denouement
The EP and everything that has gone along with it has been one of the more interesting experiences of my recent life, if not the most defining. Not just because of the music itself or the project finding its feet, but because its development mirrored a lot of other changes or ran in tandem with them. The whole experience of it has been wrapped up in so many other moments and life processes, through all of which it has been there as a kind of constant, whether at the centre or circling around the fringes somewhere. So much so that part of me maybe thought that in getting it finished other things would fall more firmly into place, if only because the surrounding times have been so transitory. So far that hasn’t happened so neatly, although through everything that has gone on much has become more grounded, or better understood, even if not all the way settled.
Writing posts about the songs was meant to be a way of opening up the process of making them in greater detail. I’d originally thought to do this while the work was actually underway, but found it too difficult to write about something in detail that I was already spending so much time on and thinking about constantly. I was too close to it then. In doing it lately, I didn’t want to have a set agenda with what to write about. Instead just look at different things and follow whatever thread happened to appear. So some entries ended up focusing on technical details, or songwriting, and others on subject matter, context or even related bits of personal history. There’s probably much more I could have mined in terms of particulars with some of it, but I didn’t want them to turn in to essays. A friend of mine told me the other day she felt like the posts were ‘introspective’, and maybe that’s true, but I hadn’t really thought of them in such a way. I had wanted to peel things back and look behind them certainly, getting into the how’s and what’s with it all in an honest way, but I’d figured on it ending up more clinical than actually introspective. She’s right though – doing it has granted a lot of insight into the project as a whole, what it is, where it came from, and where it might go.
In the end writing the entries been more than just a useful exercise in better grasping meaning and connection. It’s allowed me to better understand much more than that, what they and the process of getting there has meant outside of the scope of the project; which is something that I didn’t have access to while I was working on them. Truthfully, I spent a lot of time bogged down in it all along with the sometimes uncertain circumstances of life, and there were many times where it seemed like there was no purpose to be found, connections vague at best, notions mostly confused. Now though, I’ve discovered that there was far more at work there than I was conscious of, and hard as it often is, that it’s really the smaller/quieter moments of certainty that are more worthy of attention, even if what they might mean is beyond immediate awareness.
So with that, I’d like to give a sincere and heartfelt thank you to the people who have supported me during this and have helped in doing it. It didn’t happen overnight, and there are some folks without whom it wouldn’t have been possible. Thanks as well to those who were a big presence while it was all happening, to the people who have been enthusiastic to see it finished and who have helped put it out there or passed it along. And of course, thank you to everyone who’s listened, bought, and taken an interest. It means the world.
