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…

The Slow Curve Back To Björk

In 2015 my interest in Björk finally blossomed. Up until then there was a vague awareness & appreciation. She was on the edge of some large mystery and I wasn’t entirely ready to go there yet, dark weirdness. When the spark finally hit, I was in love: merging sex, death and science with instrumentation that both pulls from imagined futures and romantic pasts. I mean, she dresses like a galactic moth and her music videos are robots fucking. It seemed on a totally different level from any other artist I listened to. I sat in bed one day and watched the entirety of her concert at the Royal Opera House in 2001.

Musically, I was in the middle of searching for an identity. Identities are always flowing and ever-changing, but I felt like I hadn’t even found the essence with which I was flowing. I hung on to Björk and studied her melody lines and the intricacy of her arrangements. I wanted to sound futuristic, like her. But only in terms of sound. My song content was still deeply entrenched in my life, my experiences, my immediate longings. Stories of me.

After a few attempts to get some sort of electronic pop sound going, I walked away and a few years later, picked up my acoustic guitar again. A producer came along and said “hey, your acoustic songs are so good, I want to help you make them,” and I took that as a clue towards my sound. I left my dreams of becoming some incarnation of Björk on the shelf.

In my research for “Wasted Time” (or should I call it Lost Time? I think a name will emerge the more thinking I do), I came across the work of Timothy Morton. I stumbled on him through the Caitlin DeSilvey essay on Rewilding Time, and happily found that there was correspondence between Morton and Björk made public.

I’ve only just started to dip my toe into Morton’s Dark Ecology, so I can’t fully talk about all the ideas yet, cause I’m still trying to understand them. I think the conversation with Björk is helping, though. Also, they say some interesting things about pop music & songwriting:

What is original does not come from absolute blank nothing (“oblivion”), but from an electromagnetic tenderness— from remembering not forgetting . . . The song as entity is a physical being in its own right

And then Morton goes on to talk about how art helps the “almost-now” eco society to “rediscover enchantment”—

our mission maybe is to allow people to feel this and think this with full crystal clarity, not departing from reason for one second, yet allowing the inner space to sparkle madly

Allowing the inner space to sparkle madly. I love that and I feel like songwriting fits in there, rewilding time fits in there, transforming ways of looking at lost time fits in there, moments of quiet and wilderness fit in there.

Look at this beautiful tiny sparkling void, it isn’t nothing at all, it’s beautiful

And they bring up the North!! Talking about it as a realm of enchantment. As a place where society can maybe learn about the sparkling, magical unknown:

there is part of me that just wanted to talk about elves and sprites. . . you can feel these entities coming out of the rocks up here in the north of england, the pools and fountains. whether you like it or not, believe it or not. irish woman i heard once: “sure i don’t believe in them, but they’re there all the same…” bang on… somehow the further north you go the more vivid it becomes. i expect it’s super vivid in iceland?

Also on the table is the idea that thinking the world is separate and evil actually makes you the evil thing. You are the world and to think evil of it is to make evil of yourself! View time the same way! Lost time? Stuck in a sparkling void? Hate the void and you are the hate! Starting to care for the world begins with being caring — caring for yourself. Love yourself = love your neighbour = love the planet. Narcissism and nihilism and finger-pointing break that down.

What about merging with the void? Merging with care & eroticism towards the wilderness of stale, dormant time? Merging with the unknown, merging and caring about the stillness, the staring out to sea from an unmoving chair by the window?

Also, the song Isobel. Leaving it here for later:

The lyrics also relate to sparkling voids / dark forests / being alone:

in a forest pitch dark / glowed the tiniest spark / it burst into flame / like me / like me / my name isobel / married to myself / my love isobel / living by herself

Is Isobel a character of Björk’s personal mythology?

Finally finally finally, I am still figuring out what Object Oriented Ontology truly means in dumb, pop music terms, but here is a definition of it which I think makes it easy to grasp? Maybe?

Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is Graham Harman’s variant of the Speculative Realism movement. As an enquiry into the existence of objects it gives objects the same importance as humans. In doing so, humans are not all powerful over objects: we co-existing on planet Earth.

