This week, a turn to some older, pre-pandemic material: a song written in roughly May 2019.
Encountering my older work is often a better experience than I expect it to be. With distance, you can’t remember what you hoped a song would be and so are left with what it is. The small details I fussed over, the word choices I was never quite satisfied with, the arrangements that weren’t quite interesting enough: all is forgotten. And so what’s left, in most cases, is something that seems, well, pretty alright. It’s a nice surprise.
Of course, a better experience doesn’t mean a perfect experience. I can hear the things I wanted to move away from and, with hindsight, see how this piece was part of an inevitable path away from itself. In that sense, so long as one is committed to artistic growth, every tune is an ancestor that must be put to rest for new work to be born.
To be fair, I’m Sorry has always been a ‘fan favourite’,1 so the surprise was lessened in this instance.2 But I revisited it at the same time as I did the album it’s drawn from, In Open Light, and that proved to be a nice surprise.
There’s an open-heartedness to much of the album,3 a sense of invitation. This is music that wants to be shared, to be loved. The warm palette of synths and guitars is in keeping with much of my subsequent work, but there is a shimmering naivety to the music on In Open Light that works to its advantage in a way I hadn’t fully appreciated.
And yet the naivety wasn’t wholly unintentional. At the time, I remember thinking (and still do think, in many ways) that if one wanted to speak emotionally, one ought to do so frankly. Remove the metaphorical dressing from the wound and show off the scar. The title itself, In Open Light, alludes to wide skies and sundrenched sentiments, frank friendship and frank feelings.
This is not so far removed from the leaning-into-the-cheese of Giving Love and Hate, which I consider the spiritual successor to In Open Light. But the newer album, though embued with big feelings, is cleverer and more self-referential, with more lavish production and a richer cast of characters. That’s no bad thing, but the beauty of re-encountering old work is that it re-affirms what I think to be true: that the change from album to album, while absolutely necessary, isn’t essentially good or bad. Naivity or smarts? Polished or raw? They are just different.
The idea of creating a ‘discography’ (dataography?), of producing a body of work that grows with and tracks my artistic development, has always been far more motivating to me than producing standalone albums or singles.4 The art is all of it, taken together.
While I haven’t yet shared much of the work I’ve completed over the years, revisiting In Open Light makes me glad that I have consistently finished pieces. Perfectionism has slowed me down greatly, but I’ve managed to keep the drip, drip, drip of new work flowing. Create, document, move on. And that’s the discography. That’s the goal.
It’s also a diary. In the years after I made In Open Light, I changed. I became interested in new challenges and pursued different artistic horizons. My taste changed and I started asking different questions. Encountering older work is thus very much like reading an old diary. And sometimes you read an old diary and realise that something you thought you figured out just last month, you already knew 15 years ago.
And I gave her everything I need, I'm sorry, Contested every little deed, I'm sorry, And I dug up all her deathbed deeds, her desert weeds, I'd half agreed To save our love from going out to seed. And I knew that I could be alone, I'm sorry, That I could stare at screens upon my throne, I'm sorry, That I'd rest it on our ballast stone, that buffer zone we called our home, Until she knew she'd be better off alone. And she knows it's not the only way I'm sorry, But listing all the different ways I'm sorry, Doesn't seem like it will capture what I need to say so I'll say naught, Except that I am happy to be sorry. And though I've never felt so free, I'm sorry, I feel more like I belong to me, I'm sorry, I've never had a better friend and, though it's wrong, means to an end, And for that, I can't pretend I can say sorry.
Read: friend favourite.
And I only ended up considering the song finished because I sent it to my friend Lola via WhatsApp, saying “i think it could be good but it is very rough idk. i will fix.” She replied, “doesn’t really feel like a song that should be polished.”
Which I will, of course, share here in due course.
That’s why, when I started this blog, I originally intended to share tunes in the order they were finished. But I began to think that might lead to periods of relative monotony for you, dear listener.