The Plague & The Cure

My Plague essays are something that linger in my imagination still, and although I haven't had the ability to publish them in recent times, I refer to old posts and I appreciate the beauty and the bravery, the vulnerability and the insight. Each one staggers toward some sort of clarity in way that scares everyone else, and I often remember the circumstances in which I wrote them. I typed Desire Lines into my phone whilst in the basement of the Parisian club, Les Bains. When I finished it, I looked up to find a new group of strangers, poised to make friends with me. I wonder how many more friends I could have made had I stopped to look up once in a while.

I have attention span problems now. I can really see it when I try to write anything. I can't go a few lines before grabbing for my phone and checking things, researching, generally figuring out what the rest of the world is up to. When I read, I feel bad for not writing and when I write, I feel bad for not reading. My mind is a like failing hard disc, my heart is a tangled mess of cords. I sometimes revisit conversations in the knowledge that it's all extremely fragmented, and I grieve, knowing that between the two of us, I am the only one who bothers to remember. As such, I redirect my attention and make synthpop at a frantic pace, all sugary and hectic. I love it completely. I do it for my younger self. 

I often think Plague essays are essential, and they would cure me, but I wonder if my heart or mind is really up to it. I think of how I'd still give anything for his name on a screen. It's a slogan for my ultimate fucking cure, and I wonder if I could commission someone to catfish me and lure me into a state of artificial peace. I long for this ineffectual casualness, a dialogue which discharges the connection of all its electricity. It needn't be so electrified in my heart anymore. I want to see a cad for a cad, and to relieve myself of some grief. I've earned myself some relief after all this time.

Heady States

"You have to remember the power of your words too. For you, it's a heady moment to forget but for me, it's waves of electricity coursing through my fingers. You touch me."

It's a quote that's lived in me for years and years and for some reason it came back to me today. It was from this English rock star penpal who I talked to online when I was 20. He hated that "rock star" label so much, but I can say he was a musician from some emerging indie band that managed to infiltrate the mainstream. We met during a phone interview: he called from London and I spoke into a microphone from my little radio studio at RMIT. There was a minor confusion in the set up, did he mean the interview was this Thursday or the Thursday after? The conversation itself was long, relaxed and languid. We would go on to send super lengthy emails to one another. Soon it became frantic texts in the middle of the night and eventually, some real or imagined romantic dimension materialised.

In spite of its brevity, the communication was electrifying. In retrospect, I see that everything was closely tied to his narcissism. I had granted him this unlimited space to speak about himself and his band and girlfriend and music and neighbours and festivals... that he never really bothered to find out anything about me. It was just how I wanted it. Each email sent provided this incredible opportunity to blend my favourite things: therapy, music and analysis, all the while obscuring the pathetic truth of my existence as a failing law student. Despite all that, he managed to infuse so much romance into the dynamic, that we may as well have been dispatching ink-stained letters in the early 1800s. I died to see his name on a screen. It meant he was thinking of me.

The fall out was devastating. He returned home from a tour in Holland and texted me: "My world's seismic. I've fallen in love. I need to talk to you..." I momentarily thought that he was referring to us but he would swiftly disclose that he was agonising over some other girl. She was with someone else too but they had been talking intensely for some months now. Since it happened, all those years ago, I kept on screaming into the ether, "HOW ON EARTH DID YOU HAVE SPACE FOR THIS??" It's hilarious to say it now but at the time I was completely heartbroken. For years I pined for his poetic turn-of-phrase, his dramatic sensibility and his over-the-top insistence that I understood what it all meant.

The story is more nuanced and detailed than that, but that's why I've written so many essays about it over the years. All coded, disguising the identities of the victims. He was intensely quotable: when I asked him whether he wanted to see me in London, he said: "I'd only see you if it meant more to me than it would to you." It was romantic while at the same time there was an ambiguity that would confuse you. He doled out phrases that would hold you tight and squeeze you like a boa constrictor. My hostel lover was a bit like that, coming up with expressions like, "Just because I don't want to remember, doesn't mean I can forget..." and "Every time you've looked at me and felt I've wanted to kiss you, I've wanted to kiss you..." I mean, what does that even mean?

I don't believe either of them were really in love with me when they said these things, but there was something in their capacity to say such things so beautifully and spontaneously that led them into this very intense kind of euphoria, like a creative flow state. They fell in love with themselves and their own poetics. I'm not sad about it, they were powerful lines, any one of them could be shoehorned into a jagged post-punk anthem that we'd sing down at the indie clubs. I miss their poetic desperation. I would give anything now for their name to flash on my screen, despite the pain, despite the fallout.

