Carlos

I was back at The Gather in Tarbert last night. I even got a cheer when I walked through the door. They were worried that, although there were a few poets and story tellers, there was not going to be any music, until I turned up.

Hey, I’ll take desperate cheers any day of the week!

Anyway, it turns out that I wasn’t the only musician there. Carlos from Chile was in the house. He borrowed my guitar and blew us away with his fantastic playing and passionate singing.

I joked at the start of my final set that my guitar would be dreaming of Carlos that night.

Turns out it was worse than I thought. I woke up this morning to find that the familiar warm curves of Taylor were not lying there beside as would be normal on a Saturday morning.

After a little bit of research I discovered that the little devil has run away with that silver fingered Latin American troubadour!

Honestly, I was really trying to play her better.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to love again.

ps. (Just for the record, no, Carlos didn’t steal my guitar. Parts of this story are made up).

Waking Grok

This black coffee tastes good.

It warms my hands on the outside and my stomach on the inside.

Though it is almost May, the weather here is still un-seasonally cold, and today, instead of the recent blue skies, a translucent grey is hanging over Campbeltown. A short while ago I walked through that veiling mist to the bus stop. My wife is on her way to visit relatives in the Netherlands.

Walking home, I see Grok, the giant who lies across the plateau summit of Beinn Ghuilean. He is shrouded in that same light. Like a bride in waiting, who doesn’t quite feel confident enough to be seen clearly.

I will always love Grok though. I hope someday to wake him from his slumber. In fact, I call my exercise routines Waking Grok. He symbolises to me the primal man inside, who is fighting to get out of my modern 21st Century skin.

There is no desperate reason today for me to move away from my computer, apart from the Siren Light Lure behind the open door of The Refrigerator. No impending need to hunt. Everything to hand.

But Grok keeps me moving. Keeps me healthy. And in truth, keeps me alive. He may be hidden by mist, and deep in slumber, but I am grateful that he exists.

In Order To Nail That Song

I have a song that I sang every morning for a number of months.

After that length of time you might have thought I’d have nailed it down.

It never felt like that.

It never felt like every single aspect of it….the delivery, the emotion, the technique, the honesty, the awareness, the in the moment-ness, the vocal, the guitar work…it really never felt like it ALL came together.

But I hear that some artists do allegedly “nail it’. I hear it even happens to them when an audience is there. I hear that the audience is aware of it too.

And I now suspect that the last thing I needed to do, In Order To Nail That Song, was to let go of the expectation of ever nailing it.

I have a feeling that is where the magic might lie.

A Challenge

So, I’ve been procrastinating.

I’d like to offer A Challenge.

I’m looking for two artists who read this blog, and either live close together, or know each other, or both, to take part in the “Two By Two” idea I mentioned here.

Work together to find two people (it could be yourselves) who would be prepared to host a music gig in their homes. It might take a while. There is no immediate rush, but a commitment would be great.

Myself and my friend Chris Annetts (I haven’t told him i’m writing this yet, but I know he’d be up for it) will travel to play our songs at those homes.

In return, we will do the same here in Kintyre. And you can come and play here.

I know some of you have already been here to play, and have been thinking along these lines anyway.

So let’s make it happen.

Perhaps we can start a trend.

How?

Here is a remarkable personal story from a series called How We Survive. It really puts a lot of things into perspective.

Or it should.

But how easily we forget. How easy to start looking at our own relatively minor issues, and feeling sorry for ourselves.

Why do we do that, in the light of other peoples much harder struggles? And does it help us get anywhere with our own battles?

Clearly not.

Like the remarkable lady in the story, we need to be able to learn to look at the bigger picture. Her summary of how she survived, is actually a good place to start to learn How? to thrive, when we can apply it in the privileged position of not having any life threatening situations to deal with.

Read the story. This advice comes backed by some serious authority.

“You get over your little self, then you get your instinct to work, then you get to connect with other people and then you achieve stuff.”

Alarming Alarm

On Saturday somebody told me that Putin has got submarines surrounding the coastline of Britain.

I was weirdly pleased that the news, whether it is fake, true, partially true, or complete and utter b’lox, didn’t disturb my equilibrium one iota, even though my informer wasn’t somebody who I thought of as being prone to bullshit.

There is nothing I can do to change the situation.

Of course terror can more easily get a hold if we have already experienced bad news that then led to bad experiences. Real life consequences undoubtedly colour our psychology. If I was Ukrainian, I might not be so blase, about what Putin was allegedly doing.

But still, even then… what if there really is nothing I can actually do about it?

