Lemon drizzle
Thinking about songwriting and how everything I write is about me, not the thing it's supposed to be about
I’m back in my bedroom in London, sitting at the desk by the window, looking at the street. Flowers on the bushes are still somehow bright and full even if a little sparse. The sky looks big and soft blue, big wisps of thin clouds all over it. The winter feels dirty and dusty. I am tired and happy and full of emotion.
Every so often a week comes along where I don’t have to leave London to travel someplace. When a week like that comes around I buy a lot of vegetables and I cook them and eat them and I don’t worry about not having enough time to do that. It’s incredibly grounding. It feels like the only way to know where I am.
I grew up cooking and baking a lot, for myself, for my family and for my friends. It’s a very intuitive and calming process. It often feels to me that cooking is the most fundamental creative process. It’s how I show love for myself and for the people I care about.
This week I bought squash, plantain, chillis, parsley, kale, mini cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, shallot, onion, carrot, lemons, potatoes and avocados, and this morning I woke up and wanted to spend time thinking about eating. I grated squash, added eggs, chopped parsley, chilli, and shallot, flour, salt, pepper and egg and fried myself some fritters (which I ate with avocado and lemon). An edgy latke (happy chanuka). I also made a lemon drizzle cake today. It feels good to be still for a minute and to feed myself the way I want.
We’ve been in pre-production sessions this week as a band, working on new songs and really getting sucked into the details of them. It’s been incredibly fun and incredibly exhausting, like a really loud puzzle. It has also meant that I’ve been thinking a lot about what the songs I’ve been writing over the past few years are about, how I want them to sound and feel, what I’m trying to convey through them.
We’ve been talking a lot about our own mythology. Every band has its own history and philosophy of self, things that you feel define what you’re doing and how you think. Often that mythology is accidental and unconscious, sometimes it is only when someone new comes in that you really notice or articulate the way you do something and find out why. Our bassist Dan only joined the band this summer, at first just as a session bassist after Maddie left the band in March, but is now playing with us regularly. His being around a lot and being new to our dynamic and process has held up a mirror to the way I think about writing, and the way we develop songs together as a band.
The way I write is often to wrap a song around a poem, to follow the meter of the poem and let the arrangements follow. I think in words and melodies, find accidental symmetry and lean into it. I try to communicate a feeling by streaming that feeling out of me and hoping the words and the melodies will catch up. If I’m uncomfortable, I want the song to feel uncomfortable to listen to. If I’m heartbroken, I want to break your heart.
The songs we are working on at the moment span the past few years, and sometimes I have found it incredibly painful and frustrating looking at the words I’ve written two or three years ago and feeling like history keeps repeating itself through how relevant they are to things happening now. Singing words now that I wrote years ago that somehow still apply to new situations is confusing, makes me wonder if situations ever really change, if I really am growing, if I am doomed to keep choosing the same things that do not seem to work forever, stuck in a loop. And if a song is about a specific time or place or person, does it belong there, to them? Do I really want to bring them with me into the future? It can be painful revisiting something or someone that would be easier left in the past. Does it really serve my wellbeing to mark this moment and keep coming back to it?
The other night Dan made the point that songs, poems, stories aren’t about people and places, but they are from them, about what you take from them. On a basic level, as a fan, that’s important to remember - you can’t ever really know what someone wrote something about, how much is fiction and how much is autobiographical. Fans can be obsessive, think they know what an artist is going through, want to be there for them, think they are friends. Sometimes people need to be told how to understand a metaphor. But equally as an artist, it’s helpful to remember - sometimes it is a metaphor, and sometimes it may be literal, but it’s about how I experienced the thing, not the thing itself. It doesn’t belong to anyone or anything external, but maybe reflects whatever it is I’m bringing with me as I leave that place. I’m not writing about what happened, but what it left me with.
Songs will always be emotional experiences for me, not historic accounts of people and places, but a way to reach out, connect and process something. I remember after a particularly painful break-up, years ago, playing a show and suddenly being overcome with how the heartache I was feeling was written into every song - even though none of those songs were about the person I was relating them to. And those songs didn’t help heal me or make it worse, it was just that I was relating to them from heartbreak, so of course I read more heartbreak into them. Once I started to be able to compartmentalise everything a little more, and get some space, those songs started to feel exciting, vengeful, loving, angry, whatever else I needed them to be again. It’s so much easier to get sucked into simplifying everything and relating it to the current thing I’m feeling than it is to notice the subtle differences between now and then, zoom out a little bit and to allow myself the space to relate new perspectives to old feelings.
And maybe what I am slowly figuring out how to articulate is that a song isn’t tied forever to the moment that inspired it, the meaning I find in anything can change over time to relate to whoever I am in the moment I’m re-living it. As a fairly prolific writer and regular performer, that’s hugely helpful in letting go. It’s from you, but it doesn’t belong to you. It’s about me and it is whatever I need it to be.
P.S. This is the first post I’ve written since sharing this page publicly. Thank you so much if you have subscribed. It means a lot that you’re here. I’d love to know if there’s anything you’d like me to write about - just drop a comment on a post.
Thank you for letting us peak at your creative process! I would like to add that, as a fan, your songs are also tools of wisdom for others, who can process their emotions and better understand some situations through them. I wonder if you can also feel that energy when you perform them? The gratefulness we have for them - and you! - to have helped us?
ps. loved the food part