On Mess The backyard is a mess, all pot plants lined up in rows with good intentions, lovingly planted and then abandoned at the first sight of some other distraction. I garden like I do everything else in life: in short sprints, tackled over a week of high motivation and high spirits. Then a day off in bed, or a day where someone asks me to do something else and every project is abandoned to wilt and wither on its own. I have a period where I’m remarkably good at growing mint. I know, it’s a weed that will literally grow anywhere and take over any garden, but I check it obsessively everyday, noting its growth and the little spidery leaf patterns feathering out across the clay pot I found in hard rubbish last year. Then I forget about the mint too and the next time I glance at it as I shuffle past, it has been devoured by a family of snails that hug plumply to the inside rim of the pot, sleeping throughout the day and sliding in ecstasy upon my minty leaves at night. I prise each snail off the pot individually with a slight sucking sound and throw them over the neighbour’s fence. Continue reading “On Mess”
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.
On Life Balance The year pulls into its last couple of stops with a screech and a scream of brakes. I’ve felt a build up of pressure, beginning somewhere around March and building building building non-stop till now. It’s been a frantic year of juggling a million commitments and a billion other things that I’ve wanted to do instead. The balance has been totally off, I’ve neglected most of the important things in favour of whatever has wandered into my vision and I’m excited to now finally have the space and time and energy to put towards the things that need it. I’ve been dwelling on the idea of ‘holding space’. The term has been popping up a lot recently, first in a therapy context where one person commits their full attention/energy/consciousness to another’s needs. It has also popped up around various hippie festivals and, more recently, jazz gigs. I’ve been examining the idea of holding space for yourself and wondering what that looks like to me on a daily basis. An interesting aspect of growing older is slowly getting more in touch with myself, recognising both aspects of my own psyche that I’ve probably always known but never physically acknowledged and things that I haven’t realised about myself that are slowly bubbling to the surface. I recognise that I’m highly driven, very self-motivated and excited about being included in other people’s projects, and that this means I often over commit. So to hold space for myself I need to first create space in my life and then attempt to inhabit it. This is good in theory but so so hard in practice as the loudest parts of my personality are firing “go go go, got to be involved, got to be acknowledged”, whilst somewhere in the background the introvert me is whispering “hey, why don’t you take a year off and disappear into a book”. The healthiest option is obviously to combine these two aspects and live a fulfilling life of moderation but instead I veer wildly between the two. Every year around this time I disappear into a ‘book coma’, where I pull about twenty books off the bookshelf and lie in bed for a week, refusing to engage with the world. Notable book comas in my life include my teenage years where I read all seven Harry Potter books in seven days and last year where I read three notoriously dark books (Eggshell Skull, Normal People and No Friend But The Mountain) in a yurt on the South Island of New Zealand and then collapsed in a heap of despair. This all ties back into my childhood where I used to practice a form of escapism by reading and re-reading three of Enid Blyton’s kids mystery thrillers and imagine rolling green hills and doorsteps of bread covered in lashings of butter while peering out the window at the warm dusty streets of Yemen. Suffice it to say, once I start reading a book I find it very hard to stop until the book is complete and I compensate by speed reading and neglecting the outside world. If I allow myself to read when something important is occurring in life, the important thing gets ignored. But if I don’t let myself read I get sucked into an introvert’s nightmare of constant outward attention and no introspection. Turns out the human existence is complex hey? My most recent idea is to replace social media with book reading, so every time I think about checking Facebook or Instagram I instead read a page of Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands (which I got to via Eric Hansen’s Motoring with Mohammed, the next book I’m interested in is Lawrence of Arabia’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I’m slowly making my way back through a particular examination of the world’s largest expanse of sand, Rub’ Al Khali from the white European point of view). The idea is good in practice but I tend to check social media first thing in the morning and this week I skipped both breakfast and my morning shower and was almost late to the last day of school because I was attempting to finish David Byrne’s brilliant book ‘How Music Works’. Not sure if the balance is right yet. Luckily, after tonight’s gig I have zero commitments until the end of Jan (other than a couple of thousand emails), so I can feel a book coma coming on, and it’s going to be a big one! I’ll tackle the life balance thing later.
