#Scurf124: Currently: main character energy
Ed Sheeran, Courtney Barnett and Leonard Cohen
I haven’t had a moment these last few days to come here and so it’s safe to assume that I am quite brimming with ideas. Earlier this week I was having a crisis at my desk, with a recent publication (my debut run-in with trolls was only every bit scary, nothing glamorous about it) and since have been trying hard to keep it together. Simultaneously, I’ve had a raging backache, a tooth issue and then several other problems that slip through the cracks and re-emerge. Main character energy.
As of this moment, I have no thoughts. Just “persist.”
And writing this post on Scurf today has been a way to break out of the tedium. To allow the stress a resting place, and let my words take off from there.
Off late, I’ve been really into Ed Sheeran’s music. His songs’ lyrics, flirty vibes songs are all consuming. In addition to the latest numbers that I can’t stop looping on, I’m also quite enjoying Give Me Love. In that it almost feels like 2013 all over again.
A year so potent, pivotal, penal.
My life took turns personally as a dumped a long time painful boyfriend, and professionally as I decided to quit trying to be a lawyer and then again personally as I applied for a masters in English Literature.
Sheeran’s music then formed the background score to pretty much all of my life at the time. In his tunes I felt protected, looked out for. Therefrom I also gathered an un petit courage to be bold enough to secretly apply for the MA. The preparation was feverish, and the exam went well. But as happens with all things that aren’t meant to be — I never heard back from the university.
No one told me that the university doesn’t get back, you have to doggedly scour for the results and lists. Anyway, it was December of that year by the time I figured out that I had made through the second cut off. And at the time everything was so miserable. I was suffering every single day, clueless with just this music saving me from my own immediate world.
Now that I look back at it, it was all mostly heavily emotional music getting the better of me. The Blower’s Daughter, Summertime Sadnesss, Gimme Love, Let Her Go, Chandelier, Wake Me Up — pretentious, bursting, but promising. At the time I also used to keep a list of things I wished to write. The list was long, obnoxious, and frankly, oozing with the heat of frustration. At some point it got long, so long, that it felt equal parts depressing and terrifying. My desire in its breadth and width, the full, sheer extent of it all — a brilliantly terrifying little thing.
On a hot July morning, freshly out of a courtroom, as I waited for the next case to be called out, I slipped out that piece of paper and tore it to bits. M83’s Wait swelled up in my beat headphones as I dumped that ball of paper solidly into a nearby dustbin. When the next case was called and I was asking for an adjournment before the horrendous judge inside court number 13 of the Delhi High Court, I remember fighting to keep the tears back.
A single thought boomed inside my head: “I will never be a writer.”
What a dope!
Why did I tear off that excellent, biting, terrifying list? I was being full of myself, of course. But also really, really real.
These were the few songs in my life that created a halcyon mood, a sugary syrupy chimeric mirage that all might not all be gone at all. With them as background score, however flippant and simple they might’ve been, the discography of my life felt weighty, even fraught. I was meant for better, bigger things.
It would only be a matter of time that I would discover other artists whose writing would pare by anxiety down even further. The excellent bones of Rhye’s The Fall, the messiness of Wolf Larsen’s If I Be Wrong , the choppy lyrics of Sharon Van Etten’s Seventeen, the scratchy tunes of Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile’s Continental Breakfast turned those torn, discarded pieces of me into a body, full of life and longing. They made the lifeblood of my thinking, creating, writing mind, transforming it little-by-little each time I looped them on.
What do I have now?
I listen, write and live in the shadows of all these songs that made me. The music that came at the time when the chips were all but down and then the tunes that laid the way forward. This evening as I listen to Laura Marling’s What He Wrote, another set of words appears from the ether.
I don’t rush to write them, instead allow them to simmer. I situate myself in the office chair, caressing gently my bruised back, and allow the words to mill about in my mind. I will wait till I am fully marinated in the aura of these instructions, only then sitting up to saturate the page with them.
Writing’s a slow learning. Just like life, it comes gently, gradually. As it should.
Closing this newsletter with a snatch from a conversation between two favourites. Actually, scratch that. An exchange between a god and a favourite. Isn’t it moments like these that we come to art for?
Leonard Cohen & Damien Rice!!!
I write very rarely about music and so if you liked reading this, would you considering replying to this little poll? This will help me ascertain if I should write more often on music.
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