Blackout

I had developed this plan to cut out online living, in the vain hope of productivity and creative glory. The goal was to disconnect and focus on writing a script about the lyrical themes that appeared in Freddie Mercury's earliest compositions. I took a stream of consciousness approach involving a Parker fountain pen, dark purple ink and a grey thatched square notebook from Bookbinders Design. Paragraphs were dense, clean and unrevised, reading more like an academic thesis than a script for radio.

I broke my commitment to the blackout constantly, simply because I wanted to see his name in bold in my inbox, I wanted to read another message. I'd give him reports of my progress: "I'm still in 1969." He jokingly remarked that he thought he was actually hearing more from me now since I'd made that declaration to refrain from contact. He mocked me gently for it, only to make the bittersweet remark: "There's something very painful knowing that you can't contact someone if you wanted to, even if you normally don't contact them all the time."

We shared this mutual sense of urgency, this heady sense that we not only had to share many millions of stories, songs and ideas, but we had to do it as quickly as possible. It's a dynamic that I've since felt at the hostel, this intense connection and desire to convey everything well before check out. Despite all that, I've always characterised myself as a person who has had difficulties in being present. I had always figured that joy comes with meaning and meaning comes with retrospect, away and alone, at a desk.

I had assumed that my in-house best friend had learned everything there was to know, but then it was revealed that he knew nothing about radio, nothing of the blog, nothing of the writing. I kept on thinking about how odd it was that he didn't know, that in spite of all our time together, that once central and obsessive feature of my personality was no longer apparent. I then remember being struck by the existential quality of that connection. I remarked upon it at the time, that I was filled by this sense that I would only ever truly appreciate that connection in that very moment: "I've never been able to feel so present..."

Ambition tends to fall away with people like that. Hopes, ideas and plans tend to get temporarily suspended in the shadow of such a connection and I don't think it's a bad thing, necessarily. I like to think that it is because we are already fulfilling a more innate ambition to connect. There are many reasons that we create, but there is an essential component of it that suggests that we create to be remembered. When you connect with people like that, you have this vague sense of hope that you might be remembered forever.

Experts

Whenever we would have guests around, my Dad would boast about my ability to identify the year of any photograph, film or song. I would be sheepish, downplaying my mad skillz, but I've always made a point to ask the year of everything. Whether it's a deteriorated red hardcover book by Arthur Mee or a DVD of a J. Arthur Rank film, I want to know where it all fits historically. I need to develop this narrative in order to make sense of the past.

When my Dad and I watch old 1950s English films together, he always remarks about how sad he is to learn that all these actors have since died. Together we contemplate what they would have been like in real life, whether the cast were friends with one another, whether they were warm, kind or funny. We often know that they led tragic lives. They were either alcoholic depressives or else closeted homosexuals who would later commit suicide.

His knowledge of this particular genre of film is astounding and whenever we sit together, I encourage him to document all his observations in a blog or even a zine. I urge him to get in touch with his old English teacher, who coincidentally has written two encyclopaedias about the history of British film. He puts it off, expressing anxiety that he needs to learn more before finally making contact. I tell him to hurry up: we don't have much time.

I suppose we share not only the desire to be experts, but also that fear that we may never know enough. I wonder if we'll ever be ready enough to reach out to the establishment. I wonder if we'll ever spar with those we admire, in such a way that might suggest that our views might even carry some kind of authority. I look forward to that feeling that might fill me one day, that satisfaction that would come from knowing enough to finally move forward.

Highly Dangerous

Tantrums

I've recently developed this exercise to combat creative self-doubt. It's only a small act that takes place in my tatty magenta-coloured Claire Fontaine A6 cahier. I sit there and with Winston Churchill's Parker pen, I write the heading: What's the Nishi? It's Japanese Cockney rhyming slang my friends and I had made up: Nishinagahori / Story / What's the Nishi? We say it to each other all the time now as a kind of nifty in-joke salutation and in this context, I use it to drain out every fret and anxiety.