On Tour Stories It’s day three of this two week solo tour and everything starts to gain clarity. It’s been a hectic start to the tour with three shows and around fifteen hours of driving. I’m feeling great emotionally, just tired and its starting to show in my daily routine, where every activity includes a little time for a power nap. So far I’ve napped before every show, napped roughly every three hours on the freeway, napped post-lunch, napped outside the library in Wagga (where I fell asleep in shade from the hot sun and woke to find bucketing hail). I’m getting remarkably good at closing my eyes, ticking off ten minutes and waking to a sense of peace. Think meditation but with a deeper dive than originally expected and occasional surfacing to find kids staring through the windows as I dribble down the steering wheel. I wonder if this insistent napping is a sign of something below the surface, maybe a general life exhaustion borne not from burning the candle at both ends but from tossing the entire thing into the bonfire of running a small business and playing music and teaching part-time and also trying to be a creative being. But no, that couldn’t be it and introspection is for introverts, and I’m touring solo so I push all introspective tendencies to the background. In normal life I don’t normally nap, although I often feel the urge. Tour life just allows me the freedom to succumb to it. Throw this into the mix of being an adult I guess. … I’ve come to realise that there’s a lot about touring that I love. Playing music is the main joy. Spreading music and practicing my live craft and experimenting with my songs in front of people. Sometimes it works and sometimes it fails, but even on the worst gigs I’m generally getting joy from it, even if it’s a post-show wry chuckle at what went wrong. Other touring loves include: exploring new places, eating out most nights of the week, delving into Australia’s thriving craft beer subculture (I’ve been tempted for a long time to do a ‘beers I’ve tasted’ list), listening to endless streams of driving music, and finding park benches to devour books and nap. But more than anything, it’s the people that I enjoy. I’ve got a small but growing network of people I have itinerant relationships with. People whose lives I dip into, borrow some anecdotes and important facts from and then disappear into the night. Over time these chance encounters re-emerge, the ‘emotional neural pathways’ (yes, I’ve been reading ‘Incognito’) get revisited and the bonds get stronger. There are people who I met ten years ago in some band that no longer exists who see I’m coming to town and shoot me a message to catch up. There are people who hang around after the gig and offer me a place to stay and music recommendations. There are people who send me messages weeks after I’ve been to town to carry on conversations we never completed. There are many people who I meet in once off encounters and may never see again, but the stories stick with me. Here’s a couple of anecdotes, borrowed from the ether. I’ve changed some details to save some reputations and possible make the stories more compelling, but at the heart of each is a kernel of truth spurred by a late night conversation. … “My parents only had me cause they didn’t want my sister to grow up alone.” A mumble from the bar amidst a literal pile of beer glasses. It’s closing time and the bar staff have piled all the empties in one long sopping line along the edge of the bar in an attempt to make him see that they want to close and go home, but he sits with a well-nursed pint clasped between both hands and eyes off the couple of stragglers who totter out the front door as I roll the last of my cables and throw them into my Bunnings bag. I hesitate to dive headfirst into a conversation which I assume will be a) laborious at this time of night when all I want to do is pack up, drive five minutes out of town and have a deep sleep in the nearby caravan park and b) rambling as his tongue is well greased by the copious beer I’ve seen him consuming throughout the night. But I’m a glutton for punishment and it’s been a quiet night and I haven’t talked to anyone beside bar staff and service station attendants in almost three days. So I pull up a bar stool, armed with the knowledge I can call the bar staff to attention if I want to bail on the conversation. You develop conversation deflection tools when you spend your life amidst people who either don’t take social cues or are just so excited by new conversational fodder that they’ll chew the ear off anything. It’s worse than I expect, a winding backroad ramble through some sixty years of life experience, beginning somewhere in the early 90s with a dubious career as a festival promoter (“I brought Nirvana to Australia man, that first Big Day Out was all my idea”) then wandering backwards to birth in Malta and a long boat ride at age three to Australia. Everything is tinged with a vague sense of sadness, and I wonder if it’s retrospect that’s making him sad or if he’s carried self-worth issues through from an early age. His opening comments make me suspect deep-seated worries inflicted upon him by external forces, and I understand it because worries bloom in the fertile fields of man’s mind. Without the capacity to pull the electric pulses from another’s brain and turn them into language, we rely entirely on what the other tells us