All That’s Left of You and Me ….

…in the end, is a story.

Hello! Welcome to my webpage. I’ve been meaning to publish this for years, literally. But I think too much you see – that can get you stuck. When someone asks me ‘So, what do you do?’ (that lazy, barrier-building, box-ticking, question we are all guilty of asking at one point or another) I falter like a fool; with ‘but what is the most relevant bit of me to tell you about?! Which part (summated in a couple of sentences over this stupidly loud music) best communicates the essence of my me-ness? …‘

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We are the stories we tell. We are complex, walking, transient, ever-changing stories … in our own eyes and in the eyes of others (good for you if you’re an adept and succinct story teller!).

The apparent need for a music website led me to discover my capacity for procrastination, the extent of which I hadn’t previously explored fully. It’s been an adventure spanning many years down an obscured path tempting me onwards to the real possibility of becoming quite properly lost. It just seems like such a big ask, and a strange task: to summarise who I am and present it in a concise and entertaining package (to the entire interwebs none the less!) in order to sell my music. I’d rather do it face to face over a glass of wine to be honest. So who am I and what is my story? Or, at least, which parts of it should I tell you?

I find it fascinating to ponder the implications of the stories we tell; the stories that we build about ourselves and tell each other, the fragments of our story we choose to tell a stranger when we  first meet, the stories that people believe about us and then tell back to us in various ways reinforcing the weight of the story. We are walking story-books, continually written with every moment, by various authors. And we are stories that can never be read in entirety by any other single human being. There’s just far too much text, and the timescales don’t match up anyway … All we can ever get from the people we meet and love, is snippets.

Damn.

I began to wonder how much of our self-narrative can be constructed and how much of it represents the bare and raw truth of who we really are? How causal is the repetition of self-narrative in the formation of aspects of our personality we consider unchangeable? Can self-delusion become reality? (if I and those around me consistently tell me I am a superstar, do I eventually become the superstar?).  Is our reality constructed entirely of things made up – authored? Or is there some essential and immutable ‘me-ness’, my sub-conscious plot-writer, that is impervious to the insistent dialogue of my conscious mind? If you are convinced of Sam Harris’ argument that ‘free will is an illusion’ and that ‘we are no more responsible for the micro-structure of our brains, than we are for our height’ – then we are definitely not authors; we are no more than a sum of our biology, our histories and habits. He argues that thoughts arise in our minds from the obscured depths of our sub-conscious mental machinery, un-written by us, and completely out of our control.

Regardless of ‘who’ holds the pen, these internal and external narratives have a powerful influence on the unfolding events of our lives. Our thoughts, actions and experiences create our story, our character history, and hence the choices we make. Those persistent narrators in our head and from the outside world affirm our belief in our strengths, vulnerabilities and Achilles heels.

We write ourselves deeper and more solidly into our own character every day. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are distilled and then told to the world (through conversations and websites), which are further amplified by the people around us and sent straight back like a mirror; a positive feedback cycle. So be sure to tell yourself a great tale (I remind myself). At least aim for one you might not mind spending a couple of weeks reading in the winter of your life.

Since you’ve landed on this page and persevered to read this far, I should return to the point – an introduction; I was telling you my story. I have the opportunity to tell you the story I want you to hear. If I were business-minded I would try my hand at a little hero-making, it’s almost expected these days. But ultimately it’s just not part of the story I tell myself about myself. I can only tell you the story that I believe. And the only thing I believe to be important lately is honesty. Curiosity. Open-mindedness. Integrity. That’s what I’ve decided to strive for, in my own small way.

The world doesn’t need another false idol. Throughout the mind-boggling majority of human history, music and dance have been as integral to being human, as have been walking and talking. It is only a very recent development for our musical experience to be segregated into two categories – ‘those that perform it and sell it’ and ‘those that watch it being performed and buy it (or steal it)’. We have the recent rise of the religion of consumerism and marketing to thank for that.

We are human. If you talk, you can sing. If you walk, you can dance. It’s an evolutionary gift.

So that’s my introduction I guess. It’s not neat, and it’s still being written. In the end, all this is simply one more exquisite, messy, confounding, almost-already-over life story. So, even though you may have missed the beginning, welcome along. I’ll try my best to make it as non-fiction as possible.