On Gardens Charlotte Wood reminds me I have a garden. A derelict patch down the back of the house where I stacked four planters along the top of the Astroturf and enthusiastically grew silverbeet one year, supplanted it with a half-hearted attempt at zucchinis the second year and finally succumbed to beds of mint and oregano on the third. It’s not that I’m not a good gardener, a large part of it is the environment. The house shields the planters from sun for most of the year, the olive trees shields them from rain for the rest. The plants that thrive are the ones that don’t need sun or water. The other part is of course a lack of care. The busier I get the easier it is to sequester myself inside the house where there’s warmth and light and coffee, and a distinct lack of the pollen that sets off my spring hayfever. When I’m busy the garden is left to its own devices, and it does a good job of growing, not in rigid straight lines of easily accessible zucchinis, ripe for the dinner table, but more in a higgledy-piggledy explosion of weeds and oregano, woody knots that find their way through cracks in the side of the planter box and then dig down through the Astroturf to find Mother Earth. Continue reading “On Gardens”
On Low Stress Holidays I spend a lot of my time entertaining silly ideas, and this last one was one of my silliest. There’s a company that does campervan relocations. You get a free campervan, if you’re willing to drive it where the company wants it driven, and if you’re flexible so you can hit the dates they require. I’d been thinking about a holiday somewhere warm over the July school holidays, so when I looked on the website my first hope was a trip from Melbourne across the Nullarbor, up the west coast and ending in Broome. Nothing available, so I briefly entertained a four day jaunt from Hobart to Melbourne, ferry transport included. I realised that sleeping in a van in Tasmanian winter would be uncomfortable at best. Option three was a five day trip from Cairns to Brisbane, 19 hours of drive time along a stretch of coast I’ve never seen. I’ve done the Melbourne to Sydney jaunt at least thirty times over the last ten years, headed up to Brisbane ten times, gone so far as the Sunshine Coast, but never driven any higher up the coast. The company was also offering $250 in petrol vouchers which sweetened the deal, so I booked it in, and booked myself a flights from Melbourne to Cairns and a return from Brisbane to Melbourne. At this point I had no itinerary in mind and I was in the middle of a Gusto tour that was sapping all my admin head space. I outsourced the trip planning to ChatGPT. Continue reading “On Low Stress Holidays”
On The Snow We are at the snow. It is way too warm inside, we had to turn the heater off last night and crack open the window to let most of the warm air out, and even then most of the band was half-naked, lying on top of blankets. We arrived yesterday arvo, rolling out of bed at six am and driving eight hours through the mountains. I spent most of the drive reading my book, a biography of Leonard Cohen. We dropped the car off at Bullock’s Flat to catch the Skitube, a train that runs through a tunnel in the mountain. The train is decrepit, reminiscent of the old Connex trains of the early 2000s, plastic bucket seats with big scratch marks from generations of skier’s poles. The brochure tells us this train is a feat of Swiss engineering. At the top of the mountain we see glorious white slopes and streams of skiers drifting in rows. Some of them are standing, many of them are not. We meet the festival team who tell us the snow is actually pretty shit and the ski lifts aren’t running yet, so anyone who is skiing has to walk up the slope for each run. As we stand in the carpark the band stomp into the sloshy snow that steams on the tarmac. I’m over-dressed, wearing two jumpers and a jacket and sweating my arse off. Continue reading “On The Snow”
On Belonging I’ve spent the last week watching Wild Wild Country, the Netflix documentary about Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. I got there via a fairly odd route, hearing this song from one of my favourite artists Sufjan Stevens. A little digging into the lyrics reveals line such as: I’m on a path of love, I’m on a parrot Possess me with prayer on the bluff I’m on a task for God Entheogen, you lift me within Upanishad Pretty par for the course when you consider Sufjan’s back catalogue, but intriguing enough that I felt I should dig a little deeper. Googling Rajneesh brought me to Wikipedia and then on to Wild Wild Country, although I’m still not entirely sure what the connection is and why Sufjan is borrowing imagery from a 1980s Indian guru to spur his 2020 pop music. Anything can be a jumping off point for creativity I guess. Continue reading “On Belonging”
On the Disposable Nature of Music I’ve talked before about how I read voraciously, deep-diving into all-consuming worlds that supplant my reality for days and weeks and months at a time. As a child I spent most of the years between eight and fourteen in bed, books wedged against pillows to hold them in a comfortable reading position. My parents supported my reading addiction by carting around boxes and boxes of books from house to house, country to country, every time we moved. Each summer I’d read through everything on my shelves, then immediately read through them again. I’d borrow a book from a friend and read through it that night, then call them the next day asking for something new. On camping trips our family would cart around bags of books, mainly for me and Mum and Dad. My brother would be out fishing. So from an early age reading has been an addiction of sorts, and I know that when I start a good book, everything else in my life will suffer until its finished. That’s how I read all seven Harry Potter books in one seven day spell, shuffling around various positions in a one bedroom apartment to find comfort. This is not meant as a point of bravado but merely a demonstration of how poor my ability is to multi-task when I have a book in hand. Continue reading “On the Disposable Nature of Music”
