Notes from the Studio — May

On grief and life grinding to a halt

Well hello there.

It’s been a month since you last got an email from me. I don’t know about you but the intensity of my inbox makes me feel ill sometimes so maybe my very intermittent newsletters are a good thing…(?)

Oof. May. May felt like a month that happened to me rather than a month I actively participated in. I was super excited after April to keep the momentum going that I had built but life had other plans. So not much ‘studio’ talk in today’s post, but keeping my promise to round up each month honestly. Maybe someone will relate either way, as often seems to happen!

So May started off really well, I delivered my instrumental album to the music library, and I had my first ever podcast interview (me? whaaaat?) with the awesome Supernova Support which I loved doing (you can have a listen here if you’d like to hear me rant about the importance of women making their own music!). But things really took a turn and I ended up spending large parts of it in survival mode trying to navigate chronic pain, exhaustion, grief, family life, a school holiday, and (if I’m honest) outright despair that the ground beneath the music industry is shifting faster than any of us can process.

I found out that my maternal grandmother was likely in her last few weeks of life not long into May, and this brought up the usual intense emotions that losing any loved one does. For me, she was my last living grandparent, and also the one I spent the most time with in my life. She was my mother’s mother. It’s an inexplicable bond, no matter how you look at it. She had seven children and I’m the eldest grandchild of twenty-three cousins. The sheer volume of visitors she had in her final days was something truly moving. She was almost a 4 hour drive away from me but I knew I needed to go, and managed to find a day that week that I could drop everything and drive there, and ended up in a room with seven other family members (aunts, uncle, cousins). It was actually very beautiful, but also devastating. I've not been able to physically say goodbye to any of my other grandparents, so this was especially meaningful to me. After a few hours I kissed her sleeping face and told her I loved her and drove back home (another 4 hours) utterly exhausted. Two days later I woke to the news that she’d left this realm and I would never see her face or hear her voice again.

I don’t know if it was the exhaustion of motherhood (as always) alongside trying to earn money from the things that should be valued but that AI is increasingly destroying, whilst navigating the hell of hormones unleashed in a woman’s forties, and trialling food exclusions to reduce inflammation and/or the grief of losing my grandmother, but within a few hours of her death my body started burning in pain. Like, all over. From my ankles to my neck, it was just pain. My spine was on fire, my legs felt heavy and aching, there was sharp stabbing pains in hips, my rib cage…it was horrendous. It got to the point that the pain was around 80% of the pain of childbirth. I couldn’t find any position to alleviate the pain, painkillers took the edge off for an hour at most, so I just had to endure it.

So everything stopped. Everything HAD to stop. The universe has done this to me before. Because I never stop, I never want to give up, I never want let anyone down, I struggle to say no, and the only way to get me to stop is to literally stop me physically via pain in the body. To force my surrender.

By day three I was on the phone to a GP, who sounded very weary with my presumably ‘irrational’ pain experience. I know at this point that GPs cannot/will not help with much outside of prescribing antibiotics or antidepressants (oh, and trying to give you the coil, they loooove that coil) so it was me and my pain in my body (my ‘pain body’ perhaps, any Eckart Tolle readers here?) and I needed to fix myself on my own.

I have had enough bouts of chronic pain now to know that however real and debilitating, there is always a relief in a) surrendering to it and b) releasing fear about it. It's the last thing you want to hear when you’re in agony, but getting a hold of your psyche and calming the body down really does work. I managed to put on a Yoga Nidra meditation and focused on calming my racing heart and mind to allow my body to try to let go of whatever was causing it to spasm and ache and burn. To my intense relief, 30 minutes of meditation and relaxation gave me more respite than three days of taking painkillers had. I slowly regained control of my spirit and my mind and then my body started to calm down too. It took a few more days but I was able to walk again after about a week of being bedridden. Which beautifully coincided with my kids school holidays starting (you gotta laugh…)

So no music releases, no income generation and barely even touching my piano.

When your body doesn’t feel safe, when you’re in physical or emotional pain (no matter how much was may try to romanticise it as artists) in real pain creativity becomes a luxury rather than a refuge. So I just couldn't create. And then alongside all of that has been a growing sense of grief about the future of music generally.

Not music itself, because music will survive. Music is everything, it is language we all speak. It is sacred and healing and connecting and magical.

But, like many musicians, I’ve spent a lot of time this month staring at the AI-induced blackhole in front of me and wondering where all of this is heading. Wondering whether audiences even care if the voice they hear singing isn’t a real human. Wondering whether human-made work will become more valuable now or less. Wondering whether AI will be scoring all films and TV before we know it and just erasing an entire industry. Wondering whether we’re witnessing an evolution, a renaissance, a collapse, or maybe all of them simultaneously.

I don’t have any answers, of course. But May also stripped me of the energy to keep going or keep trying in the face of all that. Probably more the grief than anything else, but I was just emotionally exhausted and carrying the hopelessness that follows a loss, compounded by the endless news about AI artists blowing up on Spotify and why musicians are redundant now.

BUT….its not May anymore :-)

Despite the despair, the fear - the genuine, crippling fear - that my entire life’s work has been a total waste of energy because the goal posts haven’t just continually moved they’ve now been replaced with fucking holograms, I still keep coming back to the same thought: people have always needed stories and people have always needed connection. People have always needed evidence that another human being felt something and survived it. And that’s what songs give us.

So maybe that’s also why these little monthly blogs are worth doing, written by my strange human brain about my lived human experience of a month being totally flattened by grief and pain in a way that AI couldn’t ever experience, even if it could articulate it. And maybe thats why independent music will keep mattering, and will always find an audience of real, human, feeling, thinking people.

So no, May wasn’t a productive month ‘in the studio’. My plans remain…plans. I’ve not ‘executed’ or ‘boss moded’ anything. And my to-do list is frankly eating itself at this point.

But I’ve tuned in to myself, my limits, my pain, to my exhaustion, to my body and to my soul. Trying to trust and believe in the process, trying to remember that my worth is not measured by output. Trying to trust that creative seasons, like natural ones, are cyclical, things happen in waves, and there is no ‘clock’ I am up against.

Rest is not failure and recovery is not weak.

And perhaps the most important thing I did this month was just hold space for myself to move through something inexplicably painful, possibly life-changing, and profoundly sad.

June will have studio sessions and joy, I’m sure. And hopefully more posts because I did intend to do more than one monthly roundup!

I truly hope June is beautiful, fruitful, healing, peaceful month for every single one of you, and if it’s not, that you are able to give yourself grace to stop and rest if you need it. xx