Short version :)
These songs are very rough and far from finished.
Please consider I’m sharing the creating and finishing of over 50 songs I’ve written, from the past 7 years since Ploughed Heart and the suicide of my partner and bandmate Liane Ashberry, and a few other traumas on top.
It is by standing in the fire that we become fireproof.
And do we make life hell because we fear death that is not.
The password is alansongs
It's the story of my life so far, and in some ways the stories of all of our lives, which I can only begin to explain in songs.
Whatever we imagine we make real.
Long version :)
These are my songs in development, the stories of my life so far.
This is a work in progress. Most of it is extremely rough and far from finished.
Please understand that professionally made music tends to undergo several - 20, 50, or 100 or more stages of refining, re-writing, editing, whatever - until a work is ready for releasing or publishing as a 'finished' piece of work.
It's the same for books, architecture, and fabulous inventions, etc.
This is not to say that great powerful creative work cannot be made and published in a few seconds; it can be; but there seems to be a correlation between:
enduring creative works of big scale,
and the time taken to develop and polish them.
the investment in learning and experience
Please consider also that when a creative person produces great creative work seemingly quickly, it's commonly the case that he or she is able to do this because of many years of learning and experience, including making lots of mistakes, and all the emotional challenges that this entails.
I do not put myself in that class of person. I'm just a speck; a very ordinary man, trying to re-invent myself and stay viable in a world that mostly seems to me like a parallel universe in which I do not belong.
Put more dramatically, I am a dead man in a world of the living.
Or more optimistically (for me) and potentially (but not intentionally really) insultingly to most other people, I've been to hell and back quite regularly, and so I'm somewhat fireproof now. I am very comfortable with grief, suicide, death, mortality, being alone, uncertainty, trauma, silence, hill-running (for several hours if I choose), and a few other things that most people prefer not to discuss, let alone think about for hours.
This is my investment in learning and experience, among other gifts that have shaped me until now.
creative work and creative thinking
I am in some ways baring my soul in the belief that you and others will see that creative work:
is both immediate and natural,
comes to us, perhaps rather than needs chasing,
is in anyone's heart and mind and power if you want to do it,
emerges in many of us more easily and powerfully from struggle and/or trauma,
and shows the infinite power of the mind and soul - your mind and soul.
There is a soul within creativity that through our mind reflects the creator's life and experience, and there is a discipline to developing something creative into something accessible and rounded and of a great quality; and all of this can be profound and existentially challenging.
This means it can make us wonder about life, both:
at a deeply scary level,
and that is also deeply joyful and beautiful.
Some people refer to the climax of love-making as a 'little death', which in evolutionary terms equates to conceiving a child, and I like this reference very much.
There is something beautiful about engaging with the cycle of life, and what ultimately creates new life, and our mortality as a doorway to the love of living.
As new life in all forms is being created, at the same time parts of life are dying.
In recent human history people have become increasingly detached from this relationship.
And this detachment is a denial and fear that has enabled us all to be enslaved in many ways.
We have become each of us a prisoner and guard holding the keys to our freedom and growth.
We will find and use the keys to freedom when we realise that we must change how we imagine freedom - how we think - in order to change how we live and die.
"If you keep on doing what you've always done, then you'll keep on getting what you've always got."
And:
"We cannot solve any problem by using the same thinking that created the problem in the first place."
you will find this much easier than I do
You and others will find all this much easier than I do…
The full article is at: https://www.businessballs.com/blog/songs/
which is where I’ve done most of my existential writing for the past couple of years.
(I founded Busnessballs.com over 20 years ago.)