It's been hard, embarking on the Consequential Lyrics project on my own. I haven't had any sort of creative consultant on hand, someone to shriek and shake my arm enthusiastically during late night conversations. I've struggled in those moments when I've been compelled to pitch what it encompasses exactly. The premise is simple and intimate, it's both personal and universal. It's been hard but I've risen to the challenge of doing what the project actually requires: faithfully describing the consequence of these songs, sensitively describing the meanings I've assigned to them (without embarrassing anyone too much or getting sued).

In my practice of writing What's the Nishi?, I feel as if I'm sitting down to talk to a hysterical seven-year-old, one that has been throwing a tantrum for no discernible reason. It's important to to listen that raging child, to address them, to allow them to safely express their every angst and plague. At some point, there comes a moment when the anger recedes and the tears stop and there's no longer any rational basis for that anxiety. It's plain to see, in the matching magneta-coloured cursive print, that each of these anxieties can be broken down and addressed in a perfectly rational way.

There's another heading that comes after What's the Nishi?, I write in big letters: How to Progress? Under that heading, I try to combat those anxieties by being kind to myself. I try to think up practical solutions as to how to get over it, whether it be a practical obstacle or an emotional concern. I consider everything one at a time and I break it all down, thinking about what can I do today, this hour, this minute. I congratulate myself on how far I've come, the great amount of work I've already done and I acknowledge how good it will feel once it's actually completed.

I realised some time ago how much I've relied on other people for that creative confidence, how much I drew upon those shrieks and arm shakes. I thought compliments could fill me. I thought if I had enough of them, I would suddenly believe that my work had value. The problem was that I'd neither accept compliments or if I did, they would fade quickly. I never had enough to combat the self-doubt I harboured, but at the same time, I never wanted to quit. I just thought I was doomed to anguish: never believing, never accepting, always doubting.

I wrote a note for my desk:

Consequential Lyrics is worthy of your time and concentration. It is unique and it will encourage others to share something beautiful and important. A compliment won't make you feel better. Completion will.

I realised that's what I need to do to feel better, to calm the hysterics. I need to follow through, I need to complete this. I have forever dreamt of a creative compatriot, a Marr to my Morrissey (or even the other way around) and I wish I could have pulled this off with someone by my side, but I just can't. I just have to sit and push on through alone. I need to consistently convince myself that there is value in this. Whenever I begin to feel that hysterical child pipe up, I know that it's alright. I'll always have time for her, I'll always stop, listen and ask: What's the Nishi?

Aversions

The writing amnesty has come as a surprise. I figured I'd always write, whether it'd take the form of morning pages, essays, scripts, emails, tweets or text messages. Lately, I've refrained from words, from inkstained hands and repetitious thoughts. The amnesty has come as a surprise, because I had always believed that to write was to feel normal. Even the most meaningless, mindless, pointless thoughts - get it down and you will siphon your heart.

I daydream a lot, I nightwalk a lot, I process very little. My existence is vague but I never seem to shake that tyrannical sense of obligation, that feeling like I should be getting it all down. I should be committing to my past and my present, I should be writing to connect, to make sense of the love and the loss. I try to convince myself that the writing amnesty is some perverse therapy, that the undefined will obscure the grief.

I'll have to start again somehow, but I'm not exactly sure when it will happen. I'm still convinced that to write is to feel normal, but I'm not inclined to rush back to that sense of normality. I'll keep dwelling upon the reconstructive power of creative inaction. I would never recommend it to anyone, but I'll think of its function, during those daydreams and nightwalks. I'll marvel at how it can be so easy and so difficult, all at the same time.

Alignment

I'm not a great believer in fate, as such, but lately I've been noticing this feeling of alignment. This feeling that as one important person steps back, another important person steps forward. That every sense of loss is duly compensated by this overwhelming confrontation: I know we've just met, but I have this feeling we're going to be friends forever.

I feel great safety residing with my crew. Mini, Andrew, Missy Laur, Louise, Noreen and even OC at times. Even my exes, the greatest source of lost communication, have become supplementary members of my crew. They contact me when they witness a passing mention of the Smiths. Andrew says it is as if I have set them all onto Google Alerts and now they feel compelled to contact me, as I once felt compelled to contact them.

My crew are unrivalled in their patience, they are unrivalled in their compassion. They are more than familiar with my bullshit excuses, why I don't do radio, why I don't sing, why I don't write. I don't need to explain any of it anymore, because as we sip at our mochas at Madame Sousou, they understand exactly why I don't do it. Just as they understand why the hating gets as severe as it does.

