this is the only thing that could have happened

19/02/24, thank you Dorma <3 RIP

And finally…the grief that lies underneath the anger is coming.

For now…I want to let you know that I finished writing my solo album?

Not finished recording, just writing. I’m currently trying to get Dorma to play nice, but she’s creaking and moaning like a dying dog. A thing fell off her when the piano tuner came round. He screamed, “oh no! …this has never happened before”. She’s rattling with her last breaths.

I found Dorma on gumtree when the band got our first studio, the Lighthouse, in 2018. A cheap thing, she was kept in a family home for ten years, barely used. She was perfect. I still remember the two brave souls who got her down the steep stairs to the Crypt, our band’s second studio. They started freaking out halfway, it was tense. I said my goodbyes then. They told me she’d never be able to come back out.

I remember four years ago trying to finally put some songs together. What would I sound like, alone? I didn’t know how to be alone, anymore. Nothing sounded like “me”. And I didn’t even want to sing anymore. So I tried to make an instrumental piano EP, but Dorma didn’t sound right without the weight of a band around her. She’s a honky tonk kind of thing.

Dorma kept me company all through Covid, and all through this strange limbo of post-Covid, until now. Every part of my life was cast out in pieces into space. All I had control over was showing up for myself every day and practicing piano.

Dorma led me back to myself. When I was 18, I lived and breathed the piano. I wrote these amazing over-the-top musical theatre-esque songs, and then left them in the past like a burning effigy to who I was, like an old skin. But there is always a path back to who we really are.

I wonder sometimes if I started this substack as an act of self-love. Who reads it? I don’t seem to care. I just show up for myself every single week, now, and speak/type into a space where I can fully be myself. And that’s all writing songs is, really, a space you can fully be yourself without the demands of every day life. Songwriting is self-love. It became my identity again instead of a way to make money (ha - was it ever), and as hard as it was to ‘fail’ through Covid, it was also a gift. If you can view things in life as a gift, you can make meaning out of it, your life. And that’s all we ever have control over.

Some pictures of music this weekend:

Another Sky things:

we were Greg James tune of the week <3

Dork posted our Teenage Kicks playlist

We have a run of in-stores around the country

<3