Empty Head For Drawing

I have been writing so many songs: it has been the year of the song. As well as collaborating with Robert Rotifer and with The Desperado Housewives, I've written with Kenji, Michel (both lovely songs that will remain hidden for a while until the other two collaborators are ready), George Barker (ha! just wait till you hear that one!), Jem Price from Asbo Derek, and Shola has just been in touch to say she is using the song Fog that I helped her to finish in a film pilot she has made in LA. Every week we do song circle: Katy, Rowen, Nadya and me, each of us with a song completed ready for Friday the effort of which is pushing us to the limits of our creativity. 

I've learned to record (almost) radio friendly quality songs on my home computer, and to speak many different song languages, both technical and emotional.

I've been teaching song writing, pulling song writing practice to bits and putting it back together again and hoping the students hiding behind the neutral initialled discs on Microsoft Teams at least have some understanding of what I'm on about. 

My guitar is like a third arm just there with the other two, and ready to be commanded into action.

One day, I'll return to the call of drawing. I have had such a good idea, and I've tried to draw it, but really it's a film, an animation of a macabre children's ritual that will literally last 15 seconds. I can't animate for toffee: I've been doing the same embroidery and photographing it for animation for more than ten years. I know animation's slow, but that's positively glacial. So the poor sad children's nursery rhyme will never see the light of day: or rather, the dark of night.

All of my creativity seems to have poured itself into music. Maybe the type of grief that's around every corner at the moment is assuaged more by music than by visual art. Almost everyone that I know has lost someone this year. Some people want to talk about it, some don't, but the noise of the loss is deafening, regardless of which of those two avenues they choose.