I don't need to answer to my crew when I fall into a pattern of destructive behaviour. The levels of sympathy vary from friend to friend, but I ultimately return to the perennial advice of Mini: You are doing the wrong thing. You know what you need to do. Of course, it's true. I need to eat better, I need to sleep at night, I need to write essays every day. Unfortunately, it's advice I often ignore.

Inspiration, care of Pika Pika
I don't believe in fate, as such, but this alignment has come about from the rare inclusion of new friends in my crew. Strangers, sidling up to me, blinding me with enthusiasm and encouragement. Why isn't C&CM on radio? Why don't you make those documentaries? Why don't we start a band! My established crew have said exactly the same things to me millions of times before. Yet, I get off on the baffling selflessness of the gesture: hearing the same words from unfamiliar lips.

We may not be friends forever, sure. We may not even last the month. But I don't wish to forget this feeling I have now: People don't need to listen, but they do. People don't need to read, but they do. People don't need to care, but they do. Take responsibility for your art and start creating again. It's a miracle that they still care, long after you've stopped.

The Hip Tilt

I wasn't allowed to start a fashion folio, not until I had finished my Year 12 exams. My desire to pursue something fashionable, something artistic failed to impress my parents, but at this stage of the game, I could hardly care less. As my school friends got wasted, I bought a spiral-bound book with a translucent purple cover and I started to sketch girls, inspired by the pasted scraps of glossy paper ripped from fashion magazines. I started my first fashion folio, I started to imagine who I could be.

The girls I sketched were gruff, yet willowy, with side fringes and fashionably asymmetric garments. I drew awkward, couture dresses and near pointless white-singlet-indigo-jean combinations. All the while, I would pay careful attention to the female form. I ensured that each girl posed differently, with a head tilt or a fist clenched. There was always a cohesiveness about it, the eyes were always flat black lines, hooded to disguise any realistic demeanour. Their bodies were always stretched out and slimmed down to avoid any hint of a hip.


When I was meant to be studying for Criminal Law, I sketched furiously. I presented my initial efforts to my supportive best friend. After examining the drawings closely, she cried out: "It's great! You've got the hip tilt and everything!" I had never heard the expression before, but as she went on to explain the physiological significance of the tilt, it was the first time I ever considered that the hips might play some sort of a role in the balance and proportion of the female form.

It would take some time before I would accept the hips. I felt a great deal of reluctance to accept that curve: the exaggerated breasts, the small waist and big hips. I can only imagine this had much to do with those glossy images I poured over. In 2002, no such images were represented in the fashion magazines I collected. Yet I still admit, I wanted to be one of them, I wanted to be straight up and down, like a stick. I thought this was the absolute embodiment of sexiness.

Again and I'm not quite sure how, something changed, something in the public consciousness. I felt there was a greater acknowledgement of different shapes, of pears and apples and an almost universal adulation for the hourglass figure. Lovers raved on and on, insisting of how they unequivocally loved curvy girls, how they perceived hips as handle bars. Not only that, I spied Tyra's team of wannabe Top Models, discussing how they could effectively shape their body, to contort it in a manner that would exaggerate the curve I once so vehemently detested.

I never ended up drawing a girl with big hips. I gave up in 2005, three quarters of the way through my fourth fashion folio. I had presented my sketches, along with my stencil graffiti artwork to a panel of teachers, during an interview for a creative arts certificate. After I was rejected from the course, I could never bring myself to sketch again. It seemed pointless to imagine how I'd ever fare in trousers made of belts or a hoodie made of chainmail, inspired by the Smiths' Bigmouth Strikes Again.

I only recently started sketching again, I started teaching myself vintage fashion illustration from Walter T Foster's instructional book, Fashion Illustration 1920-1950. I love it, even though the girls are even more slender, stretched out and slimmed down. There are no hips, no breasts and only the tiniest waft of a waist. I do it, not to vanquish my own curve, but to embrace that simplicity of line and how it so easily suggests an arcane ideal of the female form.

The Rules of Productivity

In my time as a procrastinator, I have become attracted to blogs and other websites devoted to the promotion of creativity. They offer boundless encouragement and guidance about how to go about tackling your next creative project. This is often delivered in the form of a list: "Top 5 Ways To...", "99 Excuses For..." and so on. All the relevant points are provided in bold text, so it's that much easier to run away with that positive message. In later times, I have been a bit skeptical of (but no less attracted to) these types of sites. I have recognised that I fit into their market of the creatively blocked. This disappoints me, as it would. Blockages are unpleasant.

