13.06.2021

Hello, little life and art update.

Currently listening to: Ethan Gruska’s album En Garde. Favourite tracks include Enough for Now, Teenage Drug and Attacker.

Currently working on: Hurricane EP, which I have been working on for years now. Started in late 2018 when I met up with the initial producer/engineer I was working with, and have since changed songs, changed producers, changed workflow, and really started to bring the project together over COVID. Instead of just one linear path with one producer and one recording site, the songs have become a sort of patchwork of sounds from places across oceans and time. Samples from trains in London, and mandolins and rain from America. Guitar stolen from demos, new stems from friends I haven’t met in person yet. The first track is about to be sent away for mastering, which is a surreal feeling, considering I’ve been working on it for so long, and it feels like these songs have had so many lives already before even hitting other people’s ears.

Something else interesting I have decided to do is stop going on social media until I’m in the promotional phase of this project. Which I know Facebook/Instagram will probably punish me for by hiding my posts in the algorithm (they reward constant use of the app). I don’t really care at this point — I’ve seen how much I use the app and how often it takes me away from what I really should be doing. I can lose large chunks of time in one go. I’m hoping that this change will actually guide me towards more meaningful ways of connecting with people, working, and finding inspiration.

Things I have been doing instead of going on social media:

• writing in this blog

• sitting and just staring at nothing

• researching jobs and training opportunities

• listening to podcasts

• listening over mixes and working on my EP

That’s still not quite everything I would like to be doing in a life sans social media. What I’d also like to be doing is:

• practising music more

• exercising & moving my body more

• reading more (I am kind of doing this at the moment but am not enjoying the book I’m reading)

• writing and drawing more

Maybe these things will come with a bit more time off the apps. I’m still settling in to checking my phone less — I keep picking it up out of habit and scrolling through to find Instagram, which isn’t there anymore.

Missed Connections

I’m really excited to be starting a new songwriting project with my friend Hannah Fredsgaard (aka Asthmatic Harp), called Missed Connections.

It’s a short project where we co-write songs based on posts from Best of Craigslist. Basically, weird and wonderful classified adverts.

Hannah and I met at the Bird on a Wire songwriting workshop this March, which was a course remotely hosted by songwriters Findlay Napier and Boo Hewerdine. After having admired her responses to the tasks we were set over the week, I decided to reach out to Hannah and ask if she wanted to write together. Her songwriting is melodic, whimsical, kind of reminiscent of Regina Spektor, Sufjan Stevens and other anti-folk musicians.

The funny thing is, as soon as I opened the conversation on my phone, I could see that she was already in the process of writing me a message. We ended up saying “hello!” at the exact same time.

After a laugh we decided to write our songs in a style we picked up from the course: writing lyrics independently, and then swapping them so we could write melodies to each other’s words. I really loved the surprise element of this way of writing, the initial delight at another person’s lyrics and then the second surprise of hearing my words set to a beautiful melody I wouldn’t have thought of.

I suggested we used Best of Craigslist to base our songs on. There are some really wild missed connection stories in there. My first set of lyrics were based off this post, where a man sees a girl he was married to for three days back in 1989 pass him on a subway car.

Hannah and I are going to keep swapping lyrics every week for the next month or so, which means two new songs a week. We’ve set up a site for the project and a mailing list. I’m really excited about this project and where it could possibly go.

Join us below…

Songwriting as Fairytale

I had a thought today as I continue reading Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology.

He mentioned at one point getting lost in the dark forest and finding our way again, and I wondered how that pattern might be reflected in the common pop song structure.

Songs are built on this pattern of repetition and deviation — the deviation makes the repetition all the more sweet when it returns. I thought about how verses could be seen as straying off the forest path into a darker realm, and then the chorus comes in when we find the path again — let’s celebrate! We found the path!

Then I thought about the middle 8 — what some people also call “the bridge.” This is the part where we come across an entirely new melody and total deviation from all we’ve heard before. It’s at this point we’ve strayed so far off the woodland path that we’ve actually put ourselves in danger. We fight our way out (sometimes bridges in pop music end with a cry-out high note, think of Taylor Swift’s ‘Blank Space’) and the return to the chorus is hugely sweeter after that ordeal.

Another interesting thing is that the coda of pop songs is sometimes the combination of the chorus and the middle 8. Which gives the impression that the darkest part of our journey has also become an intrinsic part of it— in fact, it adds to the chorus: it imbues greater meaning and complexity, and adds to the bittersweet taste of the final sing-a-long. It’s like we’ve taken what we’ve learnt in the dark forest and applied it to our path.

Calling this place a “bridge” also makes me think of crossing over. Like a symbolic act of self-sacrifice in the hero’s journey which leaves them utterly transformed, but stronger than ever. Think about when Harry Potter decided to let himself be killed by Lord Voldemort. He crossed over to death, and then came back renewed to sing his final chorus, full of awareness about what lies on the other side of this existence.

Here’s a passage from Dark Ecology which reinforces this idea of how darkness and joy live inside each other, and we need that in order to create a world where the future is sustainable:

"within the melancholia is an unconditional sadness. And within the sadness is beauty. And within the beauty is longing. And within the longing is a plasma field of joy."

I think I could argue that this is a loop — lingering deep within joy itself is also sadness, which within lies joy, which within lies sadness, ad infinitum.

3 Things I Learnt From Writing 50 Songs In 50 Days

I’m halfway through my 100 Tiny Songs project. I like calling it a project rather than a challenge because ‘project’ feels like I’m more involved in it. I mean, I’m the one who came up with this idea and so far I think I’m the only person who’s done a project like this with these parameters (maybe I should google that though).

Number One: INSPIRATION FINDS YOU WORKING INSPIRATION FINDS YOU WORKING

Y’all hate to hear it — I know I did. Before this project I didn’t really write songs if I hadn’t something floating in my head beforehand. And I would sometimes go a month without writing a new song because I wasn’t “ready” for it yet. I literally had this belief right up until I started this Tiny Songs project!! If I had written a song only on the days I felt inspired before sitting down to write, I think I’d genuinely have about 5. Out of the 50 I’ve written so far. Inspiration really does find you when you go out looking for it.

Number Two: GROWTH IS A SPIRAL

You follow the trajectory of a spiral, it loops back on itself constantly whilst always progressing outward at the same time. That’s what this project is like. I’d go through phases of writing a few bad songs and then get back to some I liked, and then go back to writing bad ones and then go to writing good ones again… that feels cyclical. But what is happening all the while, is that I’m growing as a writer and an artist. Outward growth! Even if it feels like a closed loop.

Number Three: SOCIAL MEDIA IS A SKETCHBOOK

Instagram is so transient, as is Twitter, heck — even Youtube, I could argue. We put something up there and within a day or two, it’s on to the next thing. So why would we use social media to only showcase the best stuff we have? Social media is the funnel to that better content which can happily live somewhere else (maybe on Bandcamp, Spotify, Patreon, a website). But just like how this blog is a work in progress, where ideas get planted and grow at different rates, social media is the same. It’s just a garden of stuff where things are growing at different rates. It’s a workspace. It’s a rough draft area. It’s a sketchbook! And we all love looking inside people’s sketchbooks. When the time comes, we can collect what we’ve shared and thought about via social media channels, and can refine those ideas into something big, beautiful and more permanent.

So those are my thoughts so far, after songwriting for 50 days. It’ll be interesting to see if any new insights come out over the next 50. Until then, I’ll be here writing about time-wasting and other stuff.