On My Favourite Time of Year It’s my favourite time of year. The time when all the local households take things they no longer need and put them out on the street. It’s a strange aspect of Australia culture, officially known as ‘hard rubbish’, but every council area I’ve lived in for the last twelve years has embraced it wholeheartedly. My current council is Darebin, and my current house is in a steadfastly upper middle class area, so the quality of the goods people discard is second to none. Continue reading “On My Favourite Time of Year”
On Lucy New Music, this Friday… Link here: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/nathanpower/lucy Lucy inhabits a weird corner of my mind. She officially started life on April 8th, 2019 as an abstraction called ‘Empty Bar Blues’. She wasn’t a ‘blues song’ in any of the standard definitions (12 bar form, melody borrowed from the blues scale, call and response etc), but I’d just spent several weeks working with Year 5s on writing and performing blues songs and as part of that discussion we talked about how the blues can also characterise a mental state, and I had this inkling that I wanted to write a song around the experience of feeling the blues. This coincided with an odd intersection in my personal life where a good friend was going through a break-up and I started to piece together the ideas of feeling down and coming to terms with loving someone who no longer loves you. At first it felt a little trite to borrow from a friend’s misery to create my own art, but Lucy evolved quickly beyond being a ‘break-up song’ from my friend’s perspective into a meditation on time and my general hope for either a quick painless death or the ability to live forever suspended in the now. Anyone who has read any of my writing, or listened to any of my songs might notice that the underlying thread that ties nearly everything I create together is time. My first EP explored my fascination with seasons. The first song I wrote when I started my singer-songwriter phase in 2017 was called Springtime. Four of the five songs on my new record ‘The Hopeful Clutter’ deal with time either directly or esoterically. It should seem obvious that we all live in and around time but while some merely dabble at the edges, I’ve submerged myself so deeply at the bottom of it that I find myself sucking for air and staring up at the small circle of light that promises an elusive escape. I remember at around age thirteen I realised that I had found the secret to make time slip by faster than it ever had before. Where once I’d spent summers in languorous idleness, bored and longing for something to do beyond re-reading the same series of five books that I borrowed from our neighbour’s home library, I now found my days were sliding past like hours and my hours like minutes and minutes like seconds. I luxuriated in the idea that I could finally move beyond boredom and begin to experience life, little realising that the ever flickering fingers of time don’t stop, and once I’d opened Pandora’s ticking clock and peered into it’s depths I’d unleash the awareness that there’s no stopping, there’s no stopping, there’s no stopping. … Lucy borrowed a little from Dylan with the line ‘a shrine to love and theft’, a little from physics with a brief ode to carbon atoms and I tied her together with a nod to insomnia, another running theme on ‘The Hopeful Clutter’. She started a lot darker than the final recorded version, went even darker still (to the point I assumed I’d be getting worried calls from family and friends when they heard her), and then I reigned her in a little. There’s a certain joy in the macabre, but art can’t all be plague and pestilence. Lucy went through a couple of gender reveals and at one point had around seven verses, cut down to two for clarities’ sake. Some of her most poetic lines got lost on the cutting floor because they simply didn’t make sense in context, but “creativity is a hairy beast, you can always make new wigs off the prunings” (G. Mccoy). … Here she is, in her entirety. …. Lucy works an empty bar, hoping that he’ll show his face, Totters home alone, another night to waste, and I’m the one she calls when she gets home. She tries to fight the cobwebs off, with meditation, The gloom inside of her own creation, she says she’s better off alone. Set the table with the bones buried in the garden, Crumbling to dirt to dust to atoms made of carbon, No I, cant buy, any more time. It’s been weeks then months then years of daily distress, Sell the family home and with it all the mess, suppress the thoughts of you We’d love to slip away in sleep towards our deaths, Every dream comes out the same a shrine to love and theft, but still she dreams of you. Lucy loses beauty sleep, blames it on a fear she’ll fall to freedom, Chasing love or chasing wisdom, No time left for the bones thrown down in anger, we wait for the answer. Set the table with the bones buried in the garden, Crumbling to dirt to dust to atoms made of carbon, No I, cant buy, any more time.
