If you want to

New track. You can probably guess where I got the name from....

If you want to [mp3 - 9.73Mb]

If you want to write / of living alone

Dave recommended this book to me: "If you want to write" by Brenda Ueland. It reads a bit like a Californian self-help book in some ways, but says copyright 1938 on the inside cover, so maybe it's an influencer rather than an influenced.

"Now some people when they sit down to write and nothing special comes, no good ideas, are so frightened that they drink a lot of strong coffee to hurry them up, or smoke packages of cigarettes, or take drugs or get drunk. They do not know that good ideas come slowly, and that the more clear, tranquil and understimulated you are, the slower the ideas come but the better they are."

Now there's a perfect description of my creative process, when I was working part-time at Newham. I'd get up every morning and fret and drink a cafetiere of coffee, swear and shout at myself for being so slow and lazy - it hurt. It made me hate music. I was saying to myself, just as Ueland describes,

"'I have nothing to say and am of no importance and have no gift'; or 'the public doesn't want good stuff'"

"Both extremes, both lies".

I'm only a few pages in, but it already feels like a very important book.

Now, there is an emphasis on solitude so far - a recommendation that the artist should spend a lot of time alone. This just so happens to coincide with a decision I'm currently trying to make, about where I will move next: I need more space and I want a certain kind of space that is not necessarily compatible with living with others.

I'd like to start a discussion of the pros and cons of living alone - who has done it? Who knows what it's like? Would it be a crazy thing to do?

A quick update

Funny how the longer you leave it between blogs, the higher the standard you want for the few entries you do write. But I'll have to keep it short and sweet.

So...

I stopped smoking. (Had my last cigarette on the 29th July). Noticeable side-effects so far include waking up at odd hours, and being generally more cheery.

Had a couple of jams with some friends – that’s sounding okay – maybe I’ll post a clip if I can find a usable 3 minutes in the three hours we recorded on Sunday.

I’m heading to Berry Street Studio in September, just for a couple of self-funded days, to see how much effect the final proper mixing / mastering processes have on my tracks – it’s something I’ve wondered about for a while – if I was signed, how much better would my commercially-produced tracks sound than what they sound like when they come out of my bedroom? I'm working with Kevin Porée, who has a flash web site.