What compelled me to write a piece in relation to these types of sites is one particular article I came across tonight: The 1-Step Plan For Super Productivity. In essence, the article maintains that the secret ingredient for productivity is getting up early. There are citations aplenty, from Ernest Hemingway to the Harvard Business Review, but how do 99% understand the nature of my productivity? I've maintained apparently dysfunctional sleeping hours for the best part of twelve years, what's to say I'll produce work of a higher quality if I go to sleep at 11pm, instead of 11am? I am unlikely to ever cease my consolidation naps, am I doomed to be creatively unfulfilled for ever, so help me gawd?

What these sites fail to acknowledge is that you, as a reader have developed your own individual coping mechanisms. Instead of encouraging you to understand and appreciate how you work, they offer rules. I appreciate the positivity of the message. I understand that they want their readers to go on to create wonderful work. The fact is that we place too great a reliance upon what they say, without acknowledging that we have solved it all before. We know what we have to do to be productive and it doesn't involve bookmarking a list of excuses. It's about a fundamental recognition: there is value in your expression.

So what the hell are you doing here? Get on with it. I'm going to bed.

Jan Pieńkowski's The First Christmas

Damnatio Memoriae

"Alas, that the friend of my youth is gone! Alas, that I ever knew her! I might say to myself, "You are a dreamer to seek what is not to be found here below." But she has been mine. I have possessed that heart, that noble soul, in whose presence I seemed to be more than I really was, because I was all that I could be."

The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe

I once wrote that my writings were never about one person in particular. They were ripped up photographs of those I once loved. Perhaps that is selfish or vague, but I wrote and published work in the hope that they would read it and understand that I still held them in high regard. I could never communicate with them, not in the way I would have wanted. In any case, it isn't healthy or socially acceptable to be on such intimate terms with the past. Perhaps with such persistent feelings of yearning, I only ever wanted access to the past. I wanted access to a temporal impossibility.

I did love them, in the most authentic sense of the word. I loved their conversation more than anything else. Sharing witticisms over mochas in Brunswick St. Sharing music over MSN, mixtapes and long car trips. Sharing lengthy musical diatribes to one another. I was addicted to their words, not their lips. It was the truest form of intimacy for me, it glorified the past and challenged the mind. Now we cannot talk, I can only pass the things they would have loved, the things we could have talked about. Who knows what could have been said, maybe they had lost interest altogether.

There is no way of knowing their thoughts. There may be an oblique reference to us in a lyric or a tweet, but I would only be entertaining my vanity to wonder such things. Do they ever feel the desire to talk? To discuss the things only we cared about? It is like a young teen, angsting over a non-responsive crushling. In such circumstances I can safely say that in the case of personal regard, if one has to wonder how much they cared, they didn't care enough. Clearly, the Dolly Magazine education has worked a treat.


However, therein lies the paradox. I found their regard to be the most empowering, intoxicating thing. Friends, lovers, whoever they were, I saw these people as incredibly clever and enlightened individuals. But then, they swore that they did see something in me too. They spent hours convincing me of my skill and potential but I was too proud to acknowledge or accept their kind encouragement. It was a feeling of mutual awe that I could never adequately deconstruct. It was the clarity and the requited nature of it all never really made sense to me.

I didn't understand it, but I became addicted to that breed of attention. Although I would come to meet more and more people with similar interests, I was always in a perpetual state of mourning. I became addicted to missing my past. I grieved for one in the presence of another. I grieved in the knowledge that, in time, they would come to hate me too. Brothers and friends warned that this would be my undoing, but I have only realised its net effect in recent times.

It is when I revisited Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, that I understood what it is to be in love with the past. I always knew, on some level, that access to the past was analogous to access to my creative self. It makes sense when I think about it now. I would only feel spurred to create if I had their input, their influence and encouragement. In their presence, I was more than I was, because I was all that I could be.

So now I sit with my notes on how to build the empire. I wince and procrastinate and complain and I sniffle endlessly - I long to talk to you. You would understand all this. But somehow, I've realised that you, or rather the idea of you is all but a mirage. For all the laughter and compassion that we shared, there is a completely logical explanation as to why we must never speak. My desire for long winded d&ms is fuelled by the impossible situation we find ourselves in. We simply cannot speak. If my creative output is dependent on your speaking to me, I shall never get anything done.