On Birthdays Before you read on, I’d love you pre-save my new single Lucy. It’s out on Feb 28th. Pre-saving literally means Spotify will let you know when its out. That’s it! No money. No time. Just a chance to hear my new song as soon as it’s released. Link: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/nathanpower/lucy …. I’m experiencing existential dread. It’s a rare occurrence but it does pop up once a year like clockwork, always on the day of, or the day before my birthday. I can’t quite recall when this phenomenon started occurring but it’s been at least the last ten years, definitely since my 21st and quite likely since at least five years before that. If there’s one thing that scares me it’s the inexorable drifting of time, so much so that I’ve been reading Alan Burdick’s delightful book ‘Why Time Flies’ in an effort to slow time’s creep; funny how we use man’s one finite resource to examine man’s one finite resource. Lately the creep has started to become a jog and I fear I’ve left the summit of some unforeseen mountain and this jog will shift into a madcap helter skelter headlong tumble to the bottom. Of course that’s a little darker than it needs to be, for I’m in still in the prime of my young days, but it’s hard to shake the sinking feeling I get once a year when the month of February rolls around and the mystical goat-fish hybrid departs the sky for warmer pastures, leaving behind a youth with a large bucket of water and a desire to be kidnapped. Amateur astrologer I am not. Galactic sceptic is probably a better description. Not that I am sceptical of the galaxies, more that I’m sceptical of anything that smacks of voodoo, and indeed anything that works against man’s ability to self-determinate. Hence there are a vast array of things I’m sceptical of, including (but not limited to): the risks of getting cancer from microwaving Tupperware containers, any of the conspiracy theories about Bill Murray’s final words in Lost in Translation, treating anything at all with ‘essential oils’ (I get that they smell good, but surely if they were ‘essential’ the government would be putting them in the water), using single strokes when loosely played double strokes basically sound the same, and anyone on the internet who claims they’ve got a secret you can learn in five easy instalments of $9.99. I’m not really sure where I was going with this, but it’s worth slightly digressing to describe this particular brand of existential dread. It’s not really a ‘dread’ per se, more of a slight sinking in my stomach when I think about my birthday. As I get older I’m getting moderately better at thinking about myself (even if I tend to discount my own thoughts and never act on fixing my issues) and I think I’ve come to the realisation that while I like people making a fuss of me, I don’t necessarily like being the centre of attention (why am I a singer-songwriter? lol). So every year I’m striking this balance where I want people to adore me, but I don’t want it to be a perceptible thing, more of an unacknowledged elephant standing one room over and quietly trumpeting to itself. And in the midst of this existential stomach sinking I’m also dealing with the thought that I’m getting older and the one thing we can’t turn back is the ticking limbs of time and it all spins and spirals and sometimes get to a bit too much (which is odd because I’m a) generally quite emotionally resilient and b) happy with myself, this is one of the only things that trip me up… lets have three cheers for honesty). To combat this I’ve started to write myself a yearly letter on my birthday, talking general drivel that I think I’ll find interesting later on. It generally settles into a discussion of my mental state and the positives and negatives that I perceived in the year. This started four years ago and it seems like a relatively achievable habit, something that I’ll look back on in fifty years with some fondness. I’m growing more and more attached to the concept of recording my thoughts and feelings as I waft through this life. Without physical evidence I tend to discount entire swathes of my life and the medium I identify with most to capture an essence of today is the written word. I firmly