Never Too Late (To Get Better)
Lesson for today, slowly being learned later in life by yours truly. And passed on to you, in case you happen to be as thick as me:
Don’t rush learning the technique.
It’s worth mastering something at each stage, no matter how long it takes. Once learnt good technique can save heaps of wasted time and increase confidence hugely. And I’m guessing that will apply whatever technique we are talking about.
And one other thing. It turns out that learning technique doesn’t have to be a drudge. The repetition can become a form of meditation. And the tiniest signs of improvement can be an adrenalin boost.
It’s never too late to get better. And getting better can be fun.
(I Think) I Know You’re Out There
This blog could be for anyone who is interested in reflections on life, original music, and building better communities.
But more specifically it’s for two kinds of people.
The first of these are singer-songwriters, like me, who are looking to find more, and better, live outlets and audiences to sing their songs too. I feel like I know this group of people quite well, but because they are like me in some respects doesn’t mean that we all have exactly the same wishes and requirements.
The second group is more of a mystery to me. It is the people who love music and also like the idea of hosting gigs in their homes, but aren’t sure what that might mean in practise.
In my years of talking about Homesong I’ve had many people tell me what a good idea is. But in all that time only one person has committed to the idea, and gone on, like me, to host Homesong gigs on a regular basis. A couple of others have put their toes in the water, so to speak, and tried it out.
I’m wanting to learn how to find more about these people, and specifically about their doubts, their fears, and their questions. Because I remain convinced that every community and neighbourhood has somebody who could enrich their own lives and those of people in their locality by hosting Homesong gigs.
The question remains: how to find those people and get them across the line and a part of the Homesong community?
Your input, support and help with this conundrum would be invaluable.
Band Life
Easier sometimes to do everything yourself. And help can seem unhelpful when it involves extra time and effort for the one being helped.
But we get a lopsided, and dangerous world when a few people insist on doing it all, and keep the hard to motivate masses out of the equation. Monopolies, dictatorships and undemocratic democracies are the ultimate outcomes of this in the wider world.
And at ground level we get miniature versions of the same. The sometimes well meaning little dictators of life who always know best.
“My band” instead of “Our band”.
We don’t have to let that happen. But it will if the rest of us don’t insist on taking responsibility for our own little piece of the equation.
Set List
As a performer, choosing a set list can be tough. Especially if, like me, your songs head off in all sorts of weird directions, with no common theme or style.
Do you mix it up? Or put together a group of songs that feel like they belong with each other? Do you wanna make ‘em laugh or cry. To entertain, or to make ‘em think. Do you wing it, and go in without any set list at all?
I haven’t got the final answer to any of these questions yet. There probably isn’t one.
The only thing to do really is … be brave, takes risks, experiment and find out in the doing.
Isn’t that how we get better at anything?
Live Is Best
There is a photo of my grandchildren above me as I write.
But it’s not them. Even that representation of them is different. They’ve grown. They’ve changed. And the circumstances have changed. They’ve got another little brother or sister on the way now.
Change is, as they say a constant. A photograph is only ever a digital memory. And a recording of a song is only really that too. A version of how something sounded, forever captured as a moment in time.
Live music, live anything, will always be a more fluid, more real thing than any representation we could hope to make of them. It’s why it would be far, far nicer to have my grandchildren actually in the room with me.
It’s why live music is the best.
Lose Yourself
One life time! One opportunity!
A multitude of mistakes?
A mountain of failure?
They’re the sign that we’re giving it our best shot. Nothing to be ashamed of when you lose yourself.
A Future Springtime
When the days start to get darker, towards the northerly end of this northern hemisphere, the sunrise is more welcome than normal.
The light has a special quality when darkness is prevalent.
And a song that reaches a heart weighed down by sadness brings hope of a future springtime.
Staying Small
I was listening to Tshering Tobgay the former prime minister of Bhutan speaking about his homeland. Like you do on a Saturday evening. He was talking about some of the ways in which his country, despite it’s small size and limited resources, had managed to become the only nation in the world with a carbon neutral footprint. In fact Bhutan is in credit.
That man sounded like the sort of person I’d want to be in charge of my nation. But I disagreed with him on one thing. He suggested that if a country like Bhutan could achieve these kind of changes, then how much easier should it be for bigger countries with more technical resources and wealth.
Yet the evidence shows that size and power can actually get in the way of real change.
