26 May, 2008 Six Degrees of Separation
A more well known writer than myself recently described songwriting as something akin to the following.
“Writing a song” he says “is like digging a ditch, you constantly have to dig deeper, until you strike the vein, until you hit the nerve that makes you feel something, it is then you know that you have succeeded. There is nothing romantic about song writing whatsoever, if anything it is grunt work!”
Well, as much as I admire this writer, me being the son of a labourer who along with his workmates undoubtedly knew how it felt to dig real ditches, naturally I would be a little sensitive regarding his choice of metaphor, but I do know what he means.
In addition I can relate to the loneliness involved and his apparent loss of self. “When I write I am truly solitary, I isolate myself, build walls, and remove myself from the everyday rhythms of the world. I see the way other people have their friendships and how it is in the most usual ways. I want that – but I myself never have it, it is the price I pay and I have no complaints because for the most part I make this journey alone.” Pass me a handkerchief, the tears are flowing indeed!
Okay, possibly he lays it on a little too much for me, but again I have to say that over the course of my career and especially over the months when leading up to working on an album, I also find the need to partly detach myself from the world around me. Given the mundanity never mind the brutality of this world, that is no bad thing in my opinion as in the end I feel gifted for the chance I have been given to indulge my artistic whims – when others spend days cleaning kitchens and sweeping hospital floors. (Quit dreaming that is real life baby!)
But in seriousness, my own solution and means of escape in order to create, is to cancel all appointments apart from the absolute necessary. Oh, and get up out of bed, and get at the work by 5 am. After all, apart from my friends the bin men, the world by enlarge is asleep at the time and therefore there are few pressuring rhythms that one has to escape from!
Alternately in the past I have gone off for periods to places where I know nobody, and apart from a couple of hours each day spent wandering unfamiliar streets, I get my head absolutely lost in the songwriting and somehow usually return accomplished. No surprise given that once the local museums etc have been visited there is often little else to do.
It may all sound like a great sacrifice but then if I tell you that for example, Alive and Kicking, All The Things She Said, Wish You Were Here, were written on a solitary sunlit balcony overlooking the sapphire blue waters of the Med, you will undoubtedly feel my pain a little less! Sure you do?
Because thanks to the champagne moon that seemed to hang above, it was certainly a very romantic episode in my life. And as far as I remember the only ditch digging going on, came from the kids I could see as they buried each other daily in the sandy beach metres from where I would sit and fret over awkward middle eights. Dammit!
In any case, they say that in life all things balance out, and if so that will explain why I now am sitting here two decades later under steel grey blustery London skies. It is a bank holiday Monday, it is not quite six in the morning, and I am trying to complete the lyrics to a song called Six Degrees of Separation that I am due to sing later today.
And blissful it all is too, given that nothing gives me as much pleasure still as the feeling that I might be closing in on the completion of a very good new song.
Jim Kerr