Prog-rock birds & song developments
Back in Aotearoa where inspiration abounds.
I write to you from New Zealand where Tui’s swoop across the air singing complex melodies consisting of microtonal dips and polyrhythmic patterns that even I can’t tap out. I’m called back to my teenager years obsessing over snobby time signatures — discovering the hidden math behind music and the way it filled me with a smug amusement. I think about the person I am now. The space I occupy and how lucky I am to share it with these magical native birds. They are the greatest singers I know.
I’ve been slow to get a post out this week while I choose what feels most pertinent to write about. There’s so much I want to share and I get restless with an itchiness of words. Yet my best work is often born out of rest so I’m trying to move slowly and trust my community is here for what comes, when it comes. To give proper context here is my current pace:
There’s been a lot of time to think and I’m grateful to be finally unwinding.
Two albums in two years. Yes, it’s time to quieten down, clear the slate, set up for a new year and make room for new ideas, new songs and new lessons.
Some of you will remember when I first posted the sketch of a song called “Without Knowing” live from the halls of Newark Airport. I’ve been writing it off and on now for a couple of years. It’s become a haunting motif floating in and out of my awareness, teasing me with potential as I wait for the form to emerge.
When I sifted through my iPhone voice memos recently, it turns out I’ve been playing the song all over the world, making little recordings while I search for a new section in each new instrument I play it on.
If you’re a musician I’m sure you’ve experienced the joy of moving a song from guitar to piano to find the whole thing opening up into infinite new possibilities just from that simple shift in tone. The shift in story.
That singular story alive in every instrument.
The story of the hands that played it.
The story of the people who carried it into the recording studio—how they carried it, even. Was it through beads of sweat? With frustration? With excitement?
The story of mourners who wept at those very keys as they searched for some meaning in distant melodies that might help articulate the abstract, tragic feelings of longing or absence. Then of course, there are the hands that built it. Perhaps the most important influence of all.
The labour of man to create something for no other purpose than… beauty.
There’s something precious about the fumbling uncertainty of an early demo or a shaky voice memo tracking the first imprints of a path.
There’s a tenderness to following the writer in real time while they work out the chords or begin the first sketch that leads to a great work of art.
There’s a sacredness to witnessing inspiration as it’s happening.
Then there’s also the inevitable self consciousness that will eventually puncture the moment — the awareness one comes to when they realize they are not alone.
Below you will hear me working on that same song “Without Knowing,” in the living room of my brother in law. At the end, there’s a soft breaking of the trance — a scene change of sudden company — and I shake out from the dream.
The piano had such a charm. It was slightly out of tune, reaching for some sacred equilibrium, just as I was. In this recording, not much has changed from the version at Newark airport, there’s some hints of development and movement but right now it’s just rolling around in the mouth of play-time, digesting into my sonic bloodstream. But you can feel more-ness is right on the edge of being born…
As one might expect, it’s in the next version you’ll hear below where you start to hear some real progression. A vocal emerges. The small hint of a floating melody leading somewhere. Again, I am halted by the sound of a witness and this time feel a bit embarrassed. I’ve never been too good at writing music with someone watching.
But at times, the presence of another body can cast a new eye or ear on the idea I’m writing and just like that transcendent law of the double-slit experiment — through the observation of another, I come to experience the moment… differently.
And so it finds new form:
I’m in no rush to finish this one and there’s other musical infrastructures on my horizon that I’ll be posting more about soon (something about being in New Zealand always draws me back to my guitar and that’s the instrument I’m spending the most time on out here) but it’s beautiful to think that the idea follows me wherever I go and that it started in an airport of all places.
It makes me think of the Aboriginal songlines again. How their story, their maps, their ancestry, their knowledge was all in their song. Those melodies they carried across terrains, embedded into their memory.
I wrote about this ancient phenomenon in a post I wrote a year ago now called “The Neighbours” which talks about the way I overcame the fear of sharing my poetry. It’s funny to think about how fluid that feels as an expression now. For those who are fluctuating between sharing or holding things close, this might be a welcome post to return to:
This week I’ll be going deeper into the process of songwriting and both the casualties and gifts of having a witness to that unfolding. I could talk about this one for hours. There are few spaces where we get to see the beauty of process over the shiny product and although it’s a bit scary for me to open that side to people (because it’s rather raw and imperfect) I want this community to be the place I do.
If you’re not a paid subscriber, I welcome you to consider it — for less than a coffee a month would you believe?! — as I’ll be starting to invite those who are, into the more curious realm of my art — the messy, awkward path toward eventual abandonment.
Because, of course, it is never finished, just finished enough to let go.
It's always a joy to slow down and reset and just be a human. 3 baths a day sounds amazing.
Welcome back to Aotearoa. It really is beautiful.