On Patience Night-time nappy changes are like trying to bag an ebullient octopus. His limbs multiply, his torso stretches out, he releases his siren call. He dips his heels into the mustard yellow pool in his nappy and merrily kicks it across the room, and while you reach over to grab a towel he happily fountains wee straight into the air, across the change table, into his own mouth. All the while he is screaming bloody murder. My boy was born with a strong set of lungs, and he will happily tell you how he feels. One friend likens it to an on/off switch. He doesn’t have the nuance to tell you what’s wrong, but by god will tell you something IS wrong, and once you’ve run through the laundry list of possible problems – does he require inputs or outputs? He turns off the alarm and leave you wondering which of the things you tried worked. … I thought having a baby would bring me patience. Continue reading “On Patience”
On Success An interesting conversation unfolded on social media over the last couple of days. A musician who has been around for a while and (from my perspective) has an established profile – is playing lots of gigs, doing interesting shows with awesome people, popping up on line-ups that I aspire to etc, made a post talking about feeling both busy and rejected by the local music community. It hit hard, because most of the comments were musicians who I look up to – all sharing the same sentiment. Strange that I find myself in the same category as musicians who play with Jessica Mauboy and Guy Sebastian, artists who’ve won ARIA and GRAMMY awards, bands who’ve played headline shows on overseas festivals. I’ve been thinking a lot this week on what ‘success’ looks like, as an artist who might just float along at this level for the rest of my life. This might be it – the pinnacle of my career releasing an album to 150 people in Melbourne then hitting the East Coast for a run of festival dates where we’re either on in the early afternoon before the audience starts moving, or on as a late night closing act after the headline act has played and most of the sensible people have gone home. I keep reminding myself that we’re lucky to be on festival line-ups at all. Continue reading “On Success”
On Imposter Syndrome I’m releasing another new EP next Friday! This one is with Gusto Gusto, the raucous instrumental dance band I started exactly two years ago this month. In two years we’ve gone from not existing to two national tours, sold-out shows in three states, slots at festivals around the country (Woodford Folk Festival, Peak Festival, Questival – a full medieval festival in a castle with hundreds of punters in capes and wizard hats), and releasing our debut EP last year. It’s been a pretty wild rush, taking a couple years of COVID induced stasis and launching it full-bore into a seven-piece non-stop party band. It’s been exhausting at times, mainly co-ordinating seven peoples calendars, but also a lot of fun, and now we have a second EP (recorded, mixed and mastered by myself) ready to go. If you want to support us, please come to the launch next week! With the release of new music comes the return of imposter syndrome. Continue reading “On Imposter Syndrome”
On Japanuary After almost three years spent at home, drinking beers solo by the BBQ in the back park and thinking wistfully of busier times, this last month made up for the years of inaction. It kicked off on Boxing Day with a two week, twelve date Gusto tour, followed by a blessed two days at home (mainly spent invoicing venues, tracking spreadsheets, attempting to scramble together lesson plans and wash off two weeks of grime). Then we flew to Japan. Japan’s been on the cards for a while. Facebook memories informs I went there exactly ten years ago with my friend Steve, but time and I have done a pretty good job of wiping most of those experiences away. There were a couple of key Japanese phrases lodged in the old memory bank, arigato - ‘thank you’, konichiwa – ‘hello’ and watashi wa baka na gaikokujin – ‘I’m a stupid foreigner’, as well as memories of Fuji-Q – an amusement park at the base of Mt Fuji that sports horrifying rollercoasters (enter my fear of heights) and a terrifying haunted house (enter my fear of everything else). There was a vague recollection that the ticket inspector on the shinkansen – bullet train would bow everytime he entered and exited a carriage (still true), and a lot of memories of sitting stark naked in an outdoor onsen – hot spring as snow powdered down around us, toasty bodies holding up frosty heads. Continue reading “On Japanuary”
On Ongoing Priorities I can feel the first breaths of summer. It’s been a long monotonous winter, another one to tie into last year’s where we thought it could never get worse. Turns out it could get worse, we could do the exact same thing again but without the novelty that got us through the first one. To be fair, I’ve been pretty happy this lockdown. I’ve got enough on my plate to keep the weeks rolling past. I’ve been exercising and eating well and spending enough time catching up with friends on the internet that I feel connected. I’ve been reading and listening to new music and doing practice, although not as much as I’d have liked to in hindsight. But that’s how it always is. Steve told me the other day that this might be it. This might the last month of lockdown passivity we might ever live through. We might never be given this much free time in our adult lives again. Continue reading “On Ongoing Priorities”
On the Ongoing Passing of Time I’ve been thinking about time, as these glorious days of full sunshine and warm breezes start to waft in. It’s been a mere blink of an eye since we were here last, twelve months ago. I’ve thought often of how time is tied to memories, memories are tied to actions, and actions are tied to the places we inhabit. As much as I’d love to recall thoughts I’ve had over the years, these thoughts are infinite, a galactic ticker-tape that clicks and clacks throughout my days. There’s no way to count the thoughts I’ve had, no way to categorize them, to neatly place them in to boxes. Sure, I can vaguely group them, ideas I have on music and reactions I have to people I meet, but thoughts are so ephemeral, blink and they’re swamped by the next wave of thoughts and so on until we die. Continue reading “On the Ongoing Passing of Time”
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 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.