on yearning

Who am I and what am I doing? Thinking about repetition, longing and direction.

There’s an idea that every songwriter is just writing the same song over and over again. Not literally in melodies and rhythms, but in what the song is trying to express. It’s been on my mind a lot. It follows me around as I try to explain to new people who I am and what I do. I think it applies across creative practices, to anybody trying to make anything personal and meaningful. There is some tenet of your being that you are trying to convey, and there is no perfect way to express it, and so it keeps finding ways to re-write itself, re-emerge in something new in an attempt to represent itself clearly. It keeps coming back because it’s impossible to capture it from every angle at once, and it won’t let you forget it.

This week somebody I’d just met asked me to explain the music I make - what I write about, and why I do what I do, and what exactly is it? I was drawn back to that thought, what is it that I keep repeating? Why do I do what I do? What am I repeating, what am I trying to explain? I know that I’m trying to be emotionally honest, vulnerable, earnest. I have talked for hours and hours about how I want to translate my emotional experiences tangibly into a song, in ways that people can understand and connect with. But what experience am I actually trying to convey? Those ideas are theoretical, academic ways of describing what I make which allow me to remove myself from the conversation about the ways I’ll go too far, put too much of myself on display. Ultimately I want to leave a song open enough that there is room for somebody else to project themselves into it, but what am I actually trying to write about? What do I want to be seen?

There’s another element to my writing too, which is repetition. I am always asked why I use repetition in songs. People say to me in every interview, ‘your use of repetition is almost mantra-like, what is the reason for your use of repetition in a song?’. It’s a question that sends me into a sort of daze. I hear the start of the question and I glaze over as I start to repeat the same answer I’ve given hundreds of times. I am bored of it, so maybe I need to start thinking about it differently.

Life itself is repetitive, people are repetitive. There’s something in me that wants to describe itself, that keeps me striving for the same thing over and over, obsessions. Life is repetitive because it takes us a long time to learn what we are doing and who we are and why, and all the while I am yearning to get there. I use repetition as a way to drive home a point that I’m still not getting. It won’t go away until the message comes across. I’m circling until it makes sense, or until I get there.

I know it’s a meme right now, 2024 year of yearning etc., but this year I learned that I am always yearning and longing, and that is a huge part of who I am, how I keep going, and I like the feeling. I am realising slowly that it is this experience of longing that I’m trying to convey through the things I make, the thing that I keep repeating. I don’t let go, I keep trying. Yearning is a huge motivator - for a time or a place, for a feeling, a person, a future. Yearning is what keeps me moving, repeating, creating, and it keeps me loyal and thoughtful and alive to my own life.

I am energised by process, by having a direction, by the idea of something beyond what is in front of me. I’m yearning for a better world, for the person I love to come home, to feel safe, to be the person I’d like to be, to do things that I believe in. But it’s not what I am yearning for that makes yearning so engrossing, it’s the action of moving towards something itself.

I learned recently about the Sufi concept of the state of spiritual yearning, or talab, the idea that our birth is a marked moment of parting with God, and how without yearning for perfection, for divine love, one cannot be compelled to embark on a spiritual journey to be united with God again. I find this idea really beautiful. Yearning is a state that you do not choose, one that lands on you - in this system as a gift from God, involuntarily. Yearning is a result of the shock of learning that you are the sufferer of your own circumstances, and the arrival of an inclination towards changing them, in this case away from earthly matters and towards a spiritual life.

In Sufism the most powerful force in existence is divine love. Divine love is understood as the deepest love that lies within ourselves, and to be on a spiritual path of yearning is to be awakened to our own ability to love and be loved. I am not sure where my personal beliefs fit into this religious framework, one that sees itself as the essence of all religions, but I am yearning to be close to life and to love. Sometimes God is ambiguous, ambivalent, present in absence, but if God is the energy of life that is everywhere, creative, loving, I am trying to move in the direction of those things.

I can understand my own yearning as a way to get there. I can imagine beauty and joy and love and I want to move towards it. The more examples of possibilities for living that I encounter, the more I can see that there are other ways of being than my own, current state. Yearning can land on you out of anywhere. It can come from a dark encounter, a terrible story, or from a glimmer of a hope, an inspiring idea, a wonderful person. I am moving away from the bad, or I am moving towards something good, either way I am moving from old to new, I am on a path to something other.

There is a simple sincerity within yearning too. To yearn freely you not only have to accept your current reality, be aware of your true wants and needs, but also willing to accept those needs, and to long for something other than what you currently have. It not only requires self-knowledge, but also self-acceptance and the desire for the possibility of the existence of something different and more meaningful. It is both dynamic and receptive, it involves being open and being patient. It is a state full of potential.

Personally, I find yearning fun. It is in yearning that I have found room for playfulness and laughter where they may have otherwise been missing. I yearn because I am devoted. I am devoted to making music and art, I am devoted to my band, I am devoted to my friends and family, to my relationships, to my future, to the future of the world. Yearning is the duty I feel to see things through, to show up, to be open and connect with the people I love. To be devoted to love. To combat grief, and grief is everywhere.

Yearning is what allows me to expose my innermost thoughts and feelings in ways that I instinctively find shameful, and to overcome that shame. Because I want to be the kind of person who can be open, who can share how they feel and not be embarrassed. I want to use the space that creativity affords me to bare myself emotionally, to learn how to open myself up and share things that I do not instinctively know how to share. And it is only through some strange driving force that I keep attempting to do that, and learn how to do it better each time.

Within the Sufi concept of talab, once someone is on this path there is no stopping them, there is no choice to be driven towards something. Regardless of the hardships faced as you move, you keep moving. Why am I compelled to do anything? I’m seeking perfection restlessly, trying to be a certain kind of person who knows how to communicate something ineffable about myself. I’m writing the same song over and over again in case I could find it, knowing that I never will. I am on a path of self-discovery, and it is being on the path that gives me peace, not actually getting there.