I’m starting this blog for the same reason I started writing music, because I’ve been thinking. I’m not sure if this is just for me, or if I was hoping for you to read it, but thoughts will exist with or without an audience. Writing might be a way to turn those thoughts into a conversation but I don’t think it needs to be. For me, at least tonight and with the new What It Means songs, creative writing has been a way to refine, a way to take the mixed up thoughts and turn them into something more usable (for lack of a better word).
Writing for our first single Aching in August is my best example. I spent the last half of last summer with a knot in my stomach and I didn’t know why. So I started looking for words and I just sort of stumbled into “bummer”, “lame”. At the start they feel too simple, nothing I can really think of. Then I realise, maybe they are too simple, there has to be more. So I become a detective and I start working on the case:
What’s a bummer? My summer.
It’s lame compared to what? John Hughes movies and being 14 and probably every other summer there ever was.
Suddenly it’s not simple anymore. That summer tying knots in my stomach is this imaginary monolith of fun in the sun. The knot is a bundled up mess of future fears and regressive regrets. Compared to what I started with, I had a lot more to work with now. The song turned from a pile of unhelpful whining into a way I could really confront the reality of what summer means to me. In the end it wasn’t at all as scary or as lame as I had thought.
So, at the moment that’s what writing means to me. I think without setting it all out and giving myself a fun way to explore it, some of the things wrapped up in the cobwebs of my head might remain there forever, so I’ll keep on writing. I hope this makes some sense, if not I might just have to write some more.