On What We Want from Life In another part of my life I work with children. All ages from five to eighteen. It’s interesting to see little people grow up, become big people at age twelve and then suddenly devolve into little people again. Life as a big fish in a little pond matures you, but beginning high school drops you into a wide flowing river where everyone gets jostled and jumbled and unceremoniously dumped into the sea. We might cry salty tears but the world itself is salty and no-one really cares. Not much moral to this story. … I talk with eighteen year old boys about their goals, their ambitions, their loves and hates and worries. One wants to be me. Most days even I want to be me. But is that enough for someone else to aspire to? Am I enough of a goal? He pesters me, looking for the secrets that make up my fabric. Where did I grow up? What did I want to do? How did I get here? How much do I earn? Am I happy? All great questions, but my responses feel trite in this ever-flowing river that make up my life. … I don’t feel like my childhood has affected my profession. Sure, its affected my personality, and my worldview, the way I interact with people, the things that I love and hate. But has it made me a better musician? Maybe it gave me interesting stories to tell through music. But as a drummer the story I tell is of rhythm, and while the childhood rhythms of Africa still flow through my brain I don’t believe they appear in the way I play my music. As a lyricist I have a wealth of wild childhood stories that could be passed on through song. Instead I dwell on the mundanity (profundity? depends on perspective I guess) of winter loves and lost shoes and mans’ indelible impact on the earth. So my childhood fails to affect the practical nature of my music (and I am a most practical man). … Is it enough to choose someone who interests you and mold your life on theirs? I did the same at university: flitting and floating between a series of musical crushes. I’d borrow parts and portions from teachers and records and videos on Youtube, blending them together into myself. I do the same in my small business: finding the people above me who achieve ‘success’ as I see it and following their processes, stealing their email templates, asking them for advice. Indeed, human history is littered with admirable people and the people who aspire towards them. Religion itself as the main case in point, but the cult-like status of the Tim Ferris’s, Elon Musks and Joe Rogans of the world shows that a ‘higher purpose’ isn’t the sole requirement for a hero. … If we venture away from the human aspect of human nature, there lies a vast world of inspiration. We could devise a life built around accumulation. Accumulation of knowledge. Accumulation of wealth. Accumulation of experiences. Accumulation for accumulations sake, where I stockpile a warehouse of anything at all, just so I can show the world that I own it. We could endeavour to have the most of something, develop a status as the record holder for the fastest time or longest lap or biggest hoard. Surely this is where the Murdochs of the world take note. Accumulation of power as one of the oldest stories man knows. If we take Josephus at face value then the Pharisees were exponents of the power of religions’ hold on the common-folk and we can follow the thread back to the cradle of civilisation itself. … One last thought. Love. … So do I coach my young students to follow me, to build their lives around what they see of my life’s successes? Do I push them towards what interests them, whether that’s accumulation of knowledge or merely a safe life on a quarter block in the suburbs? Do I suggest they indulge their hedonistic desires and dive into the world of possibilities that presents at the arbitrary age of eighteen? It’s a slippery slope, one that no-one ever really prepared me for.
On finding inspiration I have to admit that some ninety percent of everything I create is stolen. … I’ve heard it said that you are an amalgamation of your five closest friends. You borrow bits from those you meet and recreate yourself as life goes on. Whilst we aren’t born as a pure blank slate (for surely there’s something that exists from the spark of life itself, right?), personality is a learned trait, a series of wavering paths that criss-cross into the human other people see. There are strong influences: boulders in the stream that shift your focus and push you out of the way, but there are also a myriad of others, weak pebbles that slowly wear you down and ease you in new directions. Underneath, a wild cross-current of emotions tints everything with shades of positivity (or negativity, depending on my energy levels). … So if my behaviours are a learned trait, a fusion of mixed messages from the thirty years that underpins my time on earth, my creative output epitomizes this. I’m constantly falling in love with ideas, stealing them and turning phrases that others create into works that I sheepishly call my own. At the heart of it surely that’s all that art is. A reconstruction of ideas. Miles borrowed from classical music and Dylan borrowed from Guthrie and the blues has influenced seemingly everything since 1908. We take the things we love and learn how they work. In the process we dismember them, stringing them out to dry, their innards pulled apart to facilitate greater extrospection. Sometimes these things we love survive the inquisition and live to fight another day, but often the process is enough to kill them. We cultivate the dead corpses and hope that enough tender love and performance craft can birth them back into the world as new compositions. This is how new genres are born. … What have I been stealing from recently? The main influences underpin everything. Nick Drake and Laura Marling and The Tallest Man on Earth are constants. Recently Ali Farka Toure makes an appearance. Van Morrison and Paul Kelly are mainstays, but I struggle to believe anyone would pick it in my music. Mostly though I’ve been borrowing from concepts. I’m struggling through writing a song called the Heat Death of the Universe, a folk expose on man’s need to dwell on the minutiae of life whilst ignoring the larger issues. I’m attempting to write a song for my friends and the scenes they belong in, or wish to belong in, or have been unhappily placed in by wider societal norms. I constantly write songs inspired by students: the drama of the five year old mind is cannon fodder for a three hour set of folk lyricism. … I’m collating ideas and concepts and lines and melodies and songs and free-form late night thoughts into a folder I’m affectionately calling “A Little Wilder”. It’ll be just like “We Were Wild”, but one step farther down the track. I’m planning a solo tour for the second half of the year, and the romantic streak in me has left a blank space of four days up near Dorrigo National Park. I’ve got a little tape recorder and a collection of semi-vintage mics and there’s a chance that I might have enough material ready to put it together into recorded format in the back of a van with the possums and gumtrees for company. Will it be good? Will I enjoy it? Is it something to look forward to? Who knows.