through word and body language to determine what they think. It’s a flawed system, for who truly says what they’re thinking? Surely every thought is encircled in a ring of protective language, the edges sanded down and smoothed out before it is thrown into the world and allowed to take root in the soil of someone else’s expectations. At best, we almost express what we honestly believe and then rely on the person to take it at face value. At worst we obfuscate our thoughts, and the recipient confuses them again in their interpretation and we disappear into an ontological blackhole where all participants nod in agreement and walk away confused. We never actually discussed his relationship with his parents and his sister, but I start to see my ‘on tour’ role as less of an entertainer and more as an itinerant therapist (sure I’ll take your emotional baggage) and handyman (sure I’ll help you move the living room table). … She is an olive farmer. An award-winning olive farmer. I ask her, tongue in cheek, if she eats olives for every meal, and it turns out that yes, yes she does, and her recipe for Mediterranean scrambled eggs (think fluffy eggs interspersed with creamy fetta, halved cherry tomatoes and garlic olives on a floating bed of olive sourdough) is a neighbourhood hit. Her farm produces some six hundred thousand jars of olives a year and I imagine some modern day ‘Plain of Jars’ scenario where down a back road in rural Victoria there exists vast fields covered in glass jars and the local village kids run barefoot, slipping in streams of olive oil and sneaking handfuls of puckered, salted olives into their mouths between replenishing the nation’s stock of stone fruit. The reality is much more sanitary, an in-house bottling plant where all surface are sanitised multiple times a day and most of the process is automated. Imagine conveyor belts and hissing steam and vast quantities of freshly washed olives floating down stream to the olive pipping machine that gently punches each olive in the gut once, flicking the stone into an alternate life path where it leaves its fleshy covering to be soaked in brine and devoured amongst its own kind. The olive stones disappear into bins and are then crushed and tilled back into the earth to create fodder for the next generation, but recently new experiments with olive stones abound, from potential use as car fuel, a replacement material for plastic and as a cleansing agent amongst industrial machines. Man’s ingenuity abounds and where once we discarded piled olive pits we now delight in second use cases, waste reduction and further chances to monetize our industries. … “I put Don Burrows in a mine” he claims proudly, assuming we have a knowledge of who Don Burrows is, and why we’d want him underground. At first I assume it’s some word play on ‘burrow’ and ‘mine’ and underground semantics and maybe he’s functioning at some level of understanding much deeper than my own. But it turns out that Don Burrows is actually a renowned Australian jazz musician, and the mine was the Mt Lyell Mining and Railway Company. As part of the mine’s centenary celebrations back in 1994, Don Burrows and his band Moment’s Notice (assumably named after the Coltrane album) were dropped two kilometers down a mine shaft to perform a show. The show was turned into a subsequent live concert which can be ordered via your local library’s VHS rental service. Unfortunately all this information came to light months later via some internet sleuthing. In this current conversation he proclaims disbelief that we don’t know who Don Burrows is, and that we don’t know why he thought to put him down the mine in the first place. “How can you be an Australian musician and not know who Don Burrows is? If you don’t know your history how can you look to the future?” Relevant questions, but I’m a folk musician, and examining the careers of Australia’s mid-90s jazz clarinetists is not a current concern. Standing on the shoulders of giants, yes. Attempting to balance atop a revolving cast of the millions of musicians who have come before, not so much. He storms off in a huff, muttering about youngsters who don’t know their heritage and I’m touched by the depth of human existence. For this man, one of the cornerstones of his life’s achievement is that time he put a jazz band down a coal mine, and I get it. It’s a beautiful concept. It’s newsworthy. It’s a memory that a select group of people will carry throughout their entire lives. It’s the kind of ludicrous idea that I’d probably put together myself and I imagine myself, fifty years in the future, beleaguering the next generation of young musicians who don’t understand their history and don’t appreciate the ludicrousity that is man’s imagination. … I gather these stories like blind mice gather grain. Haphazardly. Unplannedly. Totally-without-meaningfully. Some days the pickings are slim and some days I’m hickory dickory docking my way into fertile food stores and delighting in the flood of stories that I coat my body and mind in. I’ve started to journal the stories I’m told on the road for while the human imagination is a wild and wonderful thing, the human memory is remarkably suspect and I tend to forget more beautiful anecdotes than I remember. I use these stories to springboard my own creativity: as song fodder, or anecdotal evidence, or even just as creative gristle to mentally chew over as I drive.