believe the written word is man’s greatest achievement. As an interesting side-note, in 1991 the ‘Guinness Can Widget’, the small plastic ball that used to come in cans of Guinness and ensured a frothy head on your beer beat out the internet as the greatest technological invention of the last forty years. Something to be said about man’s priorities I guess. Invariably, as I write down my thoughts and feelings and fears of the years behind and the years to come, my existential dread starts to diminish. It’s still there, but rather than a bubbling sea of stress, it’s more like a little almond of agitation, something I can tuck into my pocket, or put behind a pot plant and forget about for a while. Funny that I find my mindfulness not in the active stilling of my mind, but in spilling out on the page all the hopeful clutter that inhabits me. This term ‘hopeful clutter’ is something that will start to make sense over the next couple of months I hope, culminating in the next phase of this project. I’ll leave you with an excerpt of Alan Burdick’s beautiful book: “We (or at least the rest of us) reach this boundary whenever we ponder the cosmic. We imagine by analogy and metaphor: that strange and vast thing is like this smaller, more familiar thing. The universe is a cathedral, a clockworks, an egg. But the parallels ultimately diverge; only an egg is an egg. Such analogies appeal precisely because they are tangible elements of the universe. As terms, they are self-contained—but they cannot contain the container that holds them. So it is with time. Whenever we talk about it, we do so in terms of something lesser. We find or lose time, like a set of keys; we save and spend it, like money. Time creeps, crawls, flies, flees, flows, and stands still; it is abundant or scarce; it weighs on us with palpable heft.”
On Newstead There’s an urgency in the air. A poignant warmth of energy amongst the streaming crowds that waft across each street, holding back the traffic, criss-crossing in groups that intersect and divide and combine as mothers push prams and kids beg fathers for ice-cream money and people accost friends they haven’t seen since the last festival. I’ve had a couple months off. Tied up in the day to day of finishing last year I neglected this thing that I love and it’s so good to be back. There was a point last year where I attended a glut of festivals, probably seven or eight in a couple of months, and I started to take it for granted. In the height of festival harvest feast I forgot what famine felt like, and how easy it is to slip in to the complacency of staying home to ‘finish off some work’ and ‘oh there’s always the next one’. This was a return and it felt particularly good. I spent the weekend at Newstead where I was working with Irish lads The Ocelots. It was mainly a catch up weekend: catching up with an array of amazing musicians, some who I’ve known for years and some who I’ve eyed off from afar with awe. Catching up with punters, many of whom are more rabid about music than the musicians themselves and count time in festival experiences: “…yeah I’ve seen Eric Bogle once a decade since the 1970s” . Catching up with memories of what my favourite festival performers do, and all the little moments that fill in the slots between them. There are the easy memories: stealing a moment to make half cooked pasta, seasoned with borrowed srirarcha in a footy oval camp kitchen. Leaving the festival to dive into the nearest body of water (not limited to: bluegrass pool parties at Newstead Live, an impromptu beach run at Illawarra Folk Festival, leaving Queenscliff to ‘surf’ at Bells Beach and then arriving back at stage sopping wet to perform, a particularly freezing river bath from Tanglewood where I stood shivering in ankle deep water hoping to wash off three days of red dust but not willing to attempt death by a thousand cuts, and of course diving into a defunct volcano at Tablelands Folk Fest). Resigning yourself to stolen moments of sleep, from the early morning tent sessions where sleep is stolen from you by the swarm of dawn galas, to the mid arvo nap where you steal sleep back under a tree in the ‘backstage greenroom’. Coating every moment is a swarm of sound. Different