DYCP Application Thoughts

I’m planning on applying for Arts Council England’s Developing Your Creative Practice fund. Recommended to me by my mentor, this funding would act as a support for this “Wasted Time” research I’m doing as well as help accelerate it. And it would accelerate me as an artist, as well.

I have struggled to see where I fit in in the world of art. I make pop music. I write poetry. I want to make audio programmes. I love academia and researching. I want to help educate. I want to tackle big ideas. I want to make something rich and mysterious and layered. But I also want to make things which are catchy, easy, joyful. How can I do all of that?

The Tiny Songs Project has helped me re-brand myself as an artist almost. I went from gloomy, self-centred songwriter to happy, weird, music-maker and image creator. It’s also changed the way I dress myself, too. I wear a lot more colour now, or am drawn to it at least (don’t really have the budget for a wardrobe overhaul at the moment). See the above photos for the difference.

The DYCP application requires me to plan out what I would do with the fund, who I would get in touch with, what milestones I would aim to reach and how I would measure my progress. I’m not sure at the moment what any of that would exactly entail, but I have some ideas. Here they are in note form:

MY MAIN QUESTIONS

• How can we make the idea of "lost time" less negative?

• How can our planet help our perspective of time?

• Can pop music & the culture surrounding it be a vehicle for solutions to these questions?

AREAS OF INTEREST

I would like to network with people, organisations and places in these areas

• the arctic

• the ocean

• geology

• astrophysics

• indie pop and punk music

• audio-making (like Transom for example)

• Norse/Celtic myth and folklore

MEDIUMS TO WORK WITH

• music — writing an album or an EP

• podcasting/audio

• written blog

• visual diary/sketchbook

• diagrams or maps

• performance

• workshops/teaching

• animation

ACTIVITIES TO DO

• geological exploration of a place

• stay somewhere remote up North

• collect oral histories around nature and myth of a place

• create a series of deep time event reconstructions

• create a podcast from the information I research or an enriched audio piece by including the songs I write

• pop album pop concert zine for geological events, merch for geological events or areas so we can care about them like we care about our favourite band

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.