The following was written to accompany a (long since deleted) record release—reproduced here on a whim:
To say any piece of work began on the day its manufacture commenced is to ignore everything that had gone on before pen was put to paper, saw to timber, chisel to stone or brush to canvas; which is to say—the entire inspiration and reasoning behind the manifestation of the work itself.
The recording sessions that formed the basis for the album commenced on Monday, March 21, 2016.
The six songs recorded during these sessions were some of the number I’ve written over the past five years or so (I will go into the selection process later) but their genesis goes back much further than those handful of years, and in some cases further back than I care to remember; to conversations high and low-brow undertaken and overheard amidst the rough-and-tumble of other lives and times that couldn’t last in towns past through or lingered in with friends and lovers false and true; with shared and mixed emotions and tokens of longing (but never belonging); bets and chances taken over too many smokes and drinks in too many pubs and bars and jaded memories telescoping back to the days of faded backyard cricket stars who’s runs dried-up along with classic catches; to early mornings sneaking home in shoeless feet through kitchen doors with creaky, cranky latches. So many stories I can sing, but never tell.
It’s annoying even to myself sometimes when I find, or make, little rhythms and rhymes in my own and other people’s speech and thoughts, borrowed and fashioned into streams of words that sound like thoughts spoken and sung out loud. At other times I sit with pen or pencil in hand, staring at a piece of paper that might be any- thing from A3 to torn-apart cigarette packet lid, cursing my mind into action to no avail… or very little avail, which most times is worse than no avail. I think I’m a person who prefers complete avail, or absolutely no avail at all.
I want it so much to be a like a trade, or at least a craft – writing songs that is. I want it to be useful. I want to feel that there is some sort of mechanism – buttons, levers to push and pull like on a lathe or a drill-press or a milling machine.
That would make it seem more real, more useful. I want more than anything to be and feel useful, but time and again I end up writing songs instead.
So if it’s not work it must be art, or it might be, or might, I guess, become or be seen to be art, these songs. All these words and sounds shot through with rhythm and rhyme and coloured with harmony and melody and other people’s thoughts and emotions.
Art; that which may excite, amuse, embolden, accuse or arouse, but never, ever, ever be of any conceivable use whatsoever.
Art-ifice. That which is not real.
See?
It’s there, hidden just outside the boundaries of the written word, the truth of art is that it cannot be, it can only represent, imply, insinuate love, beauty, hate.
Purpose.
Waking at 3am to jot down some inane word-play and spend the following day pushing it and other words and phrases around on bits of paper using scrawls and lines with arrow-heads pointing to where this or that bit should be or needs to go.
A reason to spend everything I have in life and love and money and more on a record of the folly of my life which I hope someone will see as being of worth – if not of use.
Art is the thing that I make of all the bits that don’t fit the frame of my day-to-day existence.
Alas, reading back over what I’ve written I realise my original idea of restricting myself to a maximum half-page foreword was an excellent idea, ignored.
You would have done well to have skipped it altogether, however it seems you’ve managed to read this far so I can only promise that the rest of what is contained herein will be brighter, and breezier and all those other things that promotional material that accompanies EPs and CDs and DVDs should be.
Informative too, yes, I hope you are informed some, and entertained, and most of all encouraged to do something that you feel you should do but haven’t done – particularly something you can pour all your heart and soul into, but also something that will be of little or no use to yourself or anyone else. I think that’s best.
I will leave you (for now) with this:
I was once asked to give a talk on songwriting to some young students who were, if not aspiring songwriters, at least aspiring musicians. I’m told two of them never returned to the class. I still have no idea why.
B.H.
