Some Lyrical Reflections

In this post, I want to think about the ways in which we come to recognise our own selves as they are reflected back to us via the song lyrics that we consume. In my previous blog posts, I have emphasised the importance of lyrical output in my own life, describing this as a valuable (if not essential) creative channel that has helped me to deal with some difficult emotional experiences over the years. My relationship with lyrics, however, is most certainly a dialogical one. Whilst I’ve worked as a vocalist songwriter and lyricist for well over two decades, encompassing various different projects, I have been captivated by the affective power of song lyrics for as long as I can remember.

For me, as a writer and as a consumer, a degree of ambiguity is enormously important. As such, I find it difficult to engage with some of the very specifically prescriptive (or explicitly political) messages that some artists tend to favour, preferring to engage as a listener in a process of subjective interpretation… i.e. what does this mean to me? Whilst (as followers of my band, The Reasoning, will know only too well!) I do draw my lyrical inspiration from some quite complex theoretical ideas and concepts, I try to weave these into far more accessible narratives. Script-Switch Trigger (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lx_51yMv3p4), for example, was inspired by Victor Raskin’s work on the semantic mechanisms of humour[1] – but I have re-framed his ideas in more human terms, thinking of the “trigger” he describes as a person, rather than a linguistic technique. Apophenia (from The Reasoning’s new EP), meanwhile, borrows this term – which refers to the spontaneous perception of meaningful connections between unrelated phenomena – from psychiatrist/neurologist Klaus Conrad[2], but uses it to describe some of the interpersonal misunderstandings that feature so significantly in our relationships from time to time.

As a listener, meanwhile, my most memorable experiences are usually those which involve an uncanny sense of identification or recognition: the feeling that the lyrical story I was hearing was written specifically about or for me. Sometimes it’s interesting that feelings we’ve been experiencing for a long time cannot quite be accurately or properly recognised or articulated until we hear them sung to us by someone else, prompting us to acknowledge that a problem exists and must be dealt with. Sheryl Crow’s song Home (1996) functioned like this for me, not least because it seemed to be re-telling my life story in almost exact detail. I felt as if she had read my mind. I listened to this track repeatedly, almost obsessively, gradually coming to terms with the emotions that I’d been repressing for several years, and confronting the fact that monumental changes would have to be made in my own life: changes that it took me another eight years to mobilise. Towards the end of this eight year period, I vividly remember being completely transfixed by Keane’s second single Everybody’s Changing (2004) whilst listening to it on the radio. This time, I felt as though I could – and, indeed, should – have written the lyrics myself, so accurately did they represent my own state of mind. Similar feelings were aroused by Marillion’s Fantastic Place (2004), which lamented my increasing desire for escape from my then current situation.

Some of these experiences and memories, I think, attest to the emotive power of music, and also the communicative potential of good lyrics. I am thankful that, having re-constructed my own life for the better, I no longer need to write about my own feelings in the third person, and can draw on personal experience for my lyrical inspiration without using my work as a means of purging my unhappiness. Such days are long gone!

As always, I encourage you to share your own thoughts on this topic here. Since my last blog post, I’ve received many, many very touching personal messages, and am in the process of responding to these.

Thank you for reading, and for trusting me with your memories.

“Afraid of feeling nothing/ no bees or butterflies/ my head is full of voices/ and my house is full of lies/ and this is home…” [Sheryl Crow: 1996]

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[1] Raskin, V. (1944) Semantic Mechanisms of Humour. USA and Canada: Kluwer Academic Publishers

[2] Conrad, K. (1958) Die beginnende Schizophrenie. Versuch einer Gestaltanalyse des Wahns. Stuttgart: Thieme

My Life with Film(s)

In my previous post, I focused on the notion of change. In doing so, I touched upon my memories of one significant “moment” which seemed to herald the beginning of a series of important changes in my own life, and I linked this to a specific film-viewing experience. It’s these film-related experiences that I want to consider here in a little more depth. I encourage you, as always, to think about whether you have known similar ones yourselves: and to share your accounts of them here, if you’re so inclined.

