Day 83: Jump the Fence

Jump the Fence owes its existence to Sandra Kennedy. Until last year, Sandra ran the artist support programme at An Lanntair, where she sometimes set creative tasks for people performing at her events; Sandra asked me to write something about a sheep jumping over a fence. 

The song I ended up with is not really about sheep, although it was inspired by the fact that some sheep are smarter and more headstrong than others, and there are a few in every flock that are constantly escaping from the croft. For a crofter, these are the sheep you want rid of as soon as possible because they lead the others astray and make the work more difficult. Obviously there are human parallels here and the song explores that.

I’ve been doing a bit of soul searching as a result of this song. I realised that I’d been ambivalent about Jump the Fence ever since I wrote it, to the point where I nearly left it off the new album. Not because of the subject matter, or even because I didn’t think it was good (I do), but because it didn’t quite feel like one of mine.

I know where this feeling comes from. Mostly my songwriting is more like a compulsion or a nervous tic than something I consciously plan. My songs tend to appear involuntarily and at the least convenient moments, on public transport or in some work or social situation in which I really should be more focused on the here and now. If you’re talking to me and it seems like I’m not listening then there’s probably a song swirling round my head, possibly prompted by some phrase you’ve just said that seemed like a good title for something.

In fact, often there’s no writing at all. I never actually write anything down apart from the words. I have a rule that I’ve stuck to my entire life, that if I can remember a tune or an arrangement the next day without writing it down then it might be worth pursuing, and that if I can’t then it’s no great loss because nobody listening is likely to remember it either. It means, though, that a song swirls around my head constantly until I get a chance to record it and in the meantime I struggle to focus on anything else. I’ve noticed a familiar pattern whenever I go into a studio; first there’s a wave of anxiety, an urgent need to get the noises out of my head and into a computer as soon as possible. Afterwards the overwhelming feeling is often relief that I’ve got something out of my system that’s been stopping my brain from functioning properly, and that now there’s space for other, less intrusive thoughts. Ideally I like to get it all over with as quickly as possible. Leaving songs unfinished makes me more anxious; I listen to recordings obsessively, trying to figure out what needs fixed and unable to relax until it’s done, as if there is still something lingering in my body that needs removed.

When I began writing this blog I was barely writing songs anymore. This wasn’t by choice, they’d just stopped appearing in my head for reasons I didn’t understand. In hindsight, having very young children was probably a significant factor, since they fill up every available space in your head while also preventing you from getting anywhere near a musical instrument. But at the time I thought I was going to stop completely and that this blog would be a kind of tidying up exercise, a clearing out of the cupboards. Once I’d reflected on all the songs I’d already released – hopefully coming to some understanding of why I’d been doing it in the first place – I’d be finished with the whole songwriting thing for good. 

And for a while I wanted to be. I thought my life would be less stressful if I wasn’t writing songs anymore, if my head wasn’t constantly filled with words and sounds I hadn’t invited in, and if I gave up on trying to find an audience for them and mostly failing. My songs, after all, are weird, malformed, mis-shaped things, loved by the occasional critic, DJ or fellow musician but mostly perplexing to the general public. Sometimes I feel like my head is a kind of orphanage for other people’s abandoned ideas, all those songs floating around in the ether that didn’t quite work for anyone else.

And I’m starting to think this is a very unhealthy way to go about making music. I’ve realised I’ve been far too attached to the idea that art is not authentic unless it’s wrenched out of you involuntarily, unless you suffer for it. That if the process is contrived in any way then you’re somehow cheating. Looking back, I’ve never had any interest in songwriting exercises, competitions, ‘battles of the bands’, or similar, and if I’m honest I’ve avoided all of these things for the same reason. Because I enjoyed feeling that songwriting was something mysterious and sacred, a transaction with the universe, a kind of second sight even. And I didn’t want it to lose that sense of mystery.

There was an arrogance to this that I now find a bit embarrassing. My reasoning, if I’m honest, was that if songwriting was something that anyone could do with a bit of training, practical task-setting and encouragement then there was nothing special about my ability to do it. And I wanted to feel special, because it was better than feeling like a weirdo who was more comfortable singing silently to himself than talking to other people.

In recent years I’ve been trying to develop a less self-absorbed attitude towards making music. Writing songs for other people has helped, and I’ve been enjoying that a lot. Last year I even signed up to a songwriting course, albeit with mixed results. And when Sandra Kennedy asked me to write a song about sheep I said yes, even though there was still a little voice in my head screaming at me to say no.

The irony here is that much of my professional work involves offering other artists exactly the kind of practical help that Sandra gave me. Since 2014 I’ve been working for the Mental Health Foundation, supporting various people to make creative work about mental health. And I know from experience that success for any artist is as much about who teaches you, who mentors you, what connections you have and what support you have as it is about raw talent.

Earlier this year, as part of my Mental Health Foundation work, I found myself moderating an online writing workshop by the poet Leyla Josephine. Leyla, I learned, begins every morning by writing down anything that happens to be in her head, as a kind of mental clearing out exercise. It is important, she said, to give yourself permission to fail, to create things that are imperfect. To demonstrate this, she pointedly set us an impossible task – write a poem in 20 seconds containing three specific words. It was highly unlikely to be a good poem; it was purely a mental exercise, a flexing of muscles, a practice run for something better.

I was struck by how antithetical this is to my writing ‘technique’, which is essentially to wait until something appears, sometimes for months. And that I should maybe rethink this. Another exercise Leyla set the group was to write what she called a ‘self-portrait poem’, by completing 20 statements beginning with the words ‘I am’. Each statement was a response to a question posed by Leyla, such as ‘if you were an animal what would you be?’ or ‘what kind of building are you?’. This is my self-portrait poem.

I am a dog
I am an island
I am a plain simple pasta
I am jet black, brilliant white but mostly grey
I am 10pm
I am Uig sands
I am a public library in need of modernisation
I am I don’t know, maybe
I am season four fretting about cancellation
I am trying to live in the moment but mostly not
I am my dad
I am an exposed neck.
I am my family
I am patient, kind, organised
I am anxious, angry, and forgetful
I am a twitching leg
I am wonky toes
I am every city in every nation from Lake Geneva to the Finland station
I am an earthquake
I am always worried

It’s not a very good poem, but actually it is better than some of the lyrics I have written using my instinctive, messy ‘method’, and it took me two minutes.

Anyway, by a curious twist of fate I am about to start a new job as An Lanntair’s new artist support co-ordinator, picking up where Sandra left off at the end of last year. And so I’m going to try and get better at following the kind of advice I am likely to be offering other people, and to be less stubborn about making art in my own weird little self-absorbed way. I’m going to try and be less precious about all this, to allow myself to fail, to write to order if that’s what it takes, to find better ways to enjoy it, and perhaps to jump over a fence myself. Who knows, maybe my songs will get better as a result. I might even write some of them down.