On Sparrow Song This was originally a Facebook post. Copied here for sentiment’s sake. It brings me great joy to share some new music. Click hear to listen. … When one of my primary school students asked me what this song was about (I showed them the live video in class and asked them to identify the instrumentation, tempo and mood, not sure if its a bad reflection on me that one of them identified Stephen Hornby‘s double bass as a banjo), another of the students blurted out… “did you want to be a bird when you were little too?” Gillian Welch tells us that we should never dictate to our audience what our music is about, after all without an audience, music is causeless. In essence, the audience is the key part that makes the music meaningful and who are we to decide what our audience sees in our lyrics/art/performance? So I had no choice but to say yes, and then we spent the last five minutes of class discussing what type of bird we would be if given a choice and then the bell rang and we went out to playtime. … Suffice it to say that I’ve never really dreamt of being a bird, but I understand the sentiment, and this song probably hints at some underground sense of escapism. Or maybe its a dissertation on the search for home amidst a shifting, shapeless 21st century multiculturalism. Or maybe I just saw a sparrow one day and wrote a song about it. … I found my first draft of the lyrics for this song, in my diary under the headline ’23/12/17′. I was interested to see that both the verses on this recorded version arrived fully-fledged in that first draft. The chorus was something entirely different and the bridge (probably one of the more interesting series of chords I’ve ever stumbled upon) didn’t exist. I used the word ‘autotelic’ in the original draft. I had to look up what the word means as I’d forgotten it completely. It didn’t make the final version, but now I’m wondering if it should have. … autotelic /???t?(?)?t?l?k/ (of an activity or a creative work) having an end or purpose in itself. … Big thanks to Lucy McKenzie-McHarg, Vinny Russell, Alexandra Keusch, Stephen Hornby and Damien Sutton for their musical expertise. … I’ll playing this song live with a full band. This Sunday, September 1st at The Wesley Anne.
On Mist I wake to an early morning mist. It’s Melbourne winter, and the mist is within my bedroom, rising from my lungs and dissipating in a cloud across the room. A house that has stood for sixty years lives with its foibles, and these particular foibles are finger-width cracks around the window frames, plywood walls that flap when the wind blows, and a gaping hole where someone leant a little too hard and the plywood cracked and disappeared in chunks into the wall itself. Combine these to find a house that holds no warmth and hides no sound, allowing the outside to permeate the deepest depths of its interior. We combat the cold with a massive gas-heater, the central point of the house. The house is built around the remnants of an actual wood oven, but this was removed in the 70s and replaced with a gas heater that still blows bright. It takes ten minutes to cough to life and then burns burns burns, turning imperceptible gas into invisible warmth. You lean against the heater at the beginning, a cup of tea grasped in hands to help the heat sink in, but after a couple of minutes you pull a chair a meter out to soak up the heat. Another twenty minutes finds the entire household gathered in the farthest extremities of the room, fighting against the searing warmth. That’s the perks of a gas heater designed with no temperature gauge but only a simple on and off switch. Unfortunately, the cold still subdues the rest of the house and we brave bed only when we’ve exhausted the ability to maintain conversation. My twenties were a round of cold sharehouses, bundling into three jumpers and a beanie to practice drums in gaping garages. My thirties ease the trend: moving to a centrally heated house, an almost airtight shed that quickly warms with the glow of a space heater that warps the wrap on my vintage drum shell and sizzles moisture against the windows. I step out from an early afternoon practice session to find fingers of mist flaking in the backyard before the house. … I have a love of mist, and today it hits me that this love is hardwired, tied somewhere into my genetic makeup as a remnant from my ancestry. Two generations back was Northern Ireland and I delve into my own wistful remembrances of visiting the Cliffs of Moher (not Northern Ireland, but my closest experience). Scattered groups of tourists clicking their way through the fog, trying to get an iconic photo of sea swept shorelines between the mist and the crowds. Buses crowd the anteroom road that skirts the cliff-face and I stand rosy-faced and raincoat-clad amidst a place I’ve never identified with, but which clearly identifies me in language and skin colour and woolen jumper heritage. I missed the chance to talk through childhood with my Grandpa but the romantic in me ties history into fantasy and Belfast sticks in my memory as a place to live and love and leave. I follow the fault lines back farther through supposed Celtic history and tribes who scattered through rain soaked hills and eked out a living amidst the peat. All of human history has been pushing for new horizons from the earliest of man, and my particular tribe has done its share of chasing new vistas (interesting how the word ‘tribe’ has re-emerged amongst the 21st century internet zeitgeist). This mist has permeated all of my memories. … I feel an ache when the