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 Sunsets It’s been a year of pretty sunsets, spread across a hundred different places. I’d love to say I make a habit of taking time to watch the sun set, pausing as it dips below the horizon, but the reality is that the only times I catch it in the act are when someone else points it out to me. Too often my attention is drawn towards the humdrum daily thoughts that flood my mind as I’m lost within the confines of human habitation. The sunsets that have stood out this year have been enjoyed in the company of others and have spanned the entire year, starting in late January performing on the South Island of New Zealand at Luminate Festival with Hello Tut Tut. The festival was a booze-free, meat-free affair, six whole days spent in luxurious presentness (mostly deep within a book if I have to be honest) and embracing heavy beats whilst meeting musicians from as far afield as Denmark, the US and Brunswick. I observed the sunset from a luxury yurt in the artist’s camp and then wandered to the site office to ask for a spare sleeping bag to weather the five degree night. By the third night I’d reconnoitred four spare sleeping bags and was sleeping in a veritable pile of duck down. These sunsets were spent on a vast plain in the midst of a state park, thousands of eyes turned North West to salute the sun as it disappears into the forest above the doof stage. I went to Wilson’s Prom in November with a group of ex-housemates who excitedly plan hiking trips a couple of times a year and then complain their way through the actual days of walking. The celebrations start when the trekking finishes and we line up at the pub for a hearty meal and a beer. Then we talk about how much we enjoy hiking and how we can’t wait to do it again. When hiking, the sunset signals the end of activity, for we rely on light to function and to fight our fears (on a side note, a wombat ate a hole in our tent this trip). We eat slimy packages of dehydrated food in the dusk-light as the bushland fades to peace and retire to bed by eight pm. I spent a particularly pretty sunset with my partner in Queenstown, New Zealand. It was the midst of winter and the towering mountains that surround the town caught the sun high up in the air as it set in giant shadows across the opposing mountainsides. It took several hours for the darkness to descend on the town and we wandered through the crisp clear air with a flurry of tourists and night shopping. The local ice-cream shop was a surprise hit, a trendy establishment with a line of almost a hundred patrons spiralling out the door and around the corner. A flock of ski-jacketed youngsters blow warm air into their gloves, waiting for scoops of rum and raisin while an enterprising busker attempts to pull the change from the wallets with pre-prepared dance moves against a pre-prepared beat. There was the sunset that I drove into for almost two hours on my journey home from my Spring tour. I’d made the dubious choice of leaving Yamba in NSW at eight am and attempting to drive as far as home as I could before stopping. I drove for fourteen hours and paused in Canberra for dinner, then decided to push on for the last six hours. By this point it was just past six o’clock and the sun was a hand-span above the horizon and I assumed it’d be gone soon. Instead it floated in my vision till almost eight, burning small glowing holes in my retinas and leaving a sunburnt strip between where my sunglasses end and my moustache begins. … My sixth grade science teacher told me that sunsets are more magnificent when the air is polluted, but of course it has to be some sort of sliding scale. Too much air pollution (ala Beijing, or Sydney circa December 2019) and the sun disappears completely, replaced by the orange wash of smog. Too little pollution and the sun is a perfect ball, slowly being lowered from its zenith to the encroaching horizon. Shades of The Cyrkle’s Red Rubber Ball abound, a song that had always felt wildly familiar, something about the cadence of the words just tickles a certain itch. Of course I found out recently it was written by Paul Simon, which makes total sense. … In some inane attempt to get in touch with my childhood I’ve been reading Wilfred Thesiger’s book ‘Arabian Sands’, a meandering memoir of his time spent exploring Rub Al Khali (The Empty Quarter, a massive desert that covers parts of Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen and The Emirates) in the 1940s. While many parts of the book feel problematic, I’m attempting to view it through a lens of the time period (remnants of European Colonialism, Capitalism and WWII conspire in an uneasy mix). One particular passage stood out: “When moved, Arabs break easily into poetry. I have heard a lad spontaneously describe in verse some grazing which he had just found: he was giving natural expression to his feelings. But while they are very sensible of the beauty of their language, they are curiously blind to natural beauty. The colour of the sands, a sunset, the moon reflected in the sea: such things leave them unmoved. They are not even noticed. When we returned from Mughshin the year before, and had come out from the void of the desert on to the crest of the Qarra range and looked again on green trees and grass and the loveliness of the mountains, I turned to one of them and said, ‘Isn’t that beautiful!’ He looked, and looked again, and then said uncomprehending, ‘no – it is rotten bad grazing.’ ” I wonder at this reality, for I feel I often do the same, albeit from a viewpoint of heedless distraction rather than a pragmatic sensibility. But isn’t that always the way? We live in the shadow of the moment, relying on occasionally being shaken out of comfort zone to notice the beauty that lies around us.
