Last weekend I was heading to Bore Place with my guitar and, arguably, an ambitious number of notebooks.
I had been invited down to a songwriting weekend in an old manor house in Kent by the unbelievably generous Tom Robinson. The idea is that 12 people gather in a place for a weekend, cut off from the outside world, and try and write 20 songs. As soon as I was invited I spent the next week wondering what exactly to expect. Tom and Sue (Tom’s partner) had provided plenty of information, but my being unsure was more about what it would be like working in an environment like that.
Collaborative work when it comes to music is something pretty new to me. I’ve done some here and there, but generally it has been done more remotely via email or messages on Facebook or something, adding parts and gradually building something. This is a totally different kind of collaboration to sitting in a room with someone and just writing. Read the rest of this entry →
I am an atheist. And there is often an inherent difficulty when entering a dialogue about religion. People can become offended by what comes out of it. My hero, Douglas Adams (I wrote a post about him yesterday), put it this way:
“the invention of the scientific method and science is…the most powerful intellectual idea… it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn’t withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn’t seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That’s an idea we’re so familiar with…that it’s kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!’ If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it…But, the moment I say something that has something to do with somebody’s (I’m going to stick my neck out here and say irrational) beliefs, then we all become terribly protective and terribly defensive and say ‘No, we don’t attack that; that’s an irrational belief but no, we respect it’.”
I am not in the business of offending people. And I am not in the business of accusing those that hold a belief in a god or gods of being foolish or unintelligent. This is an unfair and unreasonable stance to take, in my opinion. There are historical, cultural and social reasons that people find themselves holding a belief in a god. Although I may have assessed the situation from my perspective and come out the other end as a firm atheist, I don’t take the attitude that those that have not done the same are, somehow, unreasonable.
I do, however, think they are wrong. And this is where Adams’ argument that religion, like anything, should be open to discussion is realised – I respect a person’s right to believe in a god, but I happen to disagree with the conclusion they’ve arrived at.
I was very conscious of how I was discussing religion when I wrote my novel because it could, at times, seem as though I am directly mocking anyone that holds a religious belief. I was extremely careful not to be outlandish or aimlessly provocative in my writing, but the entire premise of the book (and the original idea) comes out of an interest in the subject of why people are so drawn to religious beliefs in the first place. And I am interested. Fascinated, actually. Although I am of the opinion that a belief in a god is an irrational belief, I can rationally understand why such a belief would exist. Read the rest of this entry →
This year I took on a project to release one original song for every day of the year. It was a reasonably ridiculous idea. I’ve been thinking a lot about why I did it, and I’m still not entirely sure why. I think it was partly down to boredom. It might also have been because I’d been writing songs for years and was interested to see how I’d do with song-writing deadlines. I had gone through a little spurt of song-writing towards the end of last year and wanted to see if I could take something on that would force me to learn how to write better songs, and just to see if I could do it. So I think that’s what it was at first: an experiment. I enjoy a challenge (which is helpful), and this project was certainly a challenge. The way I’ve always written songs is to play around until the beginning of a song emerges and to then commit to it and try and finish it in one sitting. It seemed like a natural progression to see how many times I could do that.
Today I finished the thing. So it was definitely a success in the most basic sense, but for someone who relishes in cynicism and self-deprecation I’m surprised at how much I feel like it was a success in other ways. Read the rest of this entry →
IF AT ANY POINT YOU GET BORED DURING THIS POST JUST COME BACK TO THE TOP AND CLICK THIS LINK AS IT’S BASICALLY WHAT I’M TRYING TO POINT YOU TOWARDS THE ENTIRE TIME.
As I’m hitting a point where I’m about half-way through the 10th month of this 365 project of mine I realised a couple of things:
1. There have been several points throughout the year when I might’ve muttered to myself ‘I’m almost there’ before having to correct myself that I most certainly wasn’t. However, now I feel like these mutterings are becoming increasingly truer. I am almost there.
2. This both pleases and saddens me. I cannot wait to finish because I’ll just be so proud of having actually done something on this scale. Having an idea and then seeing that idea through is just something I’ve always loved to do. There’s something great about having something inside your mind and then making it physical. It will, I think, be tied as my greatest achievement so far in this little life of mine (tied because I’m pretty proud of that novel I done). However, it’ll be really weird to not have to write a song every day. It’s become a pretty big part of my 2011 to make time every day between all of the other crap I do to sit down for at least half an hour and make something new. Normally it’s more than half an hour. Normally it’s late into the night. I am beyond tired this year. Read the rest of this entry →
Ross Exton produced some brilliant lyrics about the history of scientific discovery, which I proceeded to insist on bawling over with my jangly guitar and whiny vocals. He then produced this video accompaniment, which is useful because I think it would be hard to hear what I was actually saying at times.
My name is Ardie and I’m prone to making things. I made a novel, I sometimes make songs, I released 365 of them in 2011 for my Cooper365 Project for some reason, I sometimes make flash fiction. This is just a site where most of this stuff I seem to make is kept.