mists roll in, driving me to walk home from the bar down the road. In summer this walk is languid, slow steps unslurried by a desire to arrive home, for the thirty degree Australian summer turns this sixty-year-old house into a heat-box. Why is it that the one time our homes trap the heat is when we sweat and stir beneath sticky sheets and long for sleep? But this is winter, and the mist cloaks the street in both directions. We walk briskly, bundled against the cold, clutching each other for warmth and stability. Little did she realise my late night plans included a twenty minute walk, so she wore the cute heels that buoy her body to an almost tenable height but are completely unsuited to carrying her from one place to another. … I’ve stumbled home amidst the mist in countries all across the world. The mist of Yemen’s highlands, sweeping in across terraced coffee plantations. This is the purest coffee in the world, built from hardy plants that relish the cold mountain air. Farmers who have lived generation by generation in the same little village in the same little tribe for the last two thousand years, have farmed the same coffee plants on the same terraces built by their great great great grandparents. The idea of ‘eking’ out a living in its purest form resides here amongst these people. We set-up camp along one of the larger terraces, a group of scattered white expats in pitied plastic tents while the locals live in stone houses built in Roman times and maintained by hand ever since. Late night downpours emanate from above and we flee the tents to shelter in a stone-circled goat shed among the local livestock. The mist of Kenya’s Rift Valley where the year’s two seasons (wet and dry) alternate with frightening regularity. Over night the shift comes and you wake to torrential rain: weeks and weeks of torrential rain where the red soil slips and slides and swells into a red river that slowly washes down stream. Everything is caked in the mud of my youth, and we return to the dorm to find nineteen pairs of shoes under the porch overhang. This is the time of year to play rugby (the grass grows better in the wet), and the Junior team traipse out to the bus twice a week, riding to other towns to foe other teams of boys who fight dirty. They arrive home with black eyes and stomach scratches and talk of fields turned into swimming pools, and holes near goal lines where one boy was held under water for almost a minute by members of the rival scrum. When the rains finally stop, the mist settles in and with it comes hordes of flying termites. Tiny ant-sized bodies with four long wings, they flap and flutter their way in through the window my room-mate left open and we arrive home to find several thousand infesting the hallway. A simple solution from a boy born here, he pulls tennis rackets from beneath his bed and we spend a half hour smacking the termites out of the air to ground below. When hit, the wings come dislodged and fall featherlike, while the termite scurries for a shady crack in the wall. The joy continues, as the same boy sweeps handfuls of crawling termites into a dustpan and runs them to the kitchen at the end of the hall. He pours them into a frying pan coated in ghee and they sizzle and snap and taste a little like crispy chunks of bacon. The mist of Tasmania’s Forth, a town of four hundred people. We leave the pub and wander, mandolin in hand, towards the top of the hill. Ahead is darkest forest, behind are scattered street lights, so we turn and eye off what should be a beautiful view of Tasmania’s old growth, but is instead a sea of white. Walk in step through town looking for some entertainment, and finally stumble head-long into the misty lights of a hotel and realise it’s the same pub we’ve been playing at for the last three hours. And other mists remembered: Years spent living in Sunbury’s abandoned Insane Asylum. Early morning city mist in Yemen where the city sits eerily silent and government workers spray clouds of chemicals into the mist in an effort to defeat an oncoming scourge of mosquitoes. Glasgow mists and couch-surfing with uni students who take me to the fish and chip shop to sample a deep-fried Mars Bar. … sonder, noun: “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”
On Where I Began (part 2) If I got my musical ability from my mum (see part 1 here), then I got my entrepreneurial spirit from my dad. But which has served me better as an independent musician? … Many of the greatest musicians, the world-changing artists, the enduring inspirations that have shaped and defined the world we live in failed on the business front. One of my great loves, 1960s folk artist Nick Drake released a miniscule amount of music and gave up on life when it failed to become commercially successful. Passing away at the age of 26, his music would go on to inspire a generation of new artists and land on the Rolling Stones 500 greatest album list. This is an artist who despaired at selling a little over 3,000 records during his time. The business side of his career was weak, but the artistic side was strong, and this is what resonates long after he passed away. … On the other end of the equation, art often falls to the wayside in favour of slick marketing and the five minute pop-star is born. I often wonder which of the ‘big stars’ of the 2000s will have enduring careers and which will fade away. For every Madonna of the 80s there are a hundred other chart-topping singles which disappeared into the past. In 50 years time will the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears