New Music Friday (Tuesday) #4: goodbye! for a bit
things are coming...but for now, here's Arlo Parks, Daughter and Wednesday
I love doing these! I’ll return at some point, and in the meantime I’ll put out archives and deep dives, if you can cough up a subscription. I’ve started writing an archive on Nick Drake and I’m interviewing Sona.
It all depends on how busy the band gets, really. I’ve never had such an uncertain future. Where am I going to live? What am I going to be doing in a year? Where will the world be in a year?
I’m going through all my belongings and I found these mini DV tapes. We used to borrow mini DV cameras from fans to make a few music videos. It was another life pre-covid - America, Canada, the Netherlands?!
The last time I left the country was for a German festival in 2021.
NPR Tiny Desk is on these tapes, as well as filming Brave Face in Norway. That was about a month before the pandemic. I filmed a walk to Canary Wharf when Covid first hit, zooming in on all the signs on the front of businesses, “closed without further notice”. To pass the time, me and my housemates also used infrared mode on the camera to create a horror film.
That title “LIVE STREAMS QUARANTINE” is a horror film in itself, isn’t it? Live streams were the worst. Firstly because Another Sky are a band!!! the magic is in the four of us playing, and we couldn’t be in a room together! But we had an album to promote, so I marched on alone. I did love the bedroom gigs one myself and Carlos organised where we got all our friends to perform, and when I did Self Esteem’s livestream festival and my two housemates Aimee and Daisy sang harmonies and Self Esteem commented “sound of the festival!!” and I was terrified to perform just after K.T Tunstall (in virtual reality).
Another. Life.
These past few years have been all about coming to terms with the fact life moving forwards might look really different. Everything we’d worked so hard for dissipated in one fell swoop. We released the album, did one gig in Banquet Records, then said, “what now?”. We recorded music ourselves in a studio under a previously flooded weed farm (there are some amazing stories from this place…), put out Music For Winter, then I landed at rock bottom.
So many people in my life told me I’d failed, told me to see the truth hanging from the door - as if I hadn’t already, as if I wasn’t already hanging by a thread, as if I wasn’t the one living it. We really like to tell people in dark situations what they’ve done wrong, usually to selfishly convince ourselves it couldn’t happen to us. That’s something I’ve noticed throughout life.
A breakdown was due, and what more of a perfect climate than a global pandemic. I told myself I’d quit music. I discovered I can’t quit. If you’re a musician, you just are one, whether you make money from it or not. Art is the most human thing in the world. We’re all artists, it’s just that the majority of us have been brainwashed into thinking we’re not. We’re told ordinary people don’t deserve to make art, that if it’s deemed ‘bad’ by society or the zeitgeist, it doesn’t count, that the process of making something has to produce reward for it to be valid.
It seemed like even when we did things like NPR Tiny Desk, we needed to feel bad, to atone for our attempt to have some joy in this relentless, difficult world. I didn’t feel allowed to just enjoy it - something that happens once, something I should be forever proud of. And I guess I’ve spent the past three years learning that other people can’t make you feel anything. I’m older now, and I’ve learned “fuck off” is a sentence.
Rant aside...instead of quitting, I sought therapy through a charity service and built up resilience. I stopped defining my self-worth by what other people thought. I found a way forward, and whatever happens now, I know that even if a million voices tell me otherwise, I really do know who I am. And music is a journey. You can always make more. And I know now there are other things I can do, that a mundane life is a beautiful one, that not being known is actually a gift of clarity.
A day once dawned, and it was beautiful. (Artists are releasing covers of Nick Drake’s album, by the way. How gorgeous.)
Here’s some music from other musicians who I bet have really interesting stories on how to deal with the world telling you who you are. I’m going to present their music without my thoughts this time:
