I'm Lost, Please Help Me #5
So often we don't recognise the important moments while we're living them.
Why do we remember so many insignificant life moments in amazing detail... and completely lose some of our most special?
I just released a song called Asleep, A Dream.
It wasn’t intended to be a single; too long, too instrumental, too much of a strange, drumless breakdown in the middle. Yet people kept coming back to it. It’s been repeatedly played on radio around the world by my favourite jazz and jazz adjacent DJs too. So I listened to you all and put it out.
When I came to write about its creation though, I realised, unusually, I couldn’t remember it and even more unusually, I’d documented none of it.
In recent years my habit has been to film a lot of my process, not for social media (although it helps) but because my work can be quite fast and my music theory is limited. So when one morning I write something on guitar and love it, I’ll probably also mic and record it that moment and start building a song around it. That guitar, that morning will often be what appears on the record, and in the years between making the song and releasing the record I may never play it again. I film myself so that, should I need to remember it, I can quickly see what I did even if it’s not obvious to my ears.
But there’s nothing for this one.
What I do remember…
It was August 2022. It was a few days after a significant one-off gig in Crystal Palace Park with the London Mozart Players (a five-piece string section, four horns as well as my full band and Cleveland Watkiss). Me and Sas had been out of our house for a month in March because of building work so I spent a lot of late spring/summer putting my studio back together and not working much. I’d been in therapy for the first time as my mental health hit significant low after parting with Wah Wah 45s earlier that year, a decision that, although for the very best, I struggled with badly at the time. By August I was starting to really grow from the talking and the meditation it had introduced me to. I was starting to feel a peace in understanding myself that was new to me.
From a musical perspective, I remember the studio was a mess and my gear was mostly packed for gigs or rehearsals around Nothing Feels Like Everything album shows. I remember too, that at the time writing had become something I did constantly, even during moments of upheaval and big work loads like this.
I know I wanted to make a “big song” like Theme For Us or The Pile. I wanted to create a big intro like Theme For Us but I didn’t want to use production tools and play like that one, I wanted to compose it. I remember the urge for the middle eight to soar off to higher plains and that I couldn’t make it work. And I remember being inspired by the strings from Diana Ross’s Brown Baby after hearing it on the radio one afternoon.
But I don’t remember playing one single note of this song!
Is that strange?
Memory means so much to us, I pride myself massively on how near-photographic mine can be. I can remember the location of objects fleetingly seen months ago, I can remember the patterns of how songs go and the chords from ones I wrote decades ago. I know where my wife’s keys are when she doesn’t, I know where we stowed that thing we need in the loft… When I was 7 or 8 I would memorise the top 40 on Sunday night and recite it as a playground trick on Monday. My mum used to tell me the shopping list before we would go into town on the weekends. I remember all too vividly, too ashamedly my most embarrassing moments from any period of my life, whether I was 7, 14, 21 in my 30s or beyond.
The times when I find memory less forthcoming as I get older, they scare me a little.
But the hardest forgotten moments are the ones we could never have predicted the importance of. The last conversation with my grandad, the first time I wrote a song, the precise moment I first saw my wife, a big chunk of the middle of my wedding.
It might be frustrating not to be able to hold these details but I guess that it’s a positive. I was fully absorbed in the presence and joy of everyone at my wedding, I wasn’t standing back and taking note of it, I was living it.
The same goes for much of the time I spend writing. It becomes so all-engaging, physically, emotionally and cerebrally that I kind of disappear into a black hole that absorbs all time. It is being completely alive, bringing decades of energy and experience and ability to a single pinpoint moment in time.
I can only assume that’s what Asleep, A Dream was. The flow state, the hyperfocus, the fluent channelling of ideas that you dream of. But I know there will have been so much deliberation, endless looping of sections to find the perfect bass line, or nail the drum beat. Hours of questioning if I’d done too little or too much, asking myself whether I should send this one out to a collaborator or not. So it’s wild not to remember.
I like being able to tell the stories of how songs came to be, cos it is so often even to me, like magic. But we don’t have the privilege of knowing these are any different from any other afternoon spent writing, or any other conversation with a friend, or any other walk on the beach with a loved one. It’s just an afternoon I’ll never remember, made special by what came afterwards. So thank you for hearing in it, what I at the time could not and for turning it into one of the important, forgotten moments.
Adam x
The Help Movement
The whole process of making and sharing this record was about accepting my limitations, my blocks, my “lostness” and asking for help.
Although the album is now in the world, I haven’t stopped asking.
You can support by listening, by sharing, by commenting and of course, by buying the record.
Bring Our Light To Every Corner is available in record shops or you can grab it at bandcamp. I’d always encourage you to go to your local shop and ask for it. It helps them, me and my distributor, which feels very nice all round.
