinated by creativity — even, I think, before I knew the word. Yet I grew up in a time and place in which creativity was firmly inside a box. It was manifest in very particular artistic ways, and you either had it or you didn’t. Famous musicians had it. Our next door neighbor, who painted fantastic murals on the bedrooms of her children’s walls, had it. I watched it, nose pressed up against a glass, and wished it had been bestowed upon me. I wrote poetry for a while when I was young. I took piano lessons. But I wasn’t specially gifted at these things, and very quickly gave them up. My fascination with creativity became a source of sadness to me, a disappointed grief, that I had not been born with its magic and gifts. 

It would have been good for me, in those years, to hear the conversation I have with Rick Rubin in this week’s show. It was good for me to have it now. He is a legendary producer of music that has changed the world and touched almost all of our ears at some point — a muse and artistic partner across decades to some of the most certifiably creative humans in our midst. But he’s never written a book before. And it intrigued me, when he and his publisher reached out in the middle of last year, that the book he’s written is not a memoir of his fascinating adventures as a producer. It is, rather, a kind of meditation on the creative process itself — as a feature of being human, not of being an artist. 

We had this conversation back in December, before he was on book tour, and when we were planning this new season. In the meantime, the book was launched and became a bestseller. I notice that interviews with Rick tend to drift into storytelling about famous people he’s worked with, and I worked very hard not to go there — to stay centered in the hard-to-talk-about matter of creativity itself. You'll hear a touching and illuminating vulnerability he brings to dwelling in and trying to put words around this.

It’s illuminating about how creativity works for the rest of us, too — close to the ground of life and the everyday. From the raw materials of a lifetime making the kind of definitive “artistry” that eludes most of us, Rick Rubin points at creativity as a way of being, not of doing, which is possible in almost everything. He makes offerings of life practices that can be sprinkled across your days. He proposes questions to live, like these: