Last night I broke down in tears writing a song. Something I didn’t know was in me but had to come out. Something from the emptiness to channel through. Maybe just some unresolved shit. It really made me think about what it is we do in this job. I was listening to an interview with Dijon where he said he doesn’t do nostalgia, he said “I refuse it. If it shows up, if you find touchstones in the music that’s just because I have not efficiently exercised that from my body yet”. Is that the norm? I don’t think it’s true for me. I think I write in the past, I think I pull from everything I’ve ever lived as a way to immortalise it. I think it takes years for words to travel through my psyche and make their way out of my mouth. Maybe that sounds dramatic. Am I a poet? Am I an archivist? Am I using my work to therapise myself and is that healthy? My work has always been nostalgic. Am I my work? I spent a lot of my time in London last week looking through old photo albums: my childhood, my mother’s childhood, my grandmothers wedding. There’s something magical in thinking maybe her words have carried down through my mother just to spill out onto my notebook. I’d say Granny Sue falls into camp Dijon though - memory as a practical exorcism rarely to be re-visited (yes, I know that’s an exaggeration but still). I guess it doesn’t matter anyway as time is happening all together all at once. And if that’s the case maybe my job is to bridge those moments where past and present melt into each other in a way that makes sense to me. On the other hand, maybe it’s not this complicated at all. Maybe it’s just as simple as you and me writing a love song.
