It's a funny
thing but after writing and recording this record and the accompanying book in
a quick flurry of creative energy, I only got a chance to reflect on what I was
thinking after it was done. Actually, that's how it usually is how it is for
me. I read the other day it takes Kazuo Ishiguro over five years to write a
novel, so maybe he does the reflecting and mulling over work as he goes along.
But that's what I like about songwriting. The immediacy of the form and the
temporality is often thrown in the songwriter's face as a criticism but
reflecting after the point of writing brings more to say about the moment in
which it was conceived.
This isn't actually to say I take it lightly but when I heard Leonard Cohen took years to write Hallelujah and he still wasn't happy, I was trying to consider what he was thinking about. It's not my favourite song, far from even being close, I much prefer the slicker, spontaneous Cohen in some of his less heralded songs (I think it's the internal and external heralding of Hallelujah which turns me off). But I realise now it was the effort to make it epic and deep and meaningful which stripped it of it's vitality. It lacked the immediacy of the cultural moment that writers such as Mitchell, Lennon, Dylan, Reid and Springsteen deliver. But I digress. I have come to realise that one of two things might happen as I write, which influences the rhythm and lyrical patterns. The first is that I write songs intuitively as an internalised, emotional response to something I can't quite figure out, or say out loud and the second is, it's not until later I realise that the tidal tugs which bring the ebb and flow of life events into focus, start to be reflected in what I was trying to say. It's a kind of mixed up, combined idea of analepsis and prolepsis. While I can be writing on a topic like homelessness or social concerns like forced migration or even Amelia Earhart's feminism, the underlying themes also reflect a subconscious concern (if concern is the right word) which I have stored up from past experience.
Let me try to explain analepsis and prolepsis in this regard, it's less complicated than the words might suggest. Prolepsis is a projection of the future from the present, it's where and what we think the future (even tomorrow) will be, as informed by our past experience while reflecting from the 'now' of our own story. Carol King singing, will you still love me tomorrow isn't really a question but a rhetorical hope that you will. Analepsis, looks back, not forward, at the experience of what went before but which impacts on the 'now'. Childhood experiences, broken love affairs, heartbreak, young love, all the accumulated speedbumps in our life's journey which bring us to who we are. So, Carol King singing, will you still love me tomorrow, is aligned to the simple fact that past experience also says possibly not. Simple huh? When I'm songwriting, echoes of my past inform the lyric as I reach out in the present to where I am going in the future. The whole Fisherrow project is infused with this idea and its only now, after looking back at it, I can see the book and the CD aren't about nostalgia but hope for the future, and the wordplay isn't play at all but actually a voice finding a space to speak. These echoes we hear are our own thoughts, the continuities we carry with us through our lives, even if we don’t own them as anything but vague memories which take us forward.
