On playing music with others Disagreements foster resentment and I’m not great at dealing with conflict. I think I do a great job of taking offence, of being on the back foot, batting away my issues with a scowl, a defensive slant to life and a ‘woe is me’ attitude. These are probably not positives. … I’ve had numerous chats with mates over the last couple of weeks about the trials and tribulations of being in a band. My closing thought post last-nights-rehearsal was the idea that spending time with other people is the hardest part of playing music. Touring is hard: late nights, travel, dealing with cranky bar staff/venue owners, battling equipment failures, eating crap food and playing to either people who don’t care, or completely empty rooms. Booking gigs, writing songs, rehearsing, performing etc are all tough, but nothing against the actuality of spending time with other humans. Putting yourself out there musically, worrying about your songs and whether your voice sounds good, or if you can even sing at all. These are all problems. But these things don’t break up bands. These things don’t demolish friendships. … How do we play music and keep projects together when the obvious role models are all so negative? Famous bands who broke up from personal disagreements number in the thousands, from the Beatles to Fleetwood Mac to The Police. Incredible bands who struggle along together but famously hate each other in their personal lives are just as common. The Rolling Stones have separate jets, separate limos and separate dressing rooms. They’d most likely have separate stages if it was at all possible. … There is no easy obvious fix. Just a willingness to embrace your own failings and try again. In the same way that romantic relationships fall apart and the participants decide whether its worth keeping this thing going and working through your problems, playing music requires an openness and an ability to see things from another’s perspective. Where it gets harder is when you tie in creative decisions (my song is better than yours), finances (one writer getting a larger cut than another), and the general stresses of gigs. Throw it all together and we have this vibrant, verdant scene with a cynical underbelly of musicians who have played in bands with people they never want to see again. … I’d love to tie everything up with a nice little solution, so I wander back through the Daily Stoic. In today’s entry (probably the darkest yet), Marcus Aurelius’ comment is: “Don’t mind me, I’m only dying slow”. The entry continues with a cliché on how every second can never be taken back and today could be the last day ever. Placing life and relationships and music into context, if we can garner an enjoyment from the music we play then it’s a positive. If we’re not gaining enjoyment then something needs to shift to bring it back. Bit like life I guess? Most of my greatest moments, the times I’ve felt truly inspired and happy and in awe of this thing we call life have been on stage, sharing a musical experience with someone.
On Touring (part 2) I write from a dorm room in FNQ (far north Queensland). Four bunks, piles of scattered clothes, instruments and remnants of last nights’ slab. Above, the rattling fan spins interminably, blowing gusts of steamy air down upon me and coming remarkably close to my bandmate’s head. Whose brilliant idea was it to pair bunk beds and a low ceiling fan? Surely a recipe for disaster, but in a 120-year-old pub built to house miners heading north, OH&S was probably the last consideration. Each subsequent publican retrofits a new concept to this heritage-listed building and we arrive at this sprawling mish mash of a death hole. The windows are slatted, creaking up and down with the hard handed jerk of a lever and in comes a flood of noise, the sounds of Yungaburra Fest. … This pub lies at the heart of the festival. Behind it lies the Garden stage where the local high school rock band kicks the day off at ten am with a set of heart-felt Missy Higgins covers. In front of the pub a farmers market, a kids DJ set, a stilted Poseidon rising out of the twirling crowd of rollerbladers to ring his town crier bell and heft his middle aged beer gut above the puzzled kids. Back and forth he sways. A precarious grip on his trident. A precarious grip on life itself. In the heart of the pub itself a female choir. The phrase ‘Welsh Women’ sticks in the back of my mind, but the alliteration invents itself in my early morning daze. Excited elderly white women co-opt cinematized black dance moves and sing ‘African-inspired’ repertoire. Think Sister Act, but no Whoopi Goldberg. Possibly no planned choreography either, just spontaneous appropriations. Probably less trained singers too I suppose. Truly an act to behold. Here in the middle I sit, seeking respite from the warmth (thirty-three