Lying in bed, the rain leaving patterns on my window, the orange glow of my lamp warming up the grey daylight, and You’re In It Now by Pure X floating over and over me. I rise to set the needle back to the beginning, again and again, round and round, a pattern in itself, a rhythm of listening, a circle of feeling, a warming in my bones.
Breathe deep
All we’re all doing – all we can do, should do – is working things through; trying this, trying that, taking this, leaving that. We’ve got to breathe it all in to know what to discard and what to hold dear. Stop exploring, stop experimenting, stop reaching, and you stop growing. Happiness is not a fucking destination.
Blister kisses
There is a blister on the sole of my right foot. It doesn’t surprise me; looking after feet is boring. Then I check my left foot: another blister, in the same spot. Why that surprises me surprises me. After all, my two feet have endured the same experiences: the same late nights, the same new shoes. It took the same pressure, the same heat, the same friction to create the same blister in the same spot on my two soles.
It’s not that different with people. Two souls can share the same spirit, divine twin responses to life, pursue a parallel path – moulded by mirror circumstances.
Today I am devouring Patti Smith’s Just Kids, a memoir of her formative years with Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s setting my imagination on fire.
The Circle Game
Life has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And yet our lives don’t follow a linear path. We trace circles, follow patterns, chase our tails. Threads are found, dropped and picked up once again. Conversations, ideas and dreams revisited, relived, rewritten. Emotions echo in circular motion blur, rippling out and in again, reverberating like basslines. Or maybe heartbeats.
I can spend a whole evening pressing play again and again on the same songs. A repeating that breeds a closeness, a comfort, a leaning over and falling in.
These are a few I’ve recently been lost in. Some are newer than others, some are coming.
Jessie Ware & Sampha – Valentine
Jacques Greene – Another Girl
Konx-om-Pax – 7th Dimension
Cubic Zirconia – Night Or Day
Nicolas Jaar – Wouh
Gang Colours – In Your Gut Like A Knife
Bullion – My Castle In England
James Blake – A Case Of You (Joni Mitchell cover)
CYMBALS – Half Ask
Adele – Turning Tables
GB – The Provider
(In case you were wondering, The Circle Game is a lullaby by Joni Mitchell. To me it will always be the dragonfly song.)
Real life
Everything echoes louder in our heads: a single moment blows up silver screen size, a glance engulfs, a sentence repeats and repeats to distortion. We carry with us our own realities, which blur, overlap, and occasionally converge. Life is messy. But it gets less messy with music. I just got home from seeing WU LYF. They made my chest hurt, the pressure almost too much. There was no relief, no release, it just built and built. I can still feel the sound. It’s a sweet pain. They were really fucking good.
We are collages
The saddest thing anyone ever said to me was: “I’m not the person you think I am.” Sad because I chose not to hear it. Years later I finally understand. What is said and what is heard are often entirely different. Our desires colour what is received, shaping and shading it. None of us are the people others see us as or want us to be. Or even the people we believe ourselves to be. We are collages. Collections and layers.
I don’t want to be here
Places are not just physical, can’t always be mapped, are often lost and sometimes never found. Home is rarely an address, a street, bricks or mortar. We move on, we move away. The unsaid things always the loudest we hear. So sometimes we live in songs. Today I’ve been living in Gold Panda ‘Vanilla Minus’. It cuts my heart but the release is sweet.
No-one on earth could feel like this
What we pass on, what we share, what we gift one another is the chance to see the world through each other’s eyes. Our own experiences can blinker, filter out, cast shadows that, while necessary to push us forward on our own way through this life, facilitate an overlooking. It is easy to forget – and more convenient to believe – that something is ours, and ours alone, when in fact someone else shared it with us.
I had fallen down that rabbit hole. Oh so proud, oh so stupid. On the phone to my dad this week I had a moment of clarity: I owe all the joy I find in music to my parents. Every single drop. I owe them for dancing round our living room, singing at the tops of their voices to the Eurythmics. I owe them for always having a stack of blank tapes so my sister and I could tape the radio and make our own Top of The Pops. I owe them for letting me stay up to watch the Free Nelson Mandela and Freddie Mercury Tribute concerts. I owe my mum for learning to play the guitar in her late 30s. I owe my dad for dancing at my school discos. I owe them for not giving two figs about demonstrating their feelings through music, for dancing and singing and laughing at our cringing. Most of all, though, I owe them because this was their thing – appreciating music in such a loud and open way wasn’t something either of them grew up with – but they shared it with us. Yeah, parents can mess you up but they can also make you.
One more hour
The clocks go back tonight. It reminded me of a childhood story. It was about a man who lived in a house with many floors, each with a steep staircase leading to the next. The rooms on every floor each had a clock that needed to be wound. The man spent every day running up and down the stairs to wind the clocks, starting at the bottom of the house and working up. He would set them according to the time of the first clock, forgetting the time it would take him to run up all those stairs. He was constantly perplexed – all of his clocks were out of sync and he never knew the right time. Resolution came in the form of a friend who gave him a pocket watch he could carry with him and set each clock to that. This satisfied the man and presumably he lived happily ever after, forever setting his clocks, finding a peculiar contentment in always knowing the precise time.
Quite where I heard or read this story I have no idea but it caught my imagination – at the time purely because it just seemed so silly to me. Thinking about it now, it’s even sillier – a life lived trying to measure, contain and own time.
At some moment or other, we all try and do this. We wish away minutes, hate hours, dread days – reaching for something or someone the other side of that time. Maybe it’s only natural (or nurtural – that should be a word) but it feels like a waste. I want to live, to feel, in the moment. The next moment will come.
Today I have been mainly listening to James Blake’s ‘Klavierwerke’ EP [listen to I Only Know (What I Know Now) below]. His music is made out of patience. All those spaces, those breaths, those pauses. It slows my heartbeat; makes me glad to be just here, right now.
What’s the matter? You hurt yourself
Day versus night. Night versus day. Dawn has a buoyancy that appeals yet dusk feels more truthful. All the little lies that daytime demands, that lubricant collective coexistence, exhaust. The night has no time for all that tip-toeing around. Night time is private, selfish, brutally honest in the most tender of ways. The warmth of darkness is the ideal temperature for truly absorbed listening and the soundtrack currently killing me softly is Warpaint’s ‘The Fool’. It’s got me right between the eyes. It speaks to the aches in my body. It makes complete and utter sense in the dead of night – and it’s slowly unravelling me.
Ruth Saxelby 