The Alchemy of Interpretation
A song comes on while I’m cleaning up after dinner, water still running in the sink. I’ve heard it a hundred times. The melody hasn’t changed. The lyrics are the same. The tempo is steady.
And this afternoon, something in it opens.
It’s one line about leaving.
I’ve sung along to it for years without thinking much about it. Now it lands differently. It feels personal. Almost unreasonably so. As if the songwriter had been standing in my kitchen, taking notes.
The song hasn’t changed. The experience has.
That’s the part that stays with me.
We tend to talk about meaning as if it lives inside the work, sealed there, waiting to be opened correctly. As if interpretation is a matter of careful retrieval.
It isn’t.
Interpretation is self-portraiture.
A work of art carries structure, craft, intention, and context. It carries the fingerprint of its maker. But it also carries space. And that space is where we enter. What happens next isn’t extraction. It’s contact.
The meaning we extract from a work often tells us more about our private history than the artist’s intention ever could.
That isn’t an argument against intention. It’s an acknowledgment of participation.
The Ghost of the Creator
I don’t believe the artist disappears once the work is released.
Intention matters. Context matters. A protest song lands differently when you understand the moment it came from. A painting made in grief carries its weather.
Craft matters. Influence matters. Lineage matters. It all deepens the encounter.
The creator lingers in the architecture of the work. Like a ghost in the room.
But enrichment isn’t the same as containment.
The work doesn’t stop at what was intended. It exceeds it. Not because the artist failed to control it, but because art is porous by design. It was always meant to be met.
If we only accept meaning that’s been certified by a critic or sanctioned by scholarship, we shrink the encounter. We outsource our response. We trade intimacy for authority.
There’s value in scholarship. There’s also a limit.
At some point, the work is in front of you. And so is your life.
“The creator lingers in the architecture of the work. Like a ghost in the room.”
Art as a Diagnostic Tool
When someone tells me what one of my songs means to them, I rarely feel defensive.
I feel honored.
Something in the work sparked their imagination enough to send them searching through their own life. A melody or phrase prompted a quiet audit of their personal archive for points of reference. They found a memory. A relationship. A former version of themselves. And they attached the song to it.
That isn’t misinterpretation. It’s participation.
I also feel curious. Their reading often reveals aspects of the piece I didn’t consciously design. Emotional undercurrents I felt but didn’t articulate. Patterns I didn’t realize were there. Sometimes they hear something in the song that teaches me about the song.
And about myself.
This is the slightly unsettling part.
If interpretation reveals the interpreter, then our reactions aren’t neutral. The songs we replay. The books we dismiss. The paintings that linger. The films we call overrated. They’re threaded with memory, longing, bias, unfinished conversations.
We think we’re evaluating the work.
Often, we’re diagnosing something in ourselves.
The art doesn’t change.
We do.
And so the meaning does.
The Creative Feedback Loop
Alchemy was about transformation.
About what happens when two elements meet and something new forms.
In interpretation, the elements are simple. There’s the work. And there’s the life standing in front of it.
Meaning forms in the contact.
Not as a fixed conclusion, but as something alive and provisional. Shaped by who you’ve been and who you’re becoming. That’s why the same song can mean one thing at twenty and something entirely different at forty. The chords are unchanged. The recording is identical.
But the listener isn’t.
That isn’t a flaw in interpretation.
It’s the point.
And it matters because the way you interpret art shapes the way you create it. When you trust your own response instead of inheriting someone else’s, you start to see your patterns. The themes you gravitate toward. The emotional tones that feel charged. The images that won’t leave you alone.
You begin to recognize the architecture of your own interior world.
So yes, learn what the artist intended. Read the criticism. Study the context. Let it deepen your understanding.
But don’t stop there.
Sit with the work long enough to notice what it does inside you.
The work is a fixed point.
You are the variable.
And that is where the alchemy lives.