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.