be examined with the same love as the Beatles and the Beach Boys? (can I even make that comparison?!) … From earliest memory, Dad was one of the greatest proponents of the ‘work from home’ lifestyle. Countless houses in countless countries housed studies filled to the brim with papers. Filing cabinets overflowing with lifetimes of work. Dad constantly had numerous new projects on the go. Dad passed on the ‘new project’ gene to me and I took it gratefully, throwing myself into idea after idea with abandon. The beauty of working from home is plenty of time to throw at other ideas as they come up. In one monsoonal flood season the local park filled with chest high water. Dad (possibly spurred on by my brother) took the opportunity and turned it into the ‘Great Raft Race (episode 1)’ and hordes of neighbourhood kids watched on in awe as three white kids and a middle-aged man paddled around the park in a dinghy. It was brought to an abrupt end with the discovery of some downed power lines sparking merrily away. We paddled home to safety. Episode 2 of the Great Raft Race involved driving twenty jerry cans and a pile of lumber eight hours to the nearest beach (Al Hudaydah). Several rolls of duct tape and a prayer later we pushed out to sea, a three-hour roundtrip to a sunken oil tanker off the coast. The Great Raft Race turned into a yearly fixture of the ex-pat community, final tally at around five rafts and some twenty people headed out to sea. Outside of nautical pursuits, Dad has ostensibly spent his life as a teacher, with combined hats of researcher, author, creator and entrepreneur vying for space on his balding head (I inherited the balding gene too). I spent child-hood summers earning pocket-money by turning Dad’s learning materials into books, page by page photocopied and spiral bound into educational materials for the courses he created and taught. No topic was too strange, with books on teaching Arabic to English-speakers, on teaching English to Arabic-speakers (including one specific course on teaching English medical words to Arab doctors). Dad wrote picture books for mum to use to teach health education to rural village women (a big killer in third world countries is diarrhoea, turns out babies get dehydrated and die if the parents don’t know they have to keep watering them). Dad spent years developing and self-publishing books then, working through the faculty of a university, spent years creating books for other people to publish. He now ‘tours’ the world, not in a musical sense, but lecturing, running short courses, inspiring a new generation of thinkers. … As I grow older, my schedule shifts to match that of my dads. He developed the daily routine of an afternoon nap (in a country where the afternoon temperature can reach 40 degrees and the entire city closes shop and sleeps) and worked late into the night. I find my most productive hours begin at 10 pm, which doesn’t bode well for drum practice, but works well as writing and reflection time. … The ones who inspire me in a business sense are the people who get things done. The Elon Musks or Tim Ferriss or Steve Jobs or Dads of the world, where no idea is too crazy to throw your energy at. Without these people where would life be? So I sit at a nexus between the creative and business worlds. I love the entrepreneurial aspect of music. I love creating business ideas, starting projects, pulling people in new ways and seeing what the combinations create. I love the beginning of an idea, where everything is so vague and new that you can push in any direction and make growth. I love sketching out ideas and seeing the possibilities that lie within. But I also love creating music. I love fleshing out lyric ideas, putting them into context against a groove with a melody and underpinning them with harmony. I love performing these parts and seeing what resonates with people. I love the visceral movement that comes from placing two notes a certain distance apart from each other and repeating repeating repeating until you have a groove. … I close with a quote from Ed Catmull, author of Creativity Inc and founder of Pixar: “Many of us have a romantic idea about how creativity happens: A lone visionary conceives of a film or a product in a flash of insight. Then that visionary leads a team of people through hardship to finally deliver on that great promise. The truth is, this isn’t my experience at all. I’ve known many people I consider to be creative geniuses, and not just at Pixar and Disney, yet I can’t remember a single one who could articulate exactly what this vision was that they were striving for when they started. In my experience, creative people discover and realize their visions over time and through dedicated, protracted struggle. In that way, creativity is more like a marathon than a sprint. You have to pace yourself. I’m often asked to predict what the future of computer animation will look like, and I try my best to come up with a thoughtful answer. But the fact is, just as our directors lack a clear picture of what their embryonic movies will grow up to be, I can’t envision how our technical future will unfold because it doesn’t exist yet. As we forge ahead, while we imagine what might be, we must rely on our guiding principles, our intentions, and our goals—not on being able to see and react to what’s coming before it happens. My old friend from the University of Utah, Alan Kay—Apple’s chief scientist and the man who introduced me to Steve Jobs—expressed it well when he said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”