That’s from an essay by Joshua Speer. My understanding of OOO (apart from the fact that I love the roundness of three Os together) is that things exist, and without human interest/understanding/gaze, things still exist and have power, timelines, lives. Everything is an object, even concepts and massive things like climate change or Jupiter. Objects are also created from disparate things which can get lumped together — the human species is an object, with its own interactions with the planet which might seem separate from any individual human who is a part of the species. For example, I’m a human writing on my computer, drinking a cup of tea. But as part of the object “human species”, I’m currently devouring the planet’s resources and wearing away the Earth’s climate. This interpretation of OOO might not be perfect, and will probably develop the more I read about it. Currently reading Morton’s Dark Ecology which is helping with that.

So. Back to the Björk. Morton mentions a coral reef in his final email in the chain:

i think of OOO as the discovery of a gigantic sparkling coral reef too deep for most philosophy to notice. sharks floating about, anemomes with tendrils. things that could be alive, could be dead. could be plant, could be animal. could be a whole entity yet made of all kinds of things that don’t add up to it

When I thought of the dark coral reef, I felt it as a place which was deep and secret, which people couldn’t even visit. When we are lonely and within the lake of lost time, we might feel like we’re at a similar place. Not a sparkling coral reef perhaps, but something like it. Something which is unseen by other people, which feels very far away, like the bottom of the Mariana Trench, but at the same time there is something magical and sparkling about it.

I am calling this The Sparkling Dark.

Does being in lost time, the sparkling dark, allow us to access a realm of the magical? Or the mythical? What mundane experiences would back these claims up?

I have got several interviews with people I know coming up, mostly about chronic illness, but also about psychology, unemployment, creativity and recovery. I wonder what we will discover about the sparkling dark then.

To put a very long, rambling story short… from all of this, I realised that Björk is still a huge inspiration to me. She can be an influence even if I’m not emulating her sound. I’m taking a different view now — ecology made pop, art made mainstream, academia in emails about coral reefs and sparkling Nordic landscapes. Philosophy and weirdness and dreaming all whipped up and put on a stage for people to sing and dance along to. That’s what I want to do with this Wasted Time project (which I am now leaning towards calling “Lost Time” instead of Wasted…. ‘wasted’ implies more blame than ‘lost’).

Making the sparkling dark a place to dance in.

UNGLOOM 2021

So, since about 37 days ago, I’ve been writing a tiny song a day.

What’s a tiny song? A little demo-like song that takes under an hour to record, and lasts for less than a minute. Tiny song. The aim is to do 100.

The purpose of this 100 Tiny Songs project is to lean harder into my niche as a songwriter. I recently had a mentor tell me that I was good at writing weird, observational little songs. This mentor told me it was what endeared her to my work. And it would be what endeared a lot of other people to me, too.

That wasn’t the first time I’d heard that opinion, but at the time I found it weird — I thought people preferred my slow, sad, acoustic stuff? My heartbreaks on train platforms and my little-too-personal lyrics?

No, it was my short songs about petting dogs and businessmen ordering steaks that had the “spark.”

I’ve always loved being funny and making strange things. When I was a kid I wrote songs about poisonous plants, yodelling goats and a big pop number about Santa Claus which sounded a lot like Culture Club’s ‘Karma Chameleon.’ When I started writing songs and gigging, I made upbeat stuff and a lot of the things I put on Bandcamp were little vignettes about my life, in the form of quirky little songs.

As the years went on, I started to think that I needed to go deeper, more serious, more heart-wrenching. People liked sad stuff. My voice sounded great when I was singing about rain. The holes in my guitar skills didn’t show when I played slower. And the producers who worked with me encouraged me to make the serious, sad, acoustic stuff. Their approval made me feel like this “emotional artist” personality was my true sound.

The problem with this is that so many artists in the acoustic singer-songwriter genre are making the same stuff. The thing that my mentor labelled as “slow self-analysis ballads.” I cringed to hear my songs put in that category, but I knew that it was partly true. I was conforming to a sound that was beautiful and easy, but it was everywhere. And although it was me, it wasn’t the most exciting thing about me.

As I grow older, I realise that the whole point of being an artist is to look outside yourself. To notice things about life. Of course our own perspectives and experiences are important — they’re what give our work it’s own personality and sound. But it really is about interacting with and responding to the real world, not just navel-gazing and hoping someone will join in with you.

Gloom is not my personal brand. I am going to Un-Gloom this year, in fact. Through the first third of this Tiny Song project I’ve realised that people like it when I make fun things. People like it when I share my sense of humour and my daily observations through my songs.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is:

YOU DON’T NEED TO MAKE SAD STUFF TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY.

Now, time to ungloom.