Finding HopeThe Honest EP – Now at Resident Music in Brighton!
Posted on October 15, 2021
I have exciting news!
The Honest EP is now in CD form and available to purchase at Resident Music in Brighton! The CDs include the five original tracks plus the acoustic versions so if you’re local (or even semi-local) and would like to support me and a wonderful independent music shop, you can pick up a copy now! You can also buy them online through Resident’s website here. This is a limited run so once they’re gone, they’re gone…
This is honestly a dream. Resident is such an amazing independent music shop and to have them selling my music is something I’d wished for but couldn’t even imagine at this point in my career. When we got in touch, I was hoping that they’d put a poster up as a ‘Support Local Artists!’ sort of thing; I had no idea that they’d suggest stocking the Honest EP. So this is beyond awesome – if I had a bucket list, this would be a big thing to be ticking off. I’d be drawing stars around it and everything.
So this is a very cool way to end the Honest era. It may not have gone as I’d planned but there have been some pretty great surprises along the way.
My First Concert Since The Pandemic Began
Posted on October 9, 2021
One of the big things I’ve missed during the pandemic is concerts. They’ve always been a big part of every year and losing that – I haven’t been to a concert since Halsey’s Manic Tour in March 2020 – has been really hard. But it’s also hard to feel like they’re safe to go to, now that they’re happening again. I still have a lot of anxiety about going out and about being around a lot of people – it’s not as if COVID is no longer a risk – so going to a concert is a big deal. But normal life does have to resume at some point, even if it happens in baby steps. Since this first show – The Shires in Bromley – was a relatively small concert, it felt like a good one to try, to get the lay of the land in terms of safety precautions, to see how I feel in that sort of environment after everything that’s happened over the last eighteen months, and so on.
This wasn’t quite my first live music event: back in September, I went to my uni’s Songwriters’ Circle, the first one in person since before the pandemic. It was just wonderful. Everyone was so excited to be back together, so excited to get to hang out together, singing along at the top of our lungs. That is one of my favourite things about going to a music uni: everyone’s always up for a sing along.
But this doesn’t feel like a first concert to me, since I’ve been in and out of the building for the last couple of months as I finished my final Masters project. It was just some more people and music. Plus, I’m really comfortable with the safety precautions there: negative COVID tests to get in, a one way system around the building, lots of people still wearing masks even though they aren’t mandatory, and so on. I already feel safe there. But a concert is an entirely new ball game.
My first proper concert was The Shires at the Churchill Theatre in Bromley on the 5th October. It wasn’t a venue I’d been to before and road closures made getting there quite stressful, plus it was a pretty bad pain day: my back, my shoulder, and my wrists and hands. So while I knew I would enjoy the show itself, I wasn’t sure whether the stress and the pain would override that. Fortunately getting in was quick and easy and I didn’t have to spend too long on my feet. And although no one had to wear a mask once seated, negative COVID tests were required for entry so it felt as safe as it can, as anything can be at the moment.
Jake Morrell was the support act and he was great: he was funny and personable and had some good songs. My favourite was ‘This House,’ I think. And I liked ‘Freewheeling.’ I definitely want to check out more of his music.
And then The Shires – Ben and Crissie and some of their band – were on. It was so nice to see them; I’ve seen them so many times over the years and the eighteen months since the pandemic began may be the longest I’ve gone without seeing them. So, as I said in my Instagram post, it felt quite apt that my first proper concert back was them. It was a cool twist on their normal shows: it was all acoustic (being in the front row, it did feel a bit like my own personal concert) and they took the opportunity to play a lot of the songs that they don’t play often or haven’t played for years, like ‘All Over Again,’ ‘Drive’ (one of my favourites), and ‘World Without You.’ Of course they played the favourites too, like ‘Nashville Grey Skies,’ ‘State Lines,’ ‘Tonight,’ and ‘A Thousand Hallelujahs,’ which always get people singing along and dancing. Of their most recent album, Good Years, which they never got to tour due to the pandemic, they only played two songs and they happened to be my two favourites: ‘Lightning Strikes’ and ‘About Last Night.’ So that was cool. And they also played one of my all time favourites of theirs, ‘Daddy’s Little Girl.’ I connected to that song instantly – it being about the loss of a father and how, whatever else you are or end up being, the most important thing you’ll always be is his daughter – and it’s remained very special to me. I actually posted a short cover of it on Instagram years ago:
And to make a cool concert experience even better, they performed a couple of songs from their next album, that is apparently written and produced already so hopefully it won’t be long before we get to hear that. Of the two songs they played, I loved ‘Side by Side’ and I can’t wait to hear it again already. So that made the night extra special.