That is not to say that I don't still love you. Our friendship was not a contract, where all our feelings rescinded upon expiration of the term. I will be forever inspired by your wit and your kindness and good taste, but I do not need to talk to you to be inspired by all that you gave me.

I do not need to know whether you remember me or not. I remember you.

Why I Can't Write a Song

When I think about writing a song, constructing lyrics, a melody, chord structures and a hook, I feel physically sick. It's been this way for a very long time. But now, in my attempt to cure my writer's block, Julia Cameron stylee, I'm compelled to write the story of how it came to be such a grotty, apologetic mess. If, for no other reason than to satisfy my own vanity, it may give my reader(s) cause to think about the nature of their own creativity and why we are sometimes discouraged from doing the things we truly want to do.

There was a time when I used to write "songs". I used to write them a lot, actually. I once boasted that I wrote 80 songs in one (particularly melancholy) winter. They weren't real songs, not in the strictest use of the term. They were more like loose leaf poems, folded and bound together by hair-ties, living in disused Walkman boxes. They were typically about adolescent anxieties, very emo in nature. At that time, I felt it was a legitimate, very private way to express my loneliness and frustration. I never reproached myself for it, although now I could never bring myself to read those words again - perhaps out of sheer embarrassment but most likely because anything more than a vague recollection of that time is simply too painful.

I can't deny that I had outrageous daydreams of being a "rockstar", in the true sensationalist meaning of the word. This was long before meeting Gordy who promptly asserted that the correct term was "musician". It makes me chortle, after all "musician" has so much more gravitas than "rockstar". Anyway, I had these preposterous ideas of somehow staging a concert on the construction site opposite my house and covering Don't Let Me Down. I harboured such an obsession over that song that I even took up bass in anticipation this concert would actually happen. Unfortunately, the house was built before anything eventuated. The annoying neighbours moved in who, in time, would come to reproach me for not earning enough money.


It's so easy but I can't do it, so risky but I gotta chance it, so funny there's nothing to laugh about, my money that's all you want to talk about...
I stopped writing my poems for one reason or another. I think I might have fallen in love, or else I might have shelved my emo tendencies and started being happy. Who the hell can remember anyway, it's hardly important. The fact of the matter is that I stopped writing these poems. For a little while, at least.

The second songwriting era occurred in first year university. I had actually sat down at the piano and composed songs about midnight adventures, lust and human delicacy. They were slightly more developed songs, perhaps by virtue of the fact that there was a musical accompaniment. But I have to say it, the piano parts were rarely very sophisticated. I was surprised by how awfully poor it was, given the years and years of music lessons I had to endure. Again, I feel embarrassed at the thought of those songs now. I feel embarrassed that we actually recorded demos for them in Bundoora. The piano drags and the pitch is slightly off and the lyrics are so derivative. It was clear I was trying to sound like Morrissey or Dave Gahan or maybe even Neil Tennant, but I didn't sound like any of them. It was just awful.

Yet in spite of my negativity, Laur encouraged me a great deal. As my best friend, she allowed me to record demos on her Minidisc. She would subsequently listen to the "album" repeatedly and tell me which songs she liked. I still have a text message from her from six years ago: "Your album has gone straight to my no 1 most listened spot! It's like you're always with me when I listen to it!" Her support didn't reflect any kind of musical quality, moreso a delirious breed of wholehearted loyalty. It's funny how we can never accept their compliments, no matter how emphatic.

The last song I officially wrote was "The Lost Weeks End". It was a play on words, relating to John Lennon's period of hedonistic inactivity. It detailed my period of depression after discovering my crush didn't feel the same way. I slept for up to 19 hours a day. I did it to numb the pain, to get through the hurt. I don't think I ever recorded it, the subject matter was just far too grim. After that, I stopped for good. I got involved with radio, fashion illustration and awkward romantic scenarios.

I never lost the yearning to sing or to write songs, but I was just so totally appalled at my prior efforts that I had no idea how to legitimately do it. I'm too afraid I'll make something hideously self-indulgent or infantile or plain fucking stupid. I'm too afraid that people are going to be able to identify what I'm singing about, who I'm singing about. I'm too afraid that I'm somehow going to drift into a genre of music that I quite simply hate, just because I don't have the creative intelligence to do what I want to do.

I must allow myself to bypass these fears and start again. Afresh. This can be the third era. This can be great.