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 Creative Process Today I spend thirty minutes wandering the backyard with a microphone. I’ve attached three mic leads together to the recording interface in my shed and cables crisscross the lawn in streams, knotting and twirling through the grass we haven’t mowed since summer. I’m meant to be putting the finishing touches on my new single. It’s been a protracted effort: four months of recording and deleting and recording and deleting, because I’m remarkably self critical of my own voice. Not in a constructive way, I’m not constantly striving for a better performance, instead I’m a destructive critic, listening back and deleting everything I hate. And I hate everything I’ve made. So this single that should have been finished back in April has wandered unfinished into the start of August and now sits in a pile of its own filth, dreaming of the past and wondering why it wasn’t released in the press release for the tour I started last week. This is why I find myself wandering the backyard with a clump of cables and a condenser mic. I realised early on in the process that it’d be impossible to cut all outside noise out of my recording. The traffic rumbles under everything I sing, shaking the walls of the asbestos shed I call my studio. For a brief period I recorded at night to eliminate car noise, but a family of possums tap and squeak in the roof and thumping on the wall only served to make them scratch louder and leave little droplets of poo that fall through a widening crack in the ceiling when my drum practice shakes the shed. Meanwhile our neighbour sneezes absurdly loudly in the backyard and a tree full of birds chatter throughout. My recordings are a literal snapshot of this period of my life, background noises individual to today inscribe themselves into the background of my recordings. Rather than fight it I embrace it with open arms, recording the birds as a background soundscape to frame my songs. … This current song is ‘Sparrow Song’, a Tallest Man on Earth inspired ode to nature, and it seems pertinent that I adorn the edges of the song with bird sound. I did a class at university on semiotics, the signifier and the signified. There were days spent on Wagner’s leitmotifs and the augmented 6th chord and I have a jumbled mess of notebooks from that term where I scribbled business ideas and venue phone numbers around the edges of pages filled with nonsense copied verbatim from the slides our lecturer Tavis (no R, thanks parents) read from. It seems when the learning gets hard my mind wanders, and when my mind wanders it’s the business aspect that takes hold. I’ve always loved the planning side of everything, but now I wish I’d spent a little more time engaging in 17th century semiotics to make this whole thought pattern a little more circular. The artists I love take these extra-musical ideas and make them commonplace. So obvious and so included that they don’t pull in your attention until you listen again and again and again and wonder at man’s ability to dwell in tiny details. Robin Pecknold does this well, tying lyric and melody and harmony and linear motion into a web that hides the millions of instruments tucked away behind the machinery (listen to his Song Exploder podcast for a great example). I used to think that the creative process was this hidden spark mechanism that clicked in to gear occasionally and created something amazing. But the more I delve into others work, the more it seems that its just a lot of hard work to make something magnificent. Paul Simon talks about his creative process and how there was a period in his early 20s were the songs just flowed, and then the next 50 years were a deliberate process where he sat down and worked and worked and worked to make it good. Interesting to note that his arguably most celebrated work Graceland involved a recording process where he recorded all the instrumental parts in South Africa, took them back to New York and spent a year writing songs to suit their vibe. Then he had to cut the original recordings into parts, pasting them back together in a new arrangement to suit the songs he’d written. All in all a remarkably laborious process, but the results speak for themselves. … So who am I subvert the creative process, hoping to twist it into a seamless system where ideas spark up regularly to create intriguing masterpieces to shift the social psyche and bring joy to the masses? Instead I’ll spend the afternoon wandering the backyard with a microphone and a head full of ideas, hoping that what I make resonates with people. … As an aside… I will be releasing this song this month, if you’re interested in hearing it when it comes out, please sign up here!