stages blast converging streams of noise and in between there are the Morris Dancers and roving groups of Bolivian Pan Pipe bands, all mixed up with traditional fiddle sessions and on street buskers. I remember one particularly enterprising family band at Bello Winter Fest where the family’s five children had been separated and each given their own little turf down a stretch of main street. The quality of music inevitably declined as you walked down the line, starting with a relatively capable teenage blues guitarist, descending through several fiddle players and a ukulele and finally ending on the star child, an adorably cute four year old girl excitedly banging a triangle in front of a large bucket full of money. You can draw your own parallels to the state of the music industry and what elicits the biggest emotional response. … Here are some particular moments I want to remember from Newstead 2020: Attendees to this festival love singing, and I participated in impromptu sing alongs at nearly every show I attended (I was amazed at the first show to hear audience members start singing along before they’d been prompted. By the last show I took it as assumed that you could just start singing once you’d learned a couple of words) from Kerryn Fields, Michael Waugh, Rich Davies, The Ocelots, Tuck Shop Ladies etc. A big shout-out goes to the lady who sat next to me at one show and created a new harmony for every single chorus of a song. She started (quite naturally) on the fifth, then jumped to the third on the second chorus. For the third chorus she was singing in unison an octave up and by the last chorus she was happily warbling a wavering falsetto that slid silkily over top of everything and vaguely sounded like a theremin. We found ourselves at the pub nearing midnight on Friday. The dying moments of Roger Federer’s Australian Open match were on the telly in the corner (fun fact, I served Federer a cheese toastie at the Players Cafe in 2008). I found myself pulled from conversation towards the glowing lights, and finally resigned myself to pulling up a chair and a pint to watch him take the match against Millman to overtime and then push point by point to a final victory as a crowd of thirty people yelled at the TV, high-fived each other and generally carried on. About two metres behind us was a fiddle session, where twelve musicians played pumping Irish fiddle tunes, getting louder and faster to carry over our hubbub. It culminated in Federer winning, the TV getting flipped off and everyone resuming quiet conversation as the fiddle session pulled to a close and the grumpy barman called last drinks. It only occurred to me later to ask one of the performers how long they’d played for that day (five hours straight since seven o’clock) and then to compare that with how long Federer’s match went for (four hours). How strange, that where one group of performers are lauded for their skills, plastered across front pages and celebrated for their endurance ability, another group fight and flurry to boost their volume over a crowd of drunk punters and play traditional music composed over a hundred years ago. I left the festival late on Sunday afternoon to drive home, and as I pulled out of town I mulled over the memories. The term ‘folk festival’ incites a certain mood, a vague feeling of acoustic guitars and warm beers in plastic cups and tents that collapse in the night, but there is so much more to it than that. As much as I love to classify everything I come in contact with, each festival is the sum of a million parts and while the basic building blocks might be the same (singer-songwriters, dusty halls, worried looking folkies rushing down the road to catch the next set) its hard to encapsulate exactly what each festival is and what makes it special. While a festival like Port Fairy is amazing for the sheer number of patrons (and the drawing power that gives them to get amazing international acts in) and Tablelands is amazing for the location (glorious green rainforests in amongst the hills of Queensland), I have to say Newstead is amazing for its sense of community. The people behind it are some of the best in the world, and that makes it a world-class festival.
