One Small Step

In the 1965 film Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines, with the absence of his laxative-ridden pilot, the German colonel (Gert Froebe) is forced to fly his plane for the first time, by reading from the all-important instruction manual. He climbs aboard and famously reads, “Number one: sit down!”

Last time in these pages, I’d finally reached the point of Step 1 of “The New Big Plan”: write and record the first of an infinite string of songs. Obvious and hardly a new idea, but this time around it would be without the safety-net of hiding away inside an album project with an ill-defined future release date. Instead, full-on “hit-single”-emphasis on each individual song production, as if it were the only one I’d ever make.

Easy then.

But it’d now been SEVEN years since I last wrote, let alone recorded a releasable song and to say I was a bit unsure of where to start would be a failure to grasp the height and breadth of the concrete wall which now stood between me and my putting pen to paper and plectrum to string.

I faintly remembered metaphoric construction workers coming round a few days after I packed the last album off to the manufacturers; they tidied away my notes and lyric sheets with a cheery, “You’ll not be needing these again for a while, Squire!” as they started to measure up and lay out foundations in front of me for some kind of giant fortress…

A few weeks into the next couple of years of endless daily promo-activity that followed, emailing radio stations, replying, packing and posting CDs and PR sheets, simultaneously feverishly working-out and practising live acoustic versions of those same-old songs for whatever sessions and performances would come up, I barely noticed nor cared that this ever-growing, steel-reinforced, sheer grey wall now obscured my view of the idyllic valley where I’d previously watched my future new songs gambolling, awaiting my call…

Soon, a few YEARS had gone by. Days had emptied as the album ran its course out in the world and I’d become so deafened by the clamour of all the brilliant new things I could be doing but oh, where to start? And the resultant impulse was to slump, relax and do little; watch a tutorial on setting up a drum page, rather than actually setting up a drum page, do an hour of guitar DVD scales instead of recording an acoustic guitar. (Perhaps writing a blog about not making progress…)

The longer you leave it the harder it gets to start again; you want to carry on from precisely the level you left-off at, not to start again at the bottom. Of course, it soon becomes clear that is exactly what you will have to do.

Scary.

This is where Habit comes in; self-consciously initiated daily habits. Positions of comfort to return to, which help you grasp the opportunity when such an empty day looms.

Amazon-hunting, post-David Byrne, I quickly fell upon two more books. First, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron; a classic of the genre, its award-winning author a successful screenwriter and lecturer on breaking the creative block. I won’t dwell on this one now but suffice to say, two-minutes after a Kindle purchase I was diving into a programme of wonderful ideas and practical instruction, not just for getting yourself into gear, but for living the very Life of an Artist and importantly, suddenly feeling, “Ah, it’s not just me then!” (Read it, it’s excellent.)

That purchase led me directly to Jason Timothy’s massively useful book Music Habits - The Mental Game of Electronic Music Production, this one, directly targeted at the musician/producer. Again within moments, I was reading the page where he cites just such a habit-initiation.

Paraphrasing, he says: use your right brain to organise and create space, to get all your materials ready, to tune a guitar, to sharpen your pencil. Then switch to the left brain to create for even only five or ten minutes, but just show up, do some songwriting, record something, put the work in. Set a timer! Make it easy to win by making it impossible to lose; if the only goal is to turn up and do SOMEthing, it doesn’t matter what, good or bad, then the pressure’s off and in this way you’ll be amazed how quickly real results start to flood in.

So I did - and I was. That day, day one, was my first real songwriting session since 2010. After an initial, “Well, I’ll just do ten minutes”, over the course of the day I ended up putting in an enthusiastic two hours and more. As results appeared and blank sheets of paper filled up with surprisingly good lyrics and new chord sequences I felt that age-old shock-thrill of, “Where did THAT come from?!” followed quickly by its two consequent urges: “Stop now!” (to avoid using up the magic) and “More! More!” (to strike whilst the Muse was at my shoulder).

Hence:

Rule Number 3:

Carry on chasing until you lose the trail. You’ll find it again.

Eventually, having returned to the song six or seven times that day, I left it, late in the evening, astonishingly… finished.

Admittedly, of the 11 demo tunes I had to work on, I'd picked the lowest hanging fruit, the ONLY one that already had a name and an idea for a chorus lyric (“Fleecing TheEasily Pleased” - previously the title of my last BTF album, now demandingits own song!) Even so, the joy of finishing was immeasurable, as was the shift in my psychological landscape. I genuinely hadn’t felt such a sense of musical satisfaction and fulfilment for seven years. I was back on the inside. And it all came so easily in the end. What an idiot!

Next time, what to do now I’ve no longer got a good excuse not to start recording.