On Touring New Zealand I wake on an alpaca farm twenty minutes out of Dunedin. It’s a homestay on the far south of New Zealand’s south island, an odd return to an unexplored part of my family history. Outside, a thin old growth forest grows stunted, pushing up against gravity’s interminable pull. The trees here grow at slant, aiming towards the sun, but the rolling hills and bleak cliffs are a poor place for trees, and the brusque winds gust off from the raging ocean and barrel down the hill towards the homestead. Greg is short and smiley. His dad built the place and he was born here and has lived here ever since. At some point he bought a small herd of alpacas as a business investment (as you do), with the idea that he would breed pedigree alpacas. Now he just has a field with six alpacas in it, and an electric fence that has to be turned off before we wander around the field. We attempt to photograph each other petting the alpacas for Instagram. He tells us the alpacas are ‘just like cats, sometimes they like the attention and sometimes they don’t’, and suggests we crouch down and the alpacas might come close. So we crouch down for a bit as the alpacas munch through the mist and wee on the wet grass. … The local area is a smörgåsbord of introduced species and failed attempts to address the ensuing fall-out. Three people so far have told us of the possum plague that has engulfed the islands. Australia’s native brush-tailed possums were transplanted in the 1800s to fuel the world’s growing fur trade and promptly grew morbidly obese on the fat of the land, literally doubling in size and growing long luscious hair that was a boon to the fur traders. Little did they realise that two hundred years later there would be eighty million feral possums in a country of four million people, a much larger population than the second highest, sheep at thirty million. A selection of deer were dropped here around the same time, and fled far and wide, multiplying in number until local hunters started to close in. Now the south island has a small thriving deer farming industry and an elusive supply of North American moose that were considered extinct in the 1930s but somehow still stoke up occasional tracks and hair samples. The national park of Fiordland is a wild and wonderful place, prone to hiding mysteries and bodies and vistas of astounding beauty. … It’s been ten days of wonder. First a flurried rush of days, burst from plane to airport to hire car to gig to bed to new town to gig to bed to new town. And then languid lazy days spent driving south, stopping at any sight that caught the eye. Owlcatraz, a pun worth stopping for, turned into a bird sanctuary, unfortunately closed today for a family event. A half hour down the road, a stream of sails setting forth across a parking lot turned into ‘Blo-karts’, literal go-karts powered by the wind. They roll silently in wide circles across some vaguely pre-determined route, while a kindly gentleman attempts to explain us the mechanism. ‘oh no, there’s no brakes, you just have to lean in to the wind to stop’. I’ve had vast experience with brakeless vehicles before (skateboards, childhood billy-karts, my first car), and these karts don’t appear to need a nearby fence to stop their forward motion. On south to Queenstown, to find our fill of artifice. Ski-town dreams, built around tourist shops that stay open till ten pm, flogging an endless supply of overpriced t-shirts, precious stones and sheep puppets. We swear off consumerism, and swear on to veganism, but I buy a pair of possum merino socks anyway because they are truly silky, and local possums are a pest and besides I need a new pair of thick socks to fill these oversized boots. … We tour the local vineyards, and drink our fill of pinot noir. The first tasting is quiet and awkward, scattered couples sipping and spitting glasses while an Argentinean sommelier makes small talk, but by the second winery we are all friends and the third winery brings in-depth knowledge of each others lives, and a request for my CD on Spotify as background music, and suddenly I’m here, sitting in a tin-shed on the arse-end of the world, listening to myself on record while we down glasses of wine that frankly all taste the same and talk about the unhappiness that is life and how we should all move back to Britain because life was so much better then. And I question myself, small dark questions that get bigger and bolder and build on the horizon in growing waves. You can see the swell building. You can feel that this question is going to be a big one, and maybe you should jump ship and dive down below before it engulfs you, but suddenly its here and you’re here and I’m here, and we have to think through our opinions and face the reality that at some point you have to start taking responsibility for who you are and what you’re doing. It’s a wonderful space to be in. First you worry and weave all the worries together. Maybe I’m not enough. Maybe the way I express myself isn’t healthy. Or maybe what I’ve said is the true me and you won’t like it. But instead you grasp my responses and think through them, and respond in-kind. It’s like I’ve taken woven worries and willed them into a life raft, and we stand on this set of watery woven worries and float and float and float. And as much as you know everything might pull apart and you could get flung into the water below, its kind of ok, because this is life and you’re in it with someone you love and the heady enthusiasm of youth is enough to pull you through it. … Thanks for reading. If you got this far have a squizz at this? Unreleased music, consider it a reward for persisting through my ramblings!
