It’s important to rest a little, and I’ve been doing that more than often lately, practising how to take a nap, and not feel obliged to be always productive. I do feel better when I’ve achieved something in a day, but I’m getting used to that ‘thing’ being a very small step, forwards or even backwards. Learning has flow, things need to bend and break and knit together again in new ways, and the time inbetween times can be as valuable as the time spent ‘on’ the thing. I’ve been working on some new songs, still writing in small chunks and moving them around, within the same song and sometimes between songs, so adding a chunk in an unrelated key to a new song, and spending the time learning how to get in and out of this new tonality. I’m imagining a painter who wakes up from their productive nap, and continues painting with one palette on completely the wrong painting, how do you proceed to make this work, without throwing something away. Some of this may never see the light of day, but colour theory is interesting, huh?

Today I’m thinking about presenting some songs live that I wrote for the band, as a solo act, and my process when I wrote these. I think not being an expert pianist has led me to make these tiny loops or grooves that I piece together. The relatively simple building blocks (some are, some aren’t) and their geometry guide me through the song, I don’t think in a true ‘band musician’ way about harmony, so this geometry can be irregular, and the shapes are different sizes, the chords wholly unconnected, but we can piece it together. I have a long long romance with Victorian tile. I think about the processes that make these, widely used in the closes of Scottish tenement housing, so ornate and beautiful. There is so much variation, depth and character, and true craftsmanship that stands the test of time. Some of the colour combinations are sensational. I feel it is the perfect example of something very ornately crafted but the overall outcome is a functional thing. People find them who look for them, and closer attention bears the reward.

Today’s thought is about those people and machines who talk the most loudly about what is fashionable and what is cool, and how this all adds up to a blur of noise that needlessly cramps our ability to do the work. The longer I’m around, the more I recognise that these notions don’t matter, and things come and go in surprising ways. However, they do have a sneaky habit of entering our subconscious and acting as a perfectly reasonable voice, even becoming your own voice, that prevents us from taking the true path of artistic discovery, going at a project boldly and without fear. Or maybe that’s just me, fear is a weird motivator. Today I’m leaning into the ugliest, un-coolest, most unfashionable sounds I possibly can to see what gems I can find.

Oh hi. I took this picture of many layers of paint when I was out on a walk. I think it’s more beautiful than anything I could possibly make myself, with all my skill and focus and attention to detail, makes me think of hydrangeas. Anyway at today’s desk, I’m thinking about how this beauty is only possible because over time, things have been removed. Working alone, and even working in the band, I work in layers. Maybe it’s partly just the systems I use to record and visualise it while I’m doing it, but they are all depicted in layers: You add bass layers, you have foundations, and then add more decorative additional layers on top these, and at 3am there are always more layers to be made in a semi conscious state using novelty instruments. So today my question is: What if you started with all of the possible material and your task was to take parts away, much as a stone carver would. Like just as a default assume that to have all the layers there at once is the baseline. And there is a place for that, I get it. But if you want to really see things, expose things, you’d need to be in the business of removing, not adding.

So while Leave No Shadow is on its way out into the world, here’s some stuff that came to mind this morning while I was doom-scrolling for dopamine.

Nothing is ever easy. I try not to focus too hard on the overwhelming enormity of it all because if I did, and as I am prone to panic, I would never get anything done. I just take one step every day, like anyone knows how to do with a new ‘habit-building’ life, and if anyone wants to liken the music business to an unhealthy addiction, have at it. The big picture is overwhelming, and, often unhelpful, as what you set out to do might turn into something entirely different by the time you’ve finished, so there is no sense in doggedness about how things should be. I feel like doing one thing on the journey is manageable. Some days I only manage to write one note. I work out a little corner of something, a tricky chord, and know that it is still progress. Some days I tidy my desk just to make the path clear. I reward myself with a sticker, seriously, you don’t work in education long before you realise the power of positive and specific praise.

Sometimes ‘writing what you don’t know’ is valid. What I mean here is trying, or as the toddlers would have it, ‘being a person’, and that means, for a short while, putting the very real and all-consuming fear to the side. Trying out stuff that reaches just beyond what you know. I play: sometimes I cut things up and re-order them, sometimes I reverse things, sometimes I repeat things beyond the point where I hear them any more and they become new again. I try instruments I cannot play. I try chords I do not understand. I fully wrote ‘Late Bloomer’ on this new record, AND FINISHED the full string arrangements before I really understood what key it was in, that’s the kind of confession that makes me feel vulnerable around certain people in certain quarters, but who is handing out the fucking stickers here? I am.

I’ve always needed glasses, since school. I’m now at a complicated stage of glasses that growing up involves, I won’t go into it, it’s a fucking bore. However, I have always enjoyed the superpower of being able to see the world slightly blurred when I need to, and the world at the moment is very harsh and very real and wayyyy too close. I like the 70s textured glass of municipal buildings, net curtains in chintzy B&Bs, the wrong glasses, no glasses, clouded windows, that yellow sellophane they used to put in department store windows to stop things fading in the sun, swimming pool light, reflected light. My lyrics are detailed, but not too specific, a little distant, a little blurred, and I like listeners to find their own way in the music, and sometimes this takes a long time and repeated listens, and that’s ok. This is certainly not the way to write a hit, I get it.

Thinking today about ways to obscure the obvious, or take unexpected paths without being doggedly opaque? Blend and smudge a little, loosen up, free myself from the safety of structure, let a little fractured light into the municipal building.

Today I was thinking about how much of my life I’ve compartmentalised, kept a clear division between my art and music, day job and real work, work and family. Here is a beautiful piece of typing from a painting class I once took by Aileen Elliot when I was a teenager. I keep this on a clipboard above my desk – I have several clipboards, one for each collection of projects I’m working on, it keeps the scraps of paper that I’m prone to produce a bit more organised. It is one sheet of hand-typing about the basics of portraiture, and I read it way more than I paint, in fact, I haven’t painted a portrait in earnest since taking this class. It’s taken on a sort of talismanic form, it speaks of light, shadow, construction, form, logic, likeness, proportion and detail in a way that is useful and works for me, as much as any music text I’ve ever read. The last line reads:

“Remember again to blend in exessive detail at the end of each sitting.”

Such great advice for the overworked, a reminder to let things bleed, and blur into each other, influence each other, like the magnets of your life-compartments.