Journal

Right now

 

Here's me and my girl holding hands as I lay by her cot and wait for her to fall asleep.

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For the first moment in goodness know when, I stopped my mind from racing ahead and just slowed up and enjoyed. Enjoyed her hand in mine. Her baby music playing softly around us. The faint sound of the World Cup blaring from the TV downstairs. I soaked in the joy and sadness that this too will pass. 

It felt really good.

 

Reset

 

I wrote this a few weeks ago: 

I know I've not been living very well recently. I'm rushing forward, straining towards the next thing. Unappreciative of the ordinary and the beautiful. Internally complaining about my situation and the people around me. Critical of pretty much everything. Thinking if this and that and the other we're different, then I'd be different, and that difference would make everything so very much better.

Forgetting to stop and smell the coffee, or the flowers. Passing over the urge to take another photo of my child, and capture a moment that I know is so fleeting. Choosing to eat dinner quickly in the kitchen so I can get a head start on the cleaning instead of enjoy our family meal.

Ignoring that all to rare feeling of creativity. The kind that births songs and other things. It's that feeling where the hair on my body kinda stands on ends, there's a stillness in the chaos, and my heart beats funny. It's that place in between this and that where new things are born. And I'm just passing it up for the great pleasure of vegetating in front of the box. Again. And the thing is I know, whilst I'm doing it that I'm just not living right. I really do know better.

Since writing the above, my granny sadly passed on from this life. More on this in another post I'm sure, but one of the obvious side effects of loosing one of your most cherished human beings is that one inevitably receives an acute sense of ones own mortality as well as the unstoppable passing of time.  So I'm living life abit better now.

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I'm cherishing moments again. Well not as fully as that statement implies, but I am buying up my opportunities and making better use of my time, well a lot more of it, and it feels good.

In other news, I've ventured into songwriting for others again and it's been soooo fun! In the past I've always found this to be a struggle. The pressure of having to come up with something, and having to write with other people, erghh. I write all of my own music alone, and that's the way I like it.  Writing with others has previously proved quite incapacitating and unenjoyable, however it seems to be different now. I've been writing with a great team, and whilst we were given the task of writing an album in a few weeks, it was really easy! Things just flowed. Yeaaahh. And the most amazing thing ever was that I could take Ava into the studio with me! And she was fab...most of the time, providing lots of light relief, thanks honeykins!

Art for the Heart

So why does making art today need to just be about becoming famous? Like that is the end goal, the only goal for many, and if that end isn't achieved then somehow the art must not be good enough. What happened to making art, amazing art just because you want to. Just because for some of us, we HAVE to?

Me at The Hideaway, London, 2012

Me at The Hideaway, London, 2012

Yes by a plethora of different reasons [too long to go into here], some art makers get to have their work appreciated [and picked apart] by lots and lots and lots of people, and also have it held on a very high pedestal, and for some we get the great privilege of making art for the sheer pleasure of it, to an audience that isn't an extremely vast number.

Is there then anything wrong with the art? No, how can true art even be critiqued in that way.

Is there purpose in it? Heck yes!!

Art, even independent art is good for the heart. It's good for society, and it shouldn't be marginalised, and the artist be made to feel less than.

Not everyone can make a significant living out of making art, but they should do it ANYWAY. True creativity should ALWAYS be supported and nurtured, not necessarily into a mass-marketed, money-making product, there is a place for that I suppose, but true artists of whatever place or stature, should be encouraged to make authentic, beautiful art, and that art should be helped to find its proper outlet and audience.

So for all of my creative buddies, I see you, please keeping creating, and growing artistically for the sheer joy that it brings you.

And I'm gonna try to better support you, because your art is good for my heart. x