On India I’m in India. Coughing my lungs out. I came down with something on the flight out of Melbourne and its been two days of searing headache, overheating body and gut-wracking coughs. Luckily we’re booked in to the second fanciest hotel in Cochin so I’ve spent the last 48 hours lying in the direct spray of the air-conditioner and ordering room service curry. On the first morning we call in a doctor from the local hospital. He arrives in a pair of plastic Crocs and a business shirt, accompanied by a moustachioed nurse in a neat blue one piece uniform who carries an oversize briefcase. The nurse puts the briefcase down on the bedside table and it pops open, spilling papers and medical implements across the floor. He picks a thermometer off the carpet, wipes it off on his sleeve and gestures for me to slip it into my armpit. The consultation is a comedy of misunderstandings. I’m new to India. New to the time-zone. New to the Indian head-wobble which answers every question. Are there any foods I should avoid? Wobble. Can I use the hotel pool? Wobble. Do I need any medicine? Wobble. Later I ask the hotel concierge what the head wobble means and he wobbles his head too. Mostly yes, sometimes maybe. The doctor writes down my weight as my age, then puzzles over how I can be seventy-one. We chuckle together when we realise the mistake, then I descend into a fit of coughing. The doctor prescribes me six different medications and I’m reminded of Yemeni childhood, where doctors visits are deemed successful based on how much medicine you take home and how impressive the medicine looks. Where I’d probably recover on my own with rest and fluid, it’s assumed that I’ve called the doctor because I want results and I’m left with paper bags full of legitimate horse-sized pills in florid colours: extract of ginseng and garlic plus antibiotics plus paracetamol plus a mysterious looking cough syrup that tastes lightly of tea and slides deliciously down my throat, coating everything in a viscosity that I cough up a couple minutes later. Along with the medicine I receive a stern list of instructions: no showers, no milk, no swimming, no cookies, no spicy foods, and an admonishment to only drink hot water for the next five days. The culmination of my treatment is when the nurse receives a phone call and disappears downstairs to reappear with a nebuliser – a smoking machine attached to a face mask that he straps to my face. Breathe deeper, he admonishes as I puff out small strands of smoke. We sit in a silent circle for twenty minutes until he appears satisfied and then puzzles the tangle of cables, medicines and papers back into his briefcase. … Getting to India itself was a comedy of sorts, from a wild sprints to the wrong gate at KL airport and an attempt to pull myself up straight and not cough as I show off my boarding pass. When I was seventeen I almost got detained in KL airport. It was a thirty-hour transit from Kenya to Australia as part of my final year of boarding school and I came down with the flu in the airport. I wandered into the in-airport medical centre to wrangle some Panadol and was seen by a kindly Malaysian nurse who told me if she referred me to the doctor I’d have to skip my next flight and stay in a hotel until I was well enough to fly. I backed out of the medical centre and disappeared into the throng of flyers browsing duty free. Indian immigration is a line of neatly coiffured moustachioed men seated in a row, making decrees on the plight of the foreigners before them. In a remarkably comfortable scenario each desk is fronted by a large lounge chair lifted straight from the 1970s and I laze back as my officer fills a stack of forms, questioning his colleague between every line. It’s a lackadaisical affair, made comical by the fact none of them seem to be working from the same playbook. Part of the process is scanning fingerprints and each officer approaches it differently. Mine accepts a thumbprint from each hand, while the guy next to me appears to be scanning both hands at once. A couple rows down the officer is standing up, leaning over the desk and physically pushing an old ladies’ fingers in to the machine, squishing them down with one hand and slapping his computer keyboard with the other. … An Indian man energetically taps my testicles with a metal detector. “Part of the job” he chuckles and stamps my boarding pass. He eyes me off as I step down from the wooden box all airport attendees are required to mount as they pass security clearance and then asks: “Australian?” I nod and he responds, “oh the fires, very sad, so many animals dead.” It’s a weird talking point, one that pops up constantly through this trip, from the hotel concierge to the taxi driver to the man who serves up steaming muttar paneer on our final dinner. At first I’m amazed: the news of the Australian bushfires is particularly current in India (cue giant billboards on the drive from Cochin airport depicting crying koalas and flaming trees), but it’s the loss of animal life that every conversation settles on. I wonder at the media landscape that pushes this part of the conversation to prominence. Maybe it’s the Hindu conception of the sacrality of life and the concept of losing millions of animal lives in one month of natural disaster seems to resonate. … Then its days of floating. Free from commitment. Free from worry. Free from the rigour and routine that flood my daily life. I can afford to float between an early lunch and a late dinner with no real plans. Everything is a brief taxi ride away and if you’re hungry on the way there’s delicious food adorning every street corner. There’s a beauty to the break in routine. There’s a beauty to the chaos of traffic where two lanes fit five streams of traffic. There’s a beauty to walking home each night to find the same white cow pulling rubbish from the same street side bin. There’s a beauty to the clamour and the brief moments of calm.