degrees at ten am), the crowds (a thousand ticket holders invade a town of eleven hundred, imagine the outrage if Melbourne’s population doubled over night) and the noise (three concurrent performances competing in sheets of sounds destined to leave any puzzled in-betweener reeling). … These days are spent in indolent luxury. A pre-breakfast beer to fight the creeping heat. A meat pie from the supermarket for lunch is followed by another from the bakery for dessert and a third from a food truck as an afternoon snack. We wake to music and sleep to music. Afternoon nap beneath a tree to music. The music pervades the landscape: a young girl busking in the shade outside a café while an enthusiastically scarfed accordionist plays for his supper within the café itself. When one act finishes a set, or a song, or even pauses to take breath in the midst of a vocal line, you hear a swarm of others in the background, competing for sonic domination. … Official festival venues are overrun by ecstatic grey nomads, sipping iced-soy lattes and scoffing scones to fuel the midday slumber. Sleep defeats all, the afternoon sun slowing performances and more than one gig has a snoring uncle-figure in the back row. We wander in clumps. Singles and pairs meeting for a minute and heading different ways. We congregate for feature performances and to discuss day plans. We hear rumours of nearby Lake Eacham, a dormant volcano/lake/crocodile sanctuary. Rumours turn to action turn to an afternoons’ entertainment by virtue of a chance meeting with Beeeedge (actual spelling unknown), a sprightly Irish lady playing the Bodhran in the Irish jam. The Irish jam begins on the first day of the festival and continues non-stop until late on the final night when where we are asked to move on by a group of European backpackers staying at the pub (not to attend the festival but to pick fruit on a nearby farm). Beeeeedge has a hire-car and a partner who helped to start the festival some thirty-eight years ago. She drives us ferociously to the Lake, tells us this is her third swim in the lake that day and leaves us clutching a box of dripping Choc Tops as she dives back in for an afternoon sojourner. All around the heat permeates, seeping into the early evening, sucking the sweat softly from my skin.
On electricity firing in the void (or, what my mind does when I’m alone) The mind is a wild thing. Bundles of electrons. A collection of synapses firing back and forth, little electric pulses that combine to form thoughts. Spinning out across my frontal lobe, I feel happiness and sadness, not as some mechanical feat of engineering, not as emotion, but as pure electricity. Electricity in motion as this soft sludgy gray matter works away to create the sense of being. So how do we take this seemingly abstract collection of ‘stuff’ and form emotion from it? Where does this happiness or sadness, or the constant wild fluctuation between the two poles emerge? How do I interpret someone’s ‘external’ words within my own ‘internal’ mind and react/interact/inter-react with them to cause emotion? Without extended studies in neuroscience (who even knows where to begin?), surely this is beyond the scope of my weak human understanding. … How wild. How free. This idea that all that we do and feel and experience is merely electricity firing in the void. … I’ve been pulled kicking and screaming into a ritual where I read a passage from the Daily Stoic. Thankfully the book is designed with the western world’s thirty second attention span in mind. Each page a separate day. Each day a single thought. Each single thought distilled in fifty words or less. I read the passage. Think about it for a couple of seconds. Generally dismiss it entirely and move on with my day. Nevertheless, I find some ideas tick tick tick in the back of mind, nudging their way to the surface and coming up in casual conversation. This is my most recent thought bubble. … Marcus Aurelius: “If you are pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs you, but your own judgment about it.” Seneca: “Life is divided into three parts: past, present, and future. Of these, the present is brief, the future doubtful, the past certain. For this last is the category over which fortune no longer has control, and which cannot be brought back under anyone’s power.” Epictetus: “The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control.” So if I’ve had a past, or a present, I can take my perception of my experiences and warp it to my will. Bend and mould it to the shape I want and fling it to the seething ocean below. Is this not man’s greatest achievement? History re-written by the victors, and my mind re-writing my past over and over, synapses firing in the void to create meaning where meaning wasn’t intended and give life to the gremlins that dwell in the basement. How wild.
