Notes From the Studio: June

A piano interlude and "choosing your hard"

I think these monthly musings are always to going arrive 2/3 days into the following month, hope that’s ok :-).

I spoke about grief a lot in May, and then shared my song Bloodlines earlier this month and appreciated all the messages and words about that. We share so many experiences as humans and I do think the job of an artist is to pour those shared experiences through our own lens and then reflect that back out into the world for whoever is meant to find it. And it’s such a beautiful, almost indulgent, process to transmute pain into something else. I never take for granted that I get to do that, with or without applause, I have my own way of alchemising pain, and that feels like a privilege.

June was a lot, but then isn’t every month, week….day….a lot right now? For us all!? I literally have to remind myself to breeeeaaaaaatttthhhhe. My diaphragm actually seizes up sometimes in protest, I sort of contort to one side as my intercostals all spasm. More often than not some mindful breathing resolves 80% of it. People keep talking about breathwork to me, I’ve not really investigated it yet but maybe I should? (Also, I think my attempting to run (three times!)) this month, after basically zero cardiovascular exercise for months, may have caused my body to freak out completely (“What is she doing? This isn’t sedentary? Where’s the lovely sedentary gone?!))

So my June involved a week that held my daughter’s birthday, her party on the weekend, and my grandmothers funeral in between them. It was quite the emotional whiplash. Which was then immediately followed by what anyone in England can only describe as a disgusting heatwave. It was gross. Ugh. We actually had Australians living in the UK on social media saying ‘yeah guys, the heat in the UK is just awful, they’re not being dramatic’. Our country is not equipped. We don’t have air con like, anywhere. Except our cars I guess. We didn’t really have a breeze either, in a heatwave. We had almost a whole week of around 34-37C (94-100F?) sitting thick and heavy in the air and barely cooling overnight either. Everyone was angry and exhausted and just basically melting. Schools had to close! I took my kids to hang out in a supermarket for three hours because it had freezer aisles to keep it cool. May that weather never find us again. (It definitely will).

But music! I actually had some music output this month (hurrah!). I created a cover version of the song ‘Sweet Disposition’ by The Temper Trap for a submission to a publisher. It may lead to nothing, but doing these sorts of things is really helping me a) hone my sound and b) speed up my process! I’m realising if I actually want any form of meaningful income from music it will need to come from working with sync placements/production music, and then I can release my songs to the small but wonderful number of people who do care and not worry about the vanity metrics/ algorithm slavery required to ‘prove yourself’ as ‘real artist’.

It’s so funny, I have like, 16 listeners on Spotify (cos I’ve done absolutely nothing to drive any listeners for over a year) which probably looks….sad?….to an outsider. But I know that I made thousands of pounds in passive income from royalties last year from music that nobody even knows I made for TV libraries. Not to mention the upfront fees paid on making library music so far too. So, as a not-totally-stupid-person, why would I pour my (limited…) energy into trying to beg for Spotify streams of….uhhm….pennies, instead of investing that energy into trying to double or triple what’s actually already working? People love telling us there’s no money in music anymore. There is - it just ain’t on Spotify.

I’ve also been drawn back to my lovely piano this month. I was honoured to be asked to provide a piece of music to play at my grandmothers funeral. I chose a piece I wrote last year, which I recorded months ago and in full ‘me’ style…have done absolutely nothing with, it’s called ‘Butterflies’. I’m going to share it here, let me know if you close your eyes, if it feels like the right title. I’d love to know. I’m thinking I may create another pseudonym for piano pieces like these and start sharing them, again would love thoughts. I’ve swing back and forth on this for years, but I feel like its too different to my songs to sit under my songwriter work, but I’d also love to share these little pieces with the world. (I already have a pseudonym in mind too….!). Piece embedded below:

Meanwhile, times moves along, scarily fast (right? does anyone else feel that way, that time just…moves faster these days? Am I getting old and boring by saying that? I swear June felt like 8 days not 30….). I can’t quite believe we’re in July already and my goals for the year are, as always, still miles away. I don’t know if I overestimate how much I can actually do, or underestimate how much I have to do outside of what I want to do, or if actually the process or building a creative life means quite literally having the experience I am having.

I am going against the norm, so I don’t get to have normal comfort. I could go do a 9-5 job and climb the ranks of a predetermined career ladder. I could do that. It would be safe and secure and well compensated. I already did that, more than once. And it was unsustainable. So I have to remember that in not doing that, there is no predetermined route for me. There is no ‘do this for 18 months and you’ll get a promotion and a pay rise’, and there never ever will be. I don’t get to have that security, I don’t get to have that peace of mind. But what I do get is to experiment and try and grow and fail and learn and build my own path. I get to have the rare, beautiful, tiny moments of joy and fulfilment that come with building a life of design, brick by brick, against the tsunami of fear rising within me most days, all around juggling the rest of ‘real life’ and squeezing in unrealistic-yet-also-somehow-impossible-to-ignore dreams.

I heard someone once say ‘everything is hard, you just have to choose your hard’ and I think of it often. It’s hard to sit at a desk all day going insane with boredom over work you don’t care about, staring out the window at a world you can’t touch because you’re locked in an Excel document or a Powerpoint Presentation doing ‘busy work’. But it’s great to be paid monthly and have a nice holiday every year. It’s hard to not be paid a steady monthly wage and know you probably can’t have a holiday this year. But it’s great to be able to be in the world exactly as you want to and create things that only you can create, and try to prove to yourself and your children that there is another way. I’m trying to prove to my children that they don’t have to be locked in an office, or tied to a desk, building someone else’s kid’s trust fund for 40 years of their precious life. Man, every time I remember that, there is just no giving up.

I’ll wrap up there as this is a long one already. But to anyone else ‘choosing their hard’ and building a life that feels rather scary but with those priceless moments of amazing fulfilment and joy and validation…let’s keep at it!

I still stand by the fact the heatwave was totally gross. The sunsets it gave us, however, were beautiful. I got to do an amazing evening outdoor photoshoot (my ‘day job’) on one of the days, and had to grab this beautiful sky, thought I’d share :-)