Hey.
I feel like I need to collect my thoughts on things that happened recently, so I'm doing it through here. It's craving an update anyway. I started writing on this two months ago to try and motivate myself through unemployment and gain some more skills whilst doing something I love. I really enjoy writing and it was good to sharpen up my skills, teaching myself the ropes of critically reviewing music, as well as giving me a chance to practice Press Releases and other useful things (as boring as press releases sound, a good one goes a long way - more on that in a bit).
Ultimately, my interest in this led to me setting up an 'internship' (i.e. going to hang out in an office and listen to music a few days a week) that helped get the job centre off my back and allow me to focus on gaining some more connections/understandings in the music industry. I also helped run a few little PR things for other people which was interesting, as well as doing a PR campaign for my own EP which came out today - you can check it out on Bandcamp (https://armedtotheteethuk.bandcamp.com/releases) or on the player below, not even ashamed of plugging it. Turns out it's a little difficult to do PR for the whole bedroom Dave Grohl rock band project though, so I'm gonna end up doing another campaign a bit later on around that to start building on it instead.
I also started writing for Independent Music News, which has been great and I've been exposed to a load of new music through that. The downside of that is that it's something else a week (on average) I have to write, which cuts into my practice/recording time, which has also been neglected as of late and I really need to sort out soon... Notice a recurring theme?
All of this scattered approach and lack of a solid routine got compounded lately by a lack of reliable income - the job centre is anything but reliable -, trying to navigate around the job hunt and then good ol' bureaucracy when I finally got a job offered and my nana passing away about a month ago. That last one really got at me, understandably. I remember talking to her a few weeks before she passed, and her still being there in some sort of manner or faculty, still smiling and joking with us, even if it exhausted her. Then, frail shell under strip-lights, still listening, still trying to respond, but the body just wouldn't let her.
I've been thinking a lot about death for the last year. I've been thinking about how, no matter how crap the last few years and these obstacles are, I don't have the same self-destructive urge or drive I used to have. Hurting or killing myself didn't cross my mind at all, even when I felt at my lowest and that I would never achieve anything, so I guess that's a positive in some regard. At the same time, I've been wandering in the land of the dead, thinking about how I'm going to be judged by others when I've left this world. So far, bad luck and bad decisions have landed me in this situation where I'm struggling to make sense of the world and mediate my place in it, quarter of a century down the line. I try not to be full of rage and anger anymore, and I try to just breathe it out like the hot air that it is when it threatens to choke down on my lungs; sometimes I slip, but I have to pick myself up and carry on and try not to beat myself up.
As much as I fantasise and fear about dying, I'm still alive. These thoughts and fears are legitimately universal, so I'm at least drawing inspiration from them and the next few things I'm gonna record will probably address that. But I'm trying to claw myself back from this nihilistic rut I'm in. I'm trying to turn my negatives onto their head; I can't control my age and all of the events in my life, so it's just a number; decisions I did make, I can own them and accept responsibility for them, which is really positive and empowering, even if what happened is crappy. I can learn from them to make sure I don't fuck up again (like that Menzingers song "how do you make sure that something like this
won't ever happen again?", sometimes it feels impossible but you gotta try). And even though it's taken me a long time to get to this point where I can start building, and it's gonna be even longer still before things start paying off, I just think back to two years ago where I was a wreck, where I was bandless, jobless, alone, damaged and back in my hometown, thinking that this was it, this was all there was ever gonna be. I've at least changed most of those things, even if it's only been small steps. So. Yeah.
I'm rambling.
Anyway.
The cut of this all is that I'm starting a new job next week. I'll have a routine and I'll have stable income. It'll allow me to focus and stop wasting my time on crap, start developing myself as a musician, writer and person in loads of different ways and ultimately be able to live without as much worry and anxiety. I also want to start writing for this blog again and throw myself into more writing side projects. It's fun, and it may take off at some point in the future. Who knows. You gotta start somewhere.
Give my EP a whirl, I'd appreciate it. It's raw as hell, and there's a lot of stuff I'm working out in terms of fixing for future releases, but at the end of the day, I really like it and it is a good snapshot of the mindset I was in these last few years.
I'll probably stop reviewing submissions and start tackling things I really want to talk about. Hopefully it'll be once a week. Once a fortnight at least.
Yeah.
That's it.
see ya
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