2002-12-02 - 5:09 p.m.
I am writing an album. The album will will not see the light of day in our lifetime. The working title is ‘Children of the Stars’. I decided on the title some months ago and have not rethought it since, so I suppose it remains. The title-as-it-stands comes from Somabulano, Rhodesia-as-it-stood, in the year 1896.
The implication is of genocide, but the title makes me think of The Kids from Fame. I like this sense of ambiguity, although I also find it deeply offensive. Of such things is our age made.
Writing of the mental contradictions and snarls of temperament faced in such a challenge may, I hope, make illuminating reading – on top of which it ensures that something will come of the album even if nothing comes of the album (if you follow). It also allows me to update this journal without reheating the Passant myth.
My moniker for the album is ‘Passant’.
Tuesday, 26th November
An illustration: while waiting for the computer to boot up in order to write this, I picked up the guitar and pieced together, in the course of ten minutes, the sweetest song. There would be, I knew, the flutterings of a descending piano line over the bare pluck of guitar and plaintive vocal. And it would be, I knew, the closing track of the album: ‘11.45pm’. But I sat at the desk to write this and it’s all gone, all forgotten.
And that, my friends, is pop music.
It is, for a moment. And then it isn’t. Talking theology with a Quaker minister staying with us at the house in Walthamstow, we spoke of paradise and of infinite oneness, and I mentioned “spitting in the face of the infinite”. And I was thinking then, in a throwaway comment, of pop music. My beloved pop music.
Whether songs should be heartfelt, truthful, real, is really an issue for the writer alone and an absolute irrelevance for the listener. We want to be moved, and we’re not altogether concerned what cheap tricks are employed to this end. And for me, with half a desire to write honestly - or at least capture something of myself in my work – this constitutes the first major problem. How does one evoke emotion from the audience whilst simultaneously striving to evoke something of a rather cold and sullen individual? How does one turn into pop music something that doesn’t feel like pop music, without compromising oneself?
“I know.. life doesn’t seem to have a hook,
But I’m damned if my music is gonna follow suit”
- ill-conceived EverythingButTheGirl protest single.
- ”Compromising oneself”? And could you explain quite how the lies of a pop song can possibly compromise the truths of its writer?
- Yes, bad choice of words. It’s a given that only bad pop music will ever return to haunt its creator(s). And that, if your only desire is to speak honestly in order that people will listen honestly then - well, you’re damned.
- But you accept that this whole argument represents quite a contradiction within the ideas for this album?
- Yes. I do.
On the one hand, I want to make an album that I would fall in love with were I to discover it myself. As simple as that – to create for the sake of creating. For the sake of being what I love. And on the other, I wish for the album to state my case. Because if I can’t relate to it myself, then what does it matter to me if others do? I am not an automaton; I am flesh and blood. I want to create, and to find myself in what I am creating.
And there - I said ‘myself’. It stands out, looks a little naïve, and so it should. Norman O. Brown would have a field day. Because the answer, if there is one, is to be true not to myself but to myselves, to the self-mediated-by-myth. In my lies will you find my fingerprints.
Wednesday, 27th November
To put so much effort into communicating the fact that there’s nothing to communicate does almost seem a waste of a clear winter’s day. And I don’t believe I’m speaking of writer’s cramp, but of something more than that, something like a sign of the times.
- “But don’t you see? That’s the spirit of the age..”
So you work around the fact that you tend to sulk and clam up if you write about yourself too much. You distance yourself. You wheel out Nicholas Passant, and get him to write in the Third Person about someone who may or may not be yourself. After which, you change every ‘you’ to an ‘I’. Such are the mental contortions needed to get a line down on the page.
In your diary, where history goes to die.”
Thursday, 28th November
- “So it’s the most climactic pop music, something full-bodied, immediate..”
- “I didn’t think you’d be into that kind of thing. I thought you’d be into.. harpsichords and shit..”
The contradictions come thick and fast.
Friday, 29th November
If there’s one excerpt I think of more than any other, it’s this:
“And try letting yourself be carried away by your feelings, blindly, without reflection, without a primary cause, repelling consciousness at least for a time; hate or love, if only not to sit with your hands folded. The day after tomorrow, at the latest, you will begin despising yourself for having knowingly deceived yourself.”