Yesterday I got a more immediate shock when my mobile phone gave off an Alarming Alarm. If you’re British you may already have known that the government was going to do a practise “disaster warning” for everybody in the UK who doesn’t have their phone settings changed to prevent it. I don’t watch the news, so I didn’t know, and I hadn’t changed my settings.

I’ve changed them now.

What’s the point of letting other people dictate to us when, what and whom we should be afraid. Personally I’m quite capable of being a scaredy cat thank you very much. But I’m not getting into the habit of letting terror have a hold of me before something has actually happened to get that kind of adrenalin pumping.

And the good news is that there were no periscopes visible in Campbeltown Loch on my regular early morning Submarine Spotting amble.

More Like Ourselves

“Why didn’t they pick me?”

Well, for all sorts of reasons. Personal ones, reasonable ones, unreasonable ones, mood ones, timing ones, not yet time ones.

Maybe even lack of (enough) talent ones.

At the end of the day it simply wasn’t for them. Even though you gave it your very best shot. And it won’t be for most people who come across your “thing”.

But when we don’t get picked, when “they don’'t get me”, I don’t think that should lead us to try and become more like somebody else.

Quite the opposite. We should turn our faces to the wind.

And become More Like Ourselves.

THAT’S the trick

Putting off a nice thing until you’ve done a task.

I do that. It’s a trick that works.

But it still makes the task look like…well, a task.

Now, turning the task into a nice thing.

Well THAT’S the trick.

###intent It happened. And now the tent is up, the intent is to keep going for a week. And then carry on with the Friday’s.

The Intent

The Intention
Is to sleep in a tent tonight.
That’s The Intent.
The tension is palpable.
I always get nervous when I’m going to sleep
Outside
In the dark
On my own.

Do I sound like a scared little boy? Maybe I am one inside.

Partly I just don’t do it enough to become familiar and comfortable. The uncertainty breeds fear. That’s how it works with almost anything that makes us nervous or scared.

So, I have another intention.
To sleep outside in my tent on a Friday
Through the spring and the summer.
Whether in the garden, or out and about in Kintyre.
Get a habit going.

I’ve gotta help the little boy grow up.

And perhaps help the grown man to become a little boy.

Gannets

The Gannets were diving in numbers in Campbeltown Loch first thing this morning. It’s always a beautiful sight. And particularly now, after the avian flu that has devastated seabird populations.

They make quite a splash, even from a small distance, when they are all plunging down, like a flash of white torpedos.

I hope they recover fully.

Funnily enough, last Saturday I was at my Dad’s house in Newark, and we had lunch at a cafe called “Gannets”. Very nice it was too. But Newark is a long way from the sea by British standards. No fish on the menu.

I wonder why it got that name? And does it really matter?

We put a lot of stock on choosing names, but at the end of the day we don’t really judge anything, a person, a cafe, a bird, a band or a building, because of what it is called.

We value them because of what they add to our experience of living in the world.

Ya gotta love a boy named Sue.

Time Enough

Take the square root of infinity
Times by seven oceans of love
Then divide humanity
Add the wings of a dove
Take away sanity
And multiply everything
Everything
EVERYTHING
By the heavens above.

You will find
That there is not enough time
And there never will be
To make sense of it all.

But there is Time Enough

To make a cup of coffee
Kiss your lover
Walk into a storm
Drink from a mountain stream
Be helped by a stranger
Help a stranger
Amaze yourself by breathing every day
Sing a song
Read a book
Make friends with a pigeon
Be a friend to someone
Grieve
Laugh at silly things
Count sheep

And to start making something beautiful…

…that might never be finished.

Homework

Another confession.

I sometimes write a song to avoid doing something else. It’s a great excuse. It’s something creative. It’s the thing I’m good at, if I’m good at anything. There is a definite end product. How could time, for a songwriter, ever be wasted by writing a song?

But of course there are other things, which I find more difficult, and which take me out of my comfort zone. And need to be done. The biggest task I avoid is managing the mountain of creations that have been and gone.

Today I was tempted to write a song, I still am, in order to avoid archiving this very Homesong Blog that you are reading right now.

In my mind it feels like Homework more than Homesong work. But when I did the same task before, I quite enjoyed reading back and categorising my own work. So I"m going to embrace it. And that song will have to wait.

I’m sure I must be the only person who has this issue!?

Only Now

Only Now.

A theme I will constantly return to, if only to remind myself.

Only that thing which you or I are experiencing right at this second. The past has gone. It can’t touch us for good or bad. The memories of the past are just that. They come and they go, but even they are happening NOW, not then. They aren’t “Then”.

It’s the sounds, sights, smells, and sensations we experience now, as we write or read or do whatever we are doing, that really matter.