Time and again the positive changes that happen in our world happen from unexpected places. From small nations and from humble, often poor, but highly motivated individuals and groups. Especially when they work together. And if we’re very lucky they manage to slowly get the big guys onboard, especially when those fellas realise that there is something in it for them.
Maybe size and power isn’t something to be sort after and envied. Perhaps that is just going to weigh us down and make us cumbersome at best, dangerous to others at worst.
And maybe we shouldn’t dismiss our own lack of strength or resources so quickly. Travelling light and staying small seems like a good idea in so many aspects of our lives. Not just for us, but for the world we live in.
Our Own Wee Thing
The wind and the rain are coming in with a vengeance. And something makes me think of Leonard Cohen and that voice which, even more so as he got older, reaches somewhere that other voices can’t. For me at least.
The combination of the voice, the music and the poetry. It can produce magic. A little piece of me always wished I sounded like Cohen.
Mostly we singer songwriters just have to make the most of the voice we’re given.
But whatever we’re given, great singers, great songs, and great songwriting can inspire us to make the most of our own wee thing.
Leaving Home
Like most people, I love holidays, and I particularly love travelling. The accepted idea is that we go away from home for a holiday and to rest from our work.
In fact on holiday anything new and unexpected is mildly stressful. We have to prepare for the journey. We have to work out slightly new patterns of living and doing things. We meet unknown people. We have to make strange decisions…what are we going to DO today? In effect we have to work a bit harder internally, when everything is different to normal.
Coming home, with it familiarity of place, people, things and routines, then becomes our rest. And of course we appreciate it all the more because of that.
We can probably never truly understand the value of home without leaving home.
Blue Skye
We’re just about to head back after a restful few days in a wee cottage on the Isle of Skye. A beautiful island with, ironically, very little of the sky visible during this particular stay. That scenario is not unheard of here, but it doesn’t stop the visitors coming back in droves.
On the islands of Britain we use ”Blue Sky” as a metaphor for things working out. Probably because there is very rarely a guarantee that we will get one in Britain.
But “things working out” is a very flexible phrase anyway. One that we can adapt as we go. Because often we have to, if we want to keep on going.
I like to see my own songwriting as an attempt to find the silver lining on a cloudy day. Some of the very best days of all can be those stormy ones, when the sun pops through for a few glorious moments.
(And this is for my friend Tom, who headed to Malaga as we were heading north. Definitely no jealousy on my part! ;-)
The Dialects Of Robins
The first bird I spoke to was a Robin.
It was in our garden in Nottingham, as a distraction from revising for exams, where I tried to whistle back the song of the resident red-breast.
Now it goes without saying that a Nottingham Robin speaks whatever the equivalent is of The Queen’s English in the Robin world. Robins come from Nottingham!
And that’s the Robinish that I was first familiar with.
But it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Robins, like humans, talk differently in different places. I was listening to a local songbird calling not long ago, here in Campbeltown, and I didn’t recognise the song until I saw the bird. Yep, it was a Robin.
How wonderful is that? Robin’s have dialects.
I love it when someone sings a cover song in their own style.
A Song Inside
It never even occurred to me to take music at school. I dropped out as soon as I could. I can’t remember a thing about my music lessons, except for a brief, messy period, attempting the cello. Otherwise it’s all a blank.
So how do I find myself here today, gaining my greatest pleasure from writing songs.
I don’t know precisely, except that I alway loved music. I just didn’t like a class called “music”. Something wrong there, I think.
I’m grateful that there are still teachers in my memory (particularly one English teacher called David Bennett) who rose above the constraints of an education system that seemed, and still seems, to drain the life, not always, but often, out of the very stuff that children were born to do.
Learning. Creating. And finding joy in doing so.
I hope my grandchildren hang on to their passion for life. I hope they discover their future sources of pleasure as they grow. I think they might just do that, and I’m sure that there are still teachers who rise above the constraints. But sadly I think all of this will be despite, and not because of, the school system.
Maybe that can change, and there are a lot of new challenges facing the educational world, and the wider world, that may force the issue. But we need to find a way to make 'that wonderful sounding phrase “child centred learning”, which has been around for a long while, become a reality and not merely an empty slogan.
Children aren’t empty vessels, needing to be filled with the Right Stuff that only we adults know about. They almost always have a song, a light or a purpose, already welling up inside of them. They just need a little encouraging support to nurture it, and a platform to let it shine.
A Mere Something
The holy grail of science is a Unified Theory Of Everything, and that one is going to be a slippery beast to catch.
Everything is a lot.