    For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by the dynamics of the film/viewer encounter, and it is therefore probably unsurprising that these form the basis of my PhD thesis… but more on that later. For now, I want to try and maintain an autobiographical “voice” here, and to tell you about some of the ways in which film has been so meaningful for me on a personal level. I find it interesting that I can still recall key film-related memories in such rich detail; often still with a powerful sense of how each experience really “felt” at the time. Many of the people to whom I’ve spoken in the course of my research link such memories quite nostalgically to their childhoods and yet, for me, the most powerful cinematic encounters seem to have occurred much later on in life, and are not exclusively organised around happy feelings. I’m also fascinated by the sheer diversity of reactions produced in different people as they engage with the same film(s).

    To begin, I clearly remember having watched Blue Velvet [David Lynch, 1986] for the first time, aged about seventeen. During the screening itself, there was no sense of being shocked by the film (despite its arguably disturbing nature), and neither did I consider myself to have “identified” in any significant way with the film or its characters. For those of you familiar with Lynch’s work, this latter point may hardly come as a surprise! In the few hours that followed, however, I began to feel peculiarly unsettled and, most frustratingly, found myself unable to find the words to properly describe these feelings. Indeed, my attempts to communicate my emotions to my co-viewer were met not only with resistance, but with downright condescension. Even after many, many years, I have yet to brave this film for a second time, and look forward to revisiting it at some point in the future. A similarly unsettling experience ensued upon seeing Fatal Attraction [Adrian Lyne 1987] a year or so later. This time, I found myself terrified by the extent to which I seemed to have identified very closely with the “wrong” character: [Alex Forrest/ Glenn Close], since it was so clear to me that, as a spectator, this amounted to a violent transgression of the expected or appropriate responses encouraged by the film. On this occasion, I felt so ashamed of my own emotional reaction that I dared not share it with anyone at all, fearful of being terribly misunderstood.

In my previous blog post, I recounted a more positive cinematic encounter. There, I recalled how a repeated viewing of one of my favourite films – if you didn’t recognise it from my description, it was Labyrinth [Jim Henson, 1986] – quite unexpectedly gave me the courage, after many unhappy years, to leave a terribly damaging marriage, and to begin building a new and satisfying life for myself.

For the academically minded amongst you, the notion of ‘neutrosemy’ is useful for theorising such wildly disparate audience responses: this describes ‘the semiotic condition in which a text allows for so many divergent readings that, intersubjectively, it does not have any meaning at all’[1]. I explore this concept in detail as a part of my PhD research, and it certainly offers a fascinating way of thinking about how and why we engage with films in such diverse and dynamic ways. Such moments have also influenced my lyrical output, of course. Inspiration for the track Pale Criminal from The Reasoning’s new EP, for example, was drawn in part from my responses to another favourite film: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [Michel Gondry, 2004]. In this song, I explore the feelings about human love that this movie awakened for me.              

There are many similar film-related memories that I might have included here. I very much enjoy taking the time to reflect on these in personal terms, and have also learned a great deal about the process from a more academic perspective. Please do share your own experiences here, or comment on the ideas that I’ve raised in this post: your feedback is most welcome!

“If I could have it all, if I could do it all/ do it again/ if becoming you means nothing new/ just more of the same…”  [The Reasoning: Pale Criminal]

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[1] Sandvoss, C. (2005) Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity pp126 

The Thirteenth Hour

I’m delighted to see that my first blog post has been viewed nearly 300 times already, and hope that those who have visited enjoyed their reading.

This second entry is about change and, as such, I’d like to share some rather more autobiographical experiences here. I’m fortunate to have met and engaged with many interesting and inspiring people over the last few years, in pursuing both my musical and academic endeavours. The theme of change is one that emerges quite frequently in shared conversations, and I’m fascinated by the powerful – often polarised – feelings that the notion itself seems to provoke. Moreover, I want to think here about peoples’ accounts of a significant or pivotal moment in their own lives which sometimes marks the onset of such a process.

For many years, I lived in fear of change, and assumed that I simply preferred to operate well within my “comfort zones”, rejecting new ideas and experiences because I felt them to be threatening. In principle, by accepting this, I ought perhaps to have been at least fairly emotionally content. This couldn’t have been further from the truth, however, and it is only in hindsight that I am able to recognise these assumptions as the powerful unconscious defences that they really were: defences which served to contain the inner turmoil with which I was struggling at the time. These feelings became manifest in various ways; not least as a continual sense of restlessness and persistent feelings of loneliness, anxiety, and despondency. Since I was only just beginning to develop the incredible network of friends with which I am today truly blessed, it is very fortunate that my roles as singer, songwriter and lyricist provided me with a creative outlet for these powerful emotions. Indeed, it was primarily this outlet that helped me to hold onto my sanity, and there is a significant body of my work which, to this day, reminds me of the dark and terrifying psychological places that, thankfully, I no longer inhabit.

