Entry number 6, 16/03/2025
For the past few years I’ve been helping my friend run her organisation which runs affordable, inclusive songwriting retreats here in Scotland.
We take a group of songwriters some are professionals, some are students, others are people who just write in their spare time, and we go to a big, beautiful house in the countryside for a week. It’s always a really incredible experience, totally transformative, emotionally exhilarating and exhausting. The more retreats I have been on however, the more I feel that the benefits of being in that space, and the connections you make with others and your art, completely outweigh the emotional drain that I feel afterwards.
Back in January we had our first retreat of the year on the stunning Isle of Bute. We were in this huge house right on the shore, in the middle of a big line of beautiful houses looking right out on to the water. When I opened my bedroom window I could hear the waves curling and folding over the rocks, the sea birds calling to each other. It was magical.
Throughout the week we have workshops from different songwriters and on the first day we always hear from someone who is a professional songwriter. For this retreat we had the incredible Rachel Sermanni, a singer-songwriter who writes stunning indie folk-pop that “speaks of the struggle and desire to Flow, to love, to live, to feel.” At the start of her workshop Rachel asked us ‘what is your current relationship with your creative process?’ Sometimes things just happen, right? People ask you a question or you hear something on TV or you read something and it just hits so hard. It goes right to something that you’ve been struggling with and worrying about, and that question absolutely did that to me. My answer was
“I’m terrified it will leave me but also don’t know how to make it grow. Desperate to make it my career but also want to be pure to the art. Need to be soaking in it but the frustration and desperation get in the way.”
I’ve been feeling frustrated with my so-called creative practice for a long time. And now, as part of my PhD research, I am required to analyse my practice, my processes, which makes me feel even more like I don’t’ have an intentional creative practice to speak of. I don’t have a specific workflow for writing songs, for making music, for producing in my DAW. There are so many things I would like to be on top of, especially when it comes to production, that would make things easier for me. I’d like to have templates, I’d like to have a lot of drum kits already made up, I’d like to have instruments that I’ve favourited so that I can easily jump into Ableton and start working. But I get so frustrated and feel like I need to hurry up, I need to get in and make stuff, not spend more time organising things. But that’s actually what’s holding me back. That frustration, desperation, urgency.
While I was still grappling with my creative process, Rachel asked us to perform a task; draw an animal with our eyes closed. I tried to draw a cat. When I opened my eyes I had this absolutely ridiculous sketch of the head of a cat with some shapes underneath it, and then what kind of looks like a ditto (Pokémon) beside it. I do remember drawing the body and the face, then moving my hand and not being sure where to put my pen back down, so the eyes, whiskers, and paws are all sitting just off to the side of the body of the cat. It kind of looks like in a cartoon when their eyes pop out, expect they’re detached. Before I’d even looked at it properly my partner saw it and started laughing and then I couldn’t even look at it, I had to cover it up. I love it now. I feel like it should be my logo for because it’s how I feel about myself and about my art; never quite close enough to where I want it to be.
That’s what started to come together for me while Rachel was running this workshop. I started to think a lot about how my sense of urgency, my frustration and desperation with my music making abilities, makes it harder for me to finish my work. I just want to be at the other side of it all. These thoughts reminded me of a playwriting course I did last year. At the end there was a Q&A session with the tutors and I asked a bit of a depressing question. I explained that when I had done my creative writing degree, which I finished in November 2019, I was ready to write my novel, I was ready to finish my short stories and pursue competitions. I felt so much hope. I felt like it was completely inevitable that I would be that type of writer and that a few years from then I’d have what I wanted; my first novel published. Three months after I finished the degree, COVID struck and the creative industries completely crumbled, and I gave up on that dream. So although I was excited to be writing again there is still a part of my brain that said ‘why bother? Creative work is pointless, the industry is overcrowded, there’s no room for you, you’re nobody you just got here.’ These seem like such valid points, and they stop me from spending time developing my ideas or getting any further with them. How do I move past that and write anyway? One of the tutors said she totally understood that feeling and advised me to make sure that I’m not creating from a place of hunger, make sure that you are soaking in the art that you want to make. Let it feed you. This idea, of allowing yourself the time to be immersed in art, is one I love, that I day dream about, but feel like I never truly allow myself to do.
The cycle of creativity
In the second half of the workshop, Rachel spoke to us about the cycle of creativity. She put it to us that there is no such thing as writer’s block, there’s no dry spell or down time or quiet season, there are just different cycles within your life which see us situated in different cycles of creativity. So for me, at the moment I should be wintering. I’m in the second year of my PhD, I am supposed to be learning new skills so that I can make all of my own music and building on my experience with songwriting, singing, performance. I should be reading everything I can, gathering information, talking to people, daydreaming, listening to records. But I am so, so keen to fully realise myself as a music artist/singer/songwriter/ producer that I just want to be there already. I am always looking around at people that I know and feeling that they’re doing better than me, that everyone is faster than me, that everyone is so much further ahead and I’m getting old and there’s not enough time for me to complete all the things I want to complete. And I might not be here in a few days, months, weeks, years. You have no idea when you will go, so I just want to make sure that I make the best art that I can. So then surely, for that to happen, I’ve got to do a course on keyboard, and I’ve got to like make loads and loads of demos, and I should spend a week just writing, but really I’m just getting in my own way. If I wasn’t so desperate to be where I want to be, I might be there already.
I want so much to have a career in music and a lot of the time I feel like it’s too late. I have so much to give, so much to express and to share and I’m so scared that I won’t have enough time to do that. I realise that I’m fighting my winter hard, but if I don’t accept where I’m at, if I don’t do all the foundational work of spending time with my inspirations, developing myself, I’ll never get where I want to be anyway. So, I am trying now to accept my winter. Maybe right now I feel, and look like, that crude drawing of a cat I did with my eyes closed, but when my spring comes around, maybe I’ll be beautiful again.
What do I do when the drone stops wailing?
At the end of these songwriting workshops the tutor will give us a task. Rachel’s one was very simple; take a drone and write whatever you hear coming to you over the top of it. I had the drone playing for ages, and I was getting nowhere. Then it stopped, and I noticed how much of a difference there was in the room without it. I could hear the house creaking in the sun light, the sea outside my window, and it made me think; what happens when the noise in your head stops, when the fear is gone?
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When the drone quits
What do I do when the drone quits wailing
soaking in silence
my eyelids
lit by the glow of a keyboard with a backlight
stripped to my fear and swimming in foresight
ghosts in the corner and my chest is airtight
I never get to sleep I got a dream in the daylight
Never gonna get to a place that I can’t see all of this dirt up on my one screen
never gonna get never gonna get
never gonna get never gonna get
what do I do when the drone quits wailing silence doing all the talking
never gonna get never gonna get
never gonna get never gonna get
What do I do when the drone quits wailing
soaking in silence
reflecting on the violence of self-doubt
so many projects never finished
so many songs I never wrote
because I was too busy worrying about life and being broke
down into the water deep up to my neck in it
feeling sick because I can’t swim but I’m not letting that get to me
for once
for once I’m giving in
push my own head underwater and I let the current win
What do I do when the drone won’t sing
what do I do when the drone won’t sing
what do I do when the drone won’t sing
I push it underwater and I let myself begin