On man’s greatest pleasure My mind wanders. It wanes and winds and worries itself into knots. Tongue-tied and tizzy I find myself second-guessing what I’m doing. … I feel like this a lot when I try to write songs. Like a rusty tap, you struggle to turn it on, twisting and heaving and hoping it’ll give. Some days it flies open, but the first droplets of creativity are always murky. Muddy obfuscations. Borrowed tropes. Love is a… why do I always start with metaphors? In man’s eternal struggle to find meaning, I dive into others words’ for solace. I’ve found myself reading voraciously, mainly spurred on by an absurd amount of free-time that I haven’t experienced since I was a kid. I remember around age nine I spent some three years tucked into bed, reading and re-reading books. Living in a third-world country, the books I had were ones we brought with us or ones we borrowed from friends. The public library is man’s finest luxury. My parents tell the story of me as a child (or possibly my brother, the re-telling of stories gives them wings and lives way beyond their original scope). Once I’d learned to read they realised they could gain a couple of hours of morning peace by filling my cot with books at night-time. When I woke in the morning I’d delight in the sheer amount of reading material. I’d devour the books and then push them over the edge of my cot to the floor below. Read read, thunk, read read thunk. My parents would wake to the sound of books plopping on the carpet below. When I ran out of books I’d make myself known and the day would begin. Truly a wonderful childhood. … If I could forgo all that life is, retreat from work and music and creativity and love and food and return to a living where my entire world was made of books, would I do so? Interestingly enough, that’s almost what my latest tour felt like. The beauty of solo touring is you spend a lot of time on your own. As much as I love meeting new people and spending time sharing experiences, introducing yourself to a new bar full of people and making friends is a little daunting (hello introversion). Some nights I did it. Some nights I took my book from the car (where I’d been happily reading it) to the bar (where I happily kept reading it between sets) back to the car (where I continued reading it) to the campsite (where I lay in my car and read till I fell asleep). Truly a charmed existence. This meant that I read five books in the last fifteen days. Not a bad effort, although I must admit I read books in the same way that a troupe of boys devour chicken and chips after a five day hike. My partner tells me off sometimes for the way I eat, but I know that once I’ve finished my meal that hers is on offer, so why slow down? I read the way I eat. I eat as if every meal is my last and cramming the fullest amount of calories into my body in the shortest amount of time is important. … Over this tour I read a wild selection of things (I try and post them on my instagram stories as I finish them). This particular fortnight I indulged in some science fiction (I found marvellous similarities between Blade Runner 2049 and Philip K. Dick, only to realise halfway through that they were so similar because they were the same), some chosen Stoicism (The Daily Stoic) and some unchosen Stoicism (Tom Wolfe’s Man in Full, a fine work of fiction which only turns into a meditation on Stoicism in the last third or so). Upon finishing I discovered Wolfe wrote the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a book I read with some trepidation earlier in the year. Ali Smiths’ Autumn was a wild ride, something I feel I will need to re-read in a year or so (and possibly once a year until Brexit resolves itself for better or for worse). It’s a tangled web of language that genuinely distressed and delighted me throughout. Boy Swallows Universe was beautiful. An amazing story that I completed in two unbroken spells, throwing myself entirely into the plot, read by the light of a Reject Shop torch in a campground near Wingham. … And now here I am. I wrote a couple of new songs on tour. I drove some 3,000 km in two weeks. I played twelve shows. But most of all I got to do what I’ve loved since literally before I could do anything else. Here’s to that kid with the lisp and the lazy eye and the love of books. Here’s to authors around this earth, creating new worlds to pull apart your mind and scare your senseless soul. Here’s to everyone who has ever loved a book. Here’s to you and me.
Ten Minute Musings I’ve been working through the idea of daily writing. I’ve experimented with it for the last three years, long periods of inaction broken by short frantic periods where I write daily for three weeks and then subside just before the repetitive action becomes a habit. My daily writing generally takes the form of a ten minute free-thought exercise. Timer goes on for ten minutes, laptop or notebook is opened and I begin. Nothing pre-planned, nothing structured, just a quick mind dump of ideas. When the timer goes off I stop, save my work and move on with my day. Sometimes this is good. I get my ideas out, my mind quiets for a minute and I gain a sense of stable clarity. Most days though, the pure act of stopping frustrates the hell out of me. Pausing in the middle of an idea and closing my laptop leaves my mind spinning in a certain free-fall. Ideas come quick and fast and I grasp them, fidget with them for a second and discard them as new ideas rise to the surface. It’s amazing how the act of recording the thoughts my mind conceives can cause my mind to create new thoughts. Sort of like digging in a scrap heap I guess. As you unearth ideas you begin to see the edges of new ideas buried deep below. Ten minutes later and you’re deep in a hole of your own choosing, attempting to dig upwards. I was introduced to the ten minute ‘Morning Pages’ concept by a writer named Julia Cameron, but many others affirm its value. Lately I’ve been developing the concept in a new way. I still begin my day with a ten minute mind-dump, a meditative ritual to get the mind started, but as I wander through the day, if particular problems or ideas or thoughts come to mind that either worry or excite me, I use them as a fire-starter for a ten minute free-writing session. Same rules apply: timer on, notebook open, I begin. It’s wildly interesting to see how the physical act of expressing your thoughts in a digital/physical medium changes the way your mind toys with ideas. I find this act clarifies ideas, soothing my mind and also sparking my creativity. The pure act of distilling my mind’s ramblings into cogent thought stops them trundling around the back of my mind, interfering with my day.