My own pivotal moment emerged without warning during a repeated viewing of a favourite film. A combination of some powerful symbolic imagery – a clock delineating thirteen hours, and a line of dialogue (“you have no power over me”) – served as the catalyst for me to begin deconstructing the boundaries of my life as they existed… and to start building new ones. Almost a decade later, I barely even recognise this previous version of my own self and, since then, I have achieved more than I ever thought possible. Interestingly, I have also transformed my whole attitude to change more generally, and it is no longer something to which I relate so passively. Of course, life does occasionally have a habit of inflicting the unexpected upon us when we’re least prepared! Not only do I now embrace such challenges with confidence: I actively seek out fresh ones as well, and try to do something new (no matter how small) every single day.

I’ve been lyrically inspired by my fond memories of that key moment: music lovers can hear this in the track entitled “The Thirteenth Hour”, from my band The Reasoning’s third album Adverse Camber. For the academically oriented amongst you, meanwhile, such moments might be understood in psychoanalytic terms, specifically in relation to Donald Winnicott’s theory of ‘transitional space’, which he describes as ‘the third part of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore, an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute’[1]. Alternatively, perhaps, we might think of them as “ruptures”, which result ‘from the unexpected fusion of various spheres of [our] experience’[2], and motivate people to ‘define new identities, new skills, and confer meanings to their trajectory and their world’[3].

I’d like to invite readers to share their experiences of similar moments. When did they happen? What were their defining characteristics? What did you learn from them? How have your boundaries been irrevocably changed as a result?

Until next time…

 

It’s not unlucky

Are you free, are you happy?

This is thirteen: the space between…

 

 

 

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[1] Winnicott, D. W. (1971) Playing and Reality, New York: Routledge, pp2

[2] Zittoun, T. (2006) Transitions: Development Through Symbolic Resources. Greenwich: Information Age Publishing, p6

[3] Zittoun op cit, ppxiii

Bringing Down the “Walls”…

The aim of this post – which constitutes my first foray into the world of blogging – is a scene-setting one. I’d like to tell you a bit about me, about the kinds of things that I’ll be doing here, and about what it is that I can offer you, my new readers )

Whilst this is by no means a self-help manifesto, I do want to draw on my own experiences (many and varied!) as a way of encouraging others to feel more confident about challenging their own beliefs, values and ways of “being”. Put simply, I want to suggest ideas, raise questions, and encourage you to do the same. This is a process that has served me very well in the decade since my own mid-life “experience”. Looking back, I would have loved to be able to find and share inspiration in a place just like this one… and so I hope now to provide that here. For you.

Given that I am by profession both a rock musician and an academic, readers can expect to find a diverse range of topics and themes here, ranging from the psychological and philosophical to the cultural, cinematic, musical and existential.

My central concept here, however, is the notion of boundaries… hence the Walls of Wonderland cited in my blog address. Some questions might be:

• What kinds of boundaries (psychological and cultural/social) are imposed upon us from outside, that is, by the society in which we live?
• What are the boundaries that we impose upon ourselves from inside? How do these ideas and feelings define what we can do… and what we feel that we can’t do?
• What are the idealised “wonderlands” against which these boundaries are constructed, and why do these matter?
• What can we learn from taking a more critical perspective on our own “comfort zones”, and what these represent?

I ask these questions because, not so long ago, I had to ask – and then answer – them all for myself. I’ll reflect on this in more detail later down the line. As a result, I am now stronger, happier, more confident, motivated, dedicated and driven in every single aspect of my life, whilst also being peaceful, centred and always open to new experiences. I want readers to make these things happen for themselves!

I’ll draw this first post to a close here, and welcome your comments and thoughts. I aim to post regularly (at least once a week), and to take things from there.

Pieces of this life divided/ no regrets, no compromises…