So far in their search those scientists have always had to settle for A Mere Something.
I’m going to keep that in mind when I’m practising my geetar.
You Never Heard THIS Beatles Story Before
Sorry, I meant Beetles. Easy mistake to make.
So, the other day, I went off the beaten track on my regular walk, and I saw a plastic bottle. In my ongoing quest for Sainthood I did my usual thing of going to pick it up, in order to remove it from the pristine forest, whilst calling down hell and damnation on whoever saw fit to drop it there in the first place.
On close inspection the bottle turned out to be Bath Creme - Peach - by Boots. You’ll have heard that Wild Bathing has become a thing recently, so that explains that, I suppose. Although it was a good way from the loch.
On closer inspection, I noticed a couple of beetles around the rim of that bottle (Bath Creme - Peach - by Boots). I couldn’t tell you what kind of beetles they were, but they had a beautiful blue sheen. They also appeared to be dead.
I picked up the bottle (Bath Creme - Peach - by Boots)and gave it a little shake to remove the two beetles. At which point a few more popped out. I kept on shaking, and more and more beetles, the exact same kind, kept popping out, until there was quite a pile of them on the ground in front of me. The whole bottle had been full of the things. One or two were actually still alive and had started crawling.
It was a weirder experience than it probably even sounds.
And my only explanation is that some of this particular beetle’s pheromones had been used in the production of the Bath Creme - Peach - by Boots. And the discarded bottle had attracted this mass of crazy love sick (presumably male) beetles who then became a lot sicker than they had bargained before.
Quite sad really.
And the moral of the story:
Perhaps consider The Beetles when you next feel the urge to smell differently on a hillside forest. Go Au Naturel or take that bloody plastic bottle home with you.
And as a reward for staying till the end, here are some very attractive musical pheromones -Strawberry - for your listening pleasure.
Be careful now.
Money For Nothing
Exciting news after yesterday’s blog everyone. OK, I was a little optimistic with my prediction, perhaps even greedy. But, anyway, I wasn’t too far out. My PRS earnings came in at £1.12. So the milky bars are on me!
Of course this ironic personal anecdote comes to you with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Most of us full-time -hobbyist-amateur songwriters do just have to smile about it all.
And then we go away and write another song. The joy of doing that remains the same, regardless.
Poor Returns on Songwriting…Or Not?
I just got a strange email.
It was from PRS. That’s the Performance Rights Society. They collect for money owed to artists on the copyright of songs and performance rights.
I’ve recorded songs for years and, until a couple of years ago, I would religiously register my work with them. I stopped, because I hadn’t seen a single penny. You hear that they only really bother chasing up the work of well known artists. I don’t know whether that’s true or not.
Anyway, I haven’t logged in to find out how much I’m owed yet. But I know the way these things work and I’m going to take a guess. Optimistically, I think I’m going to be receiving the princely sum of £3.72. You’ve got to think big in this game.
I’ll report back tomorrow.
Unless it’s millions, in which case my new secretary will report back.
Pints And A Bit Of Love
One of the reasons I became a Homesong believer was because the main hunting ground for singer/songwriters who wanted a venue to sing their songs, the pub and bars, had become the place for Karaoke and Cover Bands and drunken crowds wanting tunes by Springsteen, or Beyonce, or Coldplay or…someone else but you.
So it was a joy to meet Rab. He’s a local landlord of The Kinloch Bar here in Campbeltown, who has set up the lounge in his pub for the purpose of making it a place for local songwriters and performers. Turns out he’s had the vision for ages.
They’ve just started up on Wednesday nights, with a kind of extended open mic, where those who come along can play for a while. Speaking to him during the evening I was really encouraged by his enthusiasm, and the offer to come along and play my songs anytime I fancy.
Hopefully at some point he can make it pay for him, and maybe find a way of helping the artists share the benefits. For now it’s pints and a bit of love.
In a desert, sometimes that’s all we songwriters need.
To Care, Or Not To Care
Everybody hurts. Sometimes. That is so true someone should probably write a song on the subject.
The hurting happens because we care about something. It’s usually a good sign. Although, like anything in life, we can have too much of it.
We respond to the caring, we lessen our suffering, whether large or small, by acting. We do something that changes, or attempts to change, the thing we care about. Everything we do is in response to something we care about. From scratching an itch to walking the dog to writing a song to going to war.
Today, I’m writing this blog.
The easy life we sometimes crave, is actually only possible if we stop caring altogether. Hats Off to us for choosing to care.