"I Forget Why I Began This Journey"

So, I do recommend The Railway Man. It's not a particularly easy watch, but beautifully acted and very moving. Like 12 Years A Slave, it reminds me, in a way that I would more often prefer to forget, that human beings are capable of hurting each other very brutally and very directly. But the strongest message is about reconcilliation.

Today though, despite trying, I'm not feeling up to the task of talking about the difficult questions that the film raised. Maybe it would be better for me to write a song about them. What I like about songwriting is the challenge of trying to strip away all the unnecessary clutter surrounding a subject. The information. The emotional NOISE, When I write prose, as I am writing now, it is very easy for the words to multiply. Or become stilted or complicated or preachy or analytical. Or just plain bad.

But when writing songs the focus, for me, is not on the meaning. It's on the emotional ESSENCE the music behind the meaning. The left brain gets switched off, at least until the editing stage, and the whole process is more of a journey, an adventure, an exploration, to an unknown destination.

Which is not to say that the meaning isn't important. Only that the meaning is a place I am travelling to while writing the song, not a building I am trying to construct, carefully, logically, with a set of plans, and with a firm grasp of engineering.

I'd like to write these blogs in the same way. The songwriting way. Sometimes I can. But you'll have to bear with me. It's a work in progress.


The line "I forget why I began this journey" is from my unreleased song It's My Car. Released songs can be found at Fee Comes Fourth