(Notes for) A discourse on (some of the ironies inherent within) Cosmic American Music

You always have to be wary of anyone who claims they are seeking ‘The Big Music’. Have you seen how large that sky is? Do you think the troposphere is waiting to be crooned to?

**

Of course, this would never work as an album cover. Men, at a subliminal level, would be too disturbed by the subversion that is going on here. A woman in black coming out of a white desert to make music that seduces us? You can hear the ponytails of the old rockers flapping away as they quickly reverse away from the newsstand – the inversion of the power relationship inherent in most rock and roll will clearly be too much for them to handle.

**

Everyone has a story, where they were in a pick-up band at school. Mine started and ended after one gig when I was 16, playing rhythm guitar on ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash at a Christmas concert. Nothing exciting about it, apart from the fact that the girl I’d been trying to chat up for the last three months, who’d been getting ever-more efficient at ignoring my entreaties, was down the front, eyes glowing – and looking at me.

Ah, I thought – that’s why you do it.

**

(Notes for) A discourse on (some of the ironies inherent within) Cosmic American Music

You are being misled here. The savants know how to fill space yes – but they also know how to manipulate time to their own ends – make a memory last an album, an arpeggio last an eternity.

**

Yeah, but seriously, where’s her amp?

**

I was like you once. I loved this stuff. I lived for this stuff. I thought I could make a living out of writing about it, writing for it, serving it like one does a mistress who you don’t dare to displease in case you lose her.

Then I had my heart broken by a woman who refused to become my mistress, and do you know what I found out? That none of it works. Music doesn’t salve you, doesn’t save you, doesn’t hold you tight. Sure, it might say it wants to, make a sweet little melody to suggest it feels for you, knows how you feel. But it won’t be there come 10.37am in the morning when you finally wake up and think ‘how long is it until the pub opens?’

No, by then, it’s long gone, spinning and entrancing its next set of irrationalists, dreamers, the irredeemable hopers who still believe.

God, I still want to be one of them.

**

What most photos of musicians don’t show you is The Devil, just out of shot saying, “Yeah, I got nothing.”

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Oh Hayley, I wish I could find you again.