There have been multiple times in my life when I found myself obsessed with something that felt too “me” to have been created by someone else.
Lyrics that hint at emotions you’ve never seen anywhere outside your own heart. A melody that slices you into two. A story with characters who illuminate the darkest corners of your psyche and give new meaning to old experiences.
Years ago this kind of feeling made me uncomfortable, or even filled with rage. How could life be unfair, to give someone else the means to express things that felt like they belonged to me.
As time went by I discoveres that those feelings, while rare and difficult to express, were merely visiting, and that as I evolved, new space would open up that made them seem smaller and less central to this being I call “me”.
I began to see them more as visitors, and if they could visit me, they could visit someone else.
I also began to see that no one had given anyone the means to express anything. Those brilliant works of art were carved by hands that had earned them. They had put the tine and effort into learning how. They’d built up skills, whether fine and polished or rough and raw.
There may have been shortcuts available but there was no half assing it. The shortcuts opened up from true effort, exploration and honesty, not out of luck.
I slowly learned how to pursue those things and failed enogih that failure no longer scared me.
Now I see those people who have been visited by the same apparations, who have felt those rare blends of emotions that I’ve struggled to express, and it fills me with a very different feeling than before.
It fills me with fire.
Not rage.
Not frustration.
Drive.
I’ve made it so far, it shouldn’t be much longer before I can sing what needs to be sung at just the right moment, in just the right way. In some ways I’m already there.
Just recently I found myself enamored by a band who I have run into in the Tokyo scene. For two years I fantasized about collaborating with them or even just knowing them.
I felt the pull towards wanting to treat them as a means to an end. If they could help me, I could become like them. But if I treated them as just objects to serve me, what could only expect the same from them. That is not what I want. That is not how you earn the power to make it rain.
And now each time I see them create something that could have come from me, each time I see them shine, I am reminded that I am just a few steps behind, and that there may be melodies that feel more me than even those. I’m drawn to see how we differ, and how there are things I can sing that they will never be able to.
Even if their melodies or lyrics feel like voyeurism into my dreams of everything I hope to be, life is guiding me on to create things that I didn’t even know I eas capable of creating. Not better. Not worse. But more sincere, more honest, and more fitting to me, as their songs are sincere, honest and fitting to them.
This upcoming live album “Resonance Experiments 1-2” will be a declaration of a new era for myself and anyone who chooses to join it, where all things serve as fuel for dreams, and none are quite so far away. From there work on the studio album will go into full force, aiming for a summer release.
And here’s a tiny clip from one of the songs:
This song keeps evolving
