There's a lovely moment at the end of the movie "Almost Famous" when the band frontman Russel - responding to the question "what is it you love about music?"  - responds with: " to begin with? Everything." 

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I can't think of a better way to put it : Everything.

 

And when I stop for a moment and (foolishly) try to comprehend the mechanics what music actually is, (in a brass tacks, nuts-and-bolts way) I start to almost lose my mind. Think about it: basically, all of this endless joy and euphoria and transcendent feeling, merely the effect of some sonic vibrations traveling through the air and entering our ear canal.... and somehow taking an express elevator, straight to our gut. 

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Miraculous. Glorious. Totally, utterly insane.

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As the writer Walter Pater summed it up, brilliantly: 

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"All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music."

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No, really - what else even comes close?

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Songs...songs...songs. Like most people, I love songs: I have thousands of favourites, thousands that I've played thousands of times, and will play a thousand more times. 

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It's a fool's errand trying to theorise what makes great songs such miraculous things ....but here goes:  

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We're all of us a nice bunch of guys, as someone once said.  

Noone is just one colour - we're all walking jigsaw puzzles and mosaics, made up of so many fragments....scraps and pieces of time, isolated moments, feelings, memories.

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For me, the glorious wonder of songs - and why I love them with a passion - is in the way they somehow distill the essence of these kind of moments and fragments into a few short minutes.....and at their best, can somehow make the intensely personal gloriously universal, ....and the universal, beautifully personal.

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Every time you listen to the song, it takes you to a place that exists exclusively only inside that precise combination of words and melody; AND it's a journey you can take repeatedly, over and over - and always as though you're taking it for the first time. That's alchemy, pure and simple: witchcraft, even! Sorcery! That four piece group from Liverpool with the funny haircuts would definitely have been burned at the stake if they'd been born a few centuries earlier....

I think anyone who winds up making their own music essentially does so out of a craving to be an active participant in that wondrous process. Certainly that's how it was for me. You're like the child watching a magician at a friend's birthday party, thinking "how does he DO that?...I want to do that too!"! You want to somehow affect others the way the songs have affected you, make people feel what your favourite records make you feel. Just the thought that something you created can change someone's world, or alter it slightly - even just a little bit -  is utterly mind blowing.

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Maybe one of your songs makes the listener smile...makes the sun shine a little warmer that day, or gets their foot tapping along; or maybe, just maybe - and this is the ultimate dream scenario -  something in the melody or the lyrics gives them that delicious, incomparable, unmistakeable shiver of recognition, when they go, " I know this, I've felt this" or, " this describes that feeling better than I ever could in words". It's like how a favourite jacket or pair of boots just feels like you.... feels like home. It doesn't get better than that, and all the great songs have that in common. That's my ultimate musical aspiration  - that something I wrote somehow becomes someone's favourite jacket, or pair of boots!

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So - all the above is just a (very) roundabout way of explaining why I love music, and why I started composing my own, way back when.....

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I initially spent years of happily noodling with clunky tape recorders (oh joy!), amassing cassette after cassette of song ideas and sketches before realising that I hadn't managed to flesh out a single one of them into a proper song! I realised then that a spark or idea can come quite quickly, but it takes diligence, focus and time to work that raw material up into something that deserves the name of A Song.

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There's no feeling like listening back to a finished tune and thinking, "I made that!" (allowing that it's any good, of course) As a natural high, it's up there with the best of them.

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However, you then have a decision to make: Do you leave the recording to gather dust in a sub-folder on your desktop, (like a rose wilting in some dark broom cupboard) , or take a deep breath, and release it into the wild? A while ago I would have said that "creation is its own reward and an end in itself". But now I think the truth is that, ultimately, songs are meant to be listened to.

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In fact, maybe a song only becomes a song when it's listened to.!

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So as scary as it's been to send my songs out into the world, I'm really glad I mustered the courage to: it's been such an enormous buzz when anyone has responded positively to something I've created. Music has given me so much, and it's a joy to feel that I'm able to contribute to the great glorious stockpile of songs which exists in the world, in however minor a way.

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If you get a moment to lend an ear, I hope you enjoy my music as much as I enjoyed making it.

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Thanks for reading to the end of this piece: I know I've gone on a bit, but there was a lot to say! I'll be trying to post regular write-ups about all aspects of music and music making, so watch this space.

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Now, if I can just write that perfect song.

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(Well, you have to dream big don't you? )

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Stay safe and happy listening!

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John  :)