On Worry Two nights ago I woke at 2 am. It’s a fairly regular occurrence, and normally I toss and turn for a couple minutes then drift back to sleep. Sometimes I get up and wander the house before returning to bed. Occasionally I dip into my latest book for half an hour until sleep slides through the back of mind and tugs my eyelids downwards. We have a new couch in our spare room, liberated from a lady in Preston who ‘wanted it to go to a good home rather than land fill’. It’s not particularly new (it came replete with stains reminiscent of a well-loved life, the wrinkles we gather through a life well lived), its not particularly comfortable (‘hard as a rock’ was one quote), but it was free and we’re saving the planet, one uncomfortable stained couch at a time. It also creaks slightly when you shift your weight. So imagine me: sleepless, wrapped in a sleeping bag, sideways on a slightly creaking couch, reading a book on copyright reform. After mindlessly flipping the same three pages for twenty minutes, I close my book and allow my mind to drift. I’ve become aware over the last several weeks that there are some issues I keep coming back to, and rather than resolving them, I’ve pushed them down into that back part of my mind, the part that only works when I’m incredibly bored or asleep. I’ll admit that I don’t think I’ve been bored since around 2008 (symptoms of a busy life, and the smart phone revolution), so my mind doesn’t get much time to work through the issues I choose to ignore. It’s somewhat similar to the computer at my old workplace that no-one turned off for seven years (actually), and when someone accidently plugged the toaster in to the same power socket as a hair dyer, the building’s fuse flipped. When we flipped it back on, the computer attempted to restart itself, but being four versions of an operating system out of date, and having never had a security update it attempted to download 600 gigabytes of data to a 100 gig hard drive. We left it chugging away for two weeks and finally put it out of its misery, sending it to the repair guy who gutted it and put a brand new computer into the old metal box. Same old body, brand new mind, some slight foibles. The main negative was we lost some seven years worth of scanned documents (it was ostensibly my job to re-scan all these documents, but I quit shortly after to begin a career as a jazz drummer). … So what am I dwelling on, and how do I protect myself from allowing it to overload me? Where’s the reset button for the human mind? Are there effective ways to regain healthy sleep patterns? I find my biggest sense of solace in a little diary that sits by my bedside. I’ve perfected the art of picking it up, scrambling for the pen that always finds its way to the floor below and shuffling in darkness out the door and down the hall to the spare room in silence. Flip the lights and begin to write. It takes pages of fluff to get to the crux of the issue. And the issue is never the same. But as I flip in daylight through my night-time journal I find the same issues re-appearing, re-creating themselves in different guises, sliding themselves from the hidden cracks in the back of my mind and through my head to my eyelids where they force themselves into consciousness and force my eyelids open and force my awareness to engage with them. Writing them down helps. My conscious mind knows I can engage with them later if they physically exist in the world. Writing them down also gives me scope to scoff at past Nathan’s worries. Like the worry I had in 2011 that I’d pissed off a friend who wasn’t returning my calls (turns out he’d dropped his phone into a toilet and spent two weeks living on vegemite sandwiches to save up the $200 needed to buy a third hand iPhone 3). Or the worry that I can’t play drums (turns out that I can play drums, but comparing yourself to others is a quick trip to an unsatisfied destination). Or years of worry that I might occasionally suffer from insomnia. You know, just casual stuff. Drinking wine with friends helps. There’s a beautiful space, generally one or two wines in where you gain the ability to download your worries on to other people. Sort of like the Matrix, without the technology or karate. Heck, you can probably do it without the wine at all, it’s the friends bit that’s truly effective, but man is good at making tools to suit every occasion, and wine suits this scenario. Exercise absolutely helps. It’s probably the most effective method of dealing with worries, but hardest of all to implement, because it requires putting on running shoes and that’s often a bridge too far. If only putting on shoes was as easy as opening a new Google Chrome tab to watch Youtube. … In the end I wrote down three big ideas that had been worrying me for the last couple of weeks. I woke up today and one of them had silently resolved itself. No input from me, it just untangled its knots and appeared in my inbox. Not sure if there’s a lesson here. … And heeeere’s some Bjork. Ps. If anyone needs a couch to crash on, we have one. 😉