We can get distracted of course. Lost in thoughts that try to drag us away from the present. But those thoughts are ethereal too, even if they lead to a lot of the suffering we experience. But really, they have no control of us unless we let them.

Maybe sometimes we want to let them, thinking that suffering in our minds is some thing that we have to do. And maybe that is our experience right now, but does it have any value? Do we need to give it value? Does it benefit anyone?

All the time we are being presented with a smorgasbord of experience, laid out right out in front of us. Free of charge. Amazing things to see and hear and smell and feel. Even in a dark room with our eyes closed.

Maybe we choose to turn away from the opportunity. But there is only today in which to experience it. More than that. Only Now.

Why would we miss the opportunity?

Humaning Something

I tried to teach a parrot to sing Happy Birthday To You a few days ago. It was on a trip to an animal park with my Grandchildren.

The parrot was definitely trying. I could recognise 3 or for notes before I left him or her to practise alone.

Later on i was trying to teach a brand new song to family members for a singalong. Turns out that humans aren’t bad parrots either. The family picked things up quicker than the actual parrot.

Perhaps Parrots call the ability to copy sounds Humaning Something.

You just never know, do you?

The Habit Donkey

I am not a creature of habit.

The habits that I do follow are there in order to prevent me from drifting to the edge of the precipice, and plunging over the side of whatever it is in that far off unforeseen place.

I like to drift. I am a drifter. And drifting can be fun for a while. But the edge of the precipice is where my drifting would undoubtedly take me.

So I don’t begrudge HAVING to do some thing every day, every week, every month. Though, every day is undoubtedly the toughest. And, as you well know, I don’t always manage EVERY day.

But if I don’t, I have to get back on The Habit Donkey.

The Habit Donkey doesn’t like to get close to the precipice either. And that suits me very well thank you.

An Event

Events. They take an awful lot of planning, and they often have unpredictable outcomes. They create expectations, and those expectations are not alway met.

In fact there is a lot to be said for an organic, spontaneous, c’est la vie approach to life, whether in music, or family, or political, or personal spheres of existence. I personally much prefer that approach.

However, one thing that can be said for events. They create commitment. Often the people who are taking part, whether organisers or participators, really WANT to make it work. After the big build up it BETTER work.

Is it necessary to have An Event to create something special. I don’t think so. But, for better or worse, they are part of our lives, and we learn something about teamwork and living together when we hold them. We learn about optimism and hope. We learn about failure and success.

And when everybody commits, they can turn into something that is truly wonderful and remarkable.

Or at the very least, memorable.

Messing About

Yesterday I wrote a song with my daughter-in-law.

She didn’t know we were writing a song at the time. She was just messing about. Coming up with words that worked, and words that didn’t. Trying to express the experience of being away with family.

If you said to someone “WRITE A SONG!” they might well be intimidated if they had never done so before. Blimey, that’s something only people with The Gift do surely?

On the other hand: “Let’s mess about with words and music for a while”. That’s different isn’t it?

Well, no. It’s a part of the process. Messing About. That’s how all of us kids…..small, medium and large…..learn to make anything.

We were just playing. And then, all of a sudden, we’d made a song.

Time Out

Time Out.

What’s that about? As though it were possible to pause time.

Time out is still part of the game, not separate from it.

Perhaps we simply need to remind ourselves not to rush. To stand back and look at things as though from the outside looking in.

But Time Out is really just “Time” by another name.

The Second Floor Spiral Staircase Shuffle

Yesterday I travelled
Up, up, up.
Then down, down, down.
Then up, up, up.
Round and around.
Then down, down, down.
Then up, up, up.
Around and around
Then down, down, down.
At least a thousand times
Clearing a flat out
In Campbeltown

So if you really wanna feel
Your Achilles Heel
And you think your tough, well
Come and do it
Yeah, step right to it
Do the Second Floor Spiral Staircase Shuffle

That’s all I’ve got for today folks. I’m DONE!

Comedy Songs

Yesterday Mr Chris Annetts, friend, fellow music maker, homesong4lifer and generally good fella, turned 60 years old, and he came round for a wee celebration. It’s great to have him around in my life. I’m grateful for a friendship like this.

Chris is a fantastic songwriter in general, who honed his skills writing lots of musicals, including award winners, in the past before I got to know him. But he has got one particular songwriting knack which is more unusual but very much needed, I would say, in these sometimes anxiety inducing times. He writes superb Comedy Songs. That’s not an easy skill to master, but he’s up there with the best in my opinion.

I’ve been on the same bill with him a few times, and he’s a tough act to follow, or precede, or to anyway try to compete with, when he’s got people pretty much crying with laughter.

But one thing I’ll tell you for sure.

I definitely don’t even try without a hard hat.