And that’s why, if it’s to be anything at all, it has to be pop music; it has to devote itself to the moment and ensnare the listener at first glance. Because otherwise.. it’s too late, it’s old. Time is not on our side.
But songs don’t just appear in a flash. The decision to create them may, but the songs themselves have to be dragged into existence unbearably slowly. The concept has to be thrashed out, then the tune, the words, the structure. And that’s on top of – and this might just be me, I suppose – choosing an outfit and hairstyle to complement the feel of the song. The details, my friends, the details.
Those details, those intricacies which must be perfectly observed if the song is to come off, are the very things that make this such a painstaking process. Recording is presumably simple if you’re someone like The Datsuns, for whom strumming and grunting come naturally. The music, the recording, the rocknroll, are all much of a muchness, each an extension of the next. And I can only look on in envy, having spent days fiddling with midi files with very little to show for it. It stops being anything to do with a love of music, and becomes a simple test of endurance. And no matter how impatiently the ideas clamour, one still spends hours just fiddling with the filters on a drum sample. Time makes one pass after another, and you may find your will buckling halfway through.
“Oh, gentlemen, do you know, perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything!”
But how to express this without being overcome with doubt and throwing up one’s hands?
There’s the rub.
And that’s why I say: if you hold pop music near to your heart and don’t want your love to grow weary; if you don’t want to run up against the fact that a minute of pleasure has to be paid for with weeks of hardship; if you don’t feel like you have to – please take my advice and stay at the other end of the conveyor belt. Don’t get your hands dirty.
Saturday, 30th November
And then you see Kylie performing the Fischerspooner mix of ‘Come Into My World’ again, and you remember why you find yourself in the middle of this. Why the temptation was too strong.
Sunday, 1st December
So runs the epigraph (/taph) of the album. And I mention this because it occurs to me that I should give more of an indication as to the feel of the record, as opposed to the aches and pains of its conception.
To make quite sure that you’re concentrating on a coherent album rather than a few upbeat singles and a bulk of indieschmindie plodders, the first thing you do is to create a tracklist. Imagine that you were killing time in a large Oxford Street record shop, your mood depending upon buying something on a whim. How would you choose?
I suggest that you would examine the tracklisting for signs that the band are something you could hold up as a statement of your own identity and, just as importantly, for signs that the band are likely to have attractive hair. The two are really one and the same. The tracklisting alone should be capable of giving you that pop rush of anticipation. I once spent an evening heaping superlatives upon an Aaliyah album, before realising that I hadn’t actually heard it and had only looked at the cover in a shop. This is good.
However, I’m going to be coy and not include my complete tracklisting here, partly because it will change between now and then, and partly because I don’t want to give everything away this early in the game. Perhaps a couple of clues might be in order. There’s ‘Become as a Photograph’, the tune of which makes me think of a black hole, spiralling round and round itself and never reaching an end, and also of ‘A Perfect Sonnet’ by the ubiquitous Bright Eyes. I suspect that these comparisons are entirely wide of the mark, but a project like this does make the mind work curiously. This would have been a dirty sprawling rock song, but then I thought “why would I do that, when I can give it a perfect pop sheen?”, and that made all the difference. “A stream flowing into an ocean loses itself in anxious waves” – and if there were to be a single from the album..
There’s ‘These Summer Nights’, which I’ve made reference to previously, and which is a cruel duet; there’s ‘Hey Movie Star’, which is less angular than it sounds, and which will all end in tears; there’s ‘She Wrote a Novel’, which is a dedication:
Lovers in love with the lovers of a previous age..”
..and which does scan, actually.
Twelve songs in all. For half of the album I’m thinking of Kylie, and a quarter of it I’m thinking of Saloon. I don’t really know Saloon at all, but I don’t think that’s a problem. For one twelfth of the album I’m thinking of Abba. For the remainder of the album I’m thinking that this is all incredibly presumptious of me, talking of singles and record shops when most of the work is still to be done. I’m thinking that this is all much harder than it looks, and I’m wondering if anyone could burn me a copy of Cubase in order to speed things up a little.
In spite of these doubts, I can categorically say that I will never release a bad album. Granted, perhaps that means I shall never release an album at all, but the fact remains.
- References available upon request -
npassant@hotmail.com