It was painful – as most things are right now – but it was a good night. It was so wonderful to be at a concert again; they really are my happy place, where I forget about the hard stuff (for the most part – I mean, you can’t exactly forget about physical pain when you’re in it). Hopefully things will continue to improve on the COVID front and concerts can, at some point, come back in full force. That’s the dream anyway.
I was hurting before we got home. I’d stayed sat down as much as possible to protect my knee but apparently my leg has a mind of its own because my foot kept tapping – and therefore flexing my knee – no matter how many times I forced myself to stop. And chronic pain and applause clearly don’t go well together so I think I might have to come up with an alternative for bad pain days (I’ve since found some suggestions here, or maybe the sign language version of clapping is the way to go). And the next morning, my whole body hurt and I was stiff and ache-y. My back and my hands were the worst and unfortunately my painkillers weren’t doing much more than taking the edge off. So that was a pretty unpleasant day but it was worth it.
So that was my first concert back. I honestly thought I’d find it more scary, more stressful – in the pandemic anxiety sense, that is. It was all a bit overwhelming for a moment going in but once we were in the auditorium and the show had started, somehow I forgot about COVID and my anxiety; I was just in the moment and completely absorbed by the music. That wasn’t something I’d expected and it was quite wonderful. All the anxiety, all of the precautions and planning… it was all so very worth it to have live music again.
Now That I’ve Finished My Masters…
Posted on September 25, 2021
After two years of being utterly focussed on my Masters, it’s definitely weird not having something specific to work on, having no deadlines to meet, and so on. It’s strange but also a welcome relief: between working on the module of the moment and dealing with whatever the pandemic threw up, plus my health stuff, it’s been an exhausting time. While I’m excited to start working on the next project, whatever that may be, I do need a break first – to rest, recover, and recharge my body and brain – and there’ve been a handful of things I’ve been looking forward to doing for when I finally reached this point.
These are some of the things I’ve held on to when I really felt the exhaustion or my motivation dipped:
- Gentle days – I’ve spent the last couple of months at least working relentlessly on my final project; unless there was a very good reason, I probably spent at least seven hours a day working on various elements of it. I really pushed myself. Unfortunately, my prime working time seems to start around 7pm; that’s when I seem to really get on a roll and sometimes that meant I’d be working until after midnight (those were the really long days), which completely screwed up my sleep schedule. But even if I didn’t get to sleep until 4am, I’d still force myself up as early as I physically could in order to get back to work – my sleep schedule is going to need some serious overhauling. Now that I don’t need to do that, I’m looking forward to having some gentler days. I’m still happiest doing things but it will be nice to do them at a more laidback pace, for a while anyway. I might even sleep in occasionally!
- See more friends and family – I’ve been so buried in this project that I really haven’t seen many of my friends or family, not properly, for ages. I’ve started catching up with people, both over FaceTime and in real life, which has been so, so lovely but there are still too many people that I haven’t seen in far too long. So I’m looking forward to that.
- Read new books – Given that my difficulties with concentration make reading somewhat of a struggle anyway, I could barely manage the reading for my Masters, let alone anything for fun (not that I had much time for that). But I’ve got a list as long as my arm of books I want to read so I’m looking forward to getting into a couple of those. I think I’m gonna start with The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green.
- Watch new TV shows and movies – While working on this final project, especially over the last couple of months, I’ve really only watched familiar things, using them as background noise – something that, most of the time, aids my concentration. I’m now thoroughly bored with all of them and, just like with the books, I have a great list of new things I want to watch, like Black Widow and Girls5eva.
- Swim more – Obviously this isn’t an immediate goal: I’ll have to build up my swimming in accordance with how my hEDS is affecting me. But I am looking forward to doing a bit more here and there and slowly building up. While doing the Masters, I was always aware of how much energy it required, balancing that against the energy I needed to keep working at the necessary pace. So it will be nice to push myself a bit and not worry about whether I’ll need a rest day afterwards, at least until I get into whatever the next project.
- Work on a new project – I have a lot of ideas in the works but they all depend on a bunch of different factors so, as of this moment, I don’t know which one will be my main focus (because, of course, I’ll still be working on the others) but hopefully it won’t be long until I do know and can get started. I’m really terrible at not doing things; I love having a project to work on.
- Release new music – Whatever project I launch into next, I want to keep releasing music. It’s been a while since I released anything new (the acoustic EP was a different kind of release, in my head at least) and I’m dying to put more music out. The Masters was just too big and took up too much of my brain. So, now that that’s done, I’m so excited to start putting stuff out again. I have multiple ideas for bigger bodies of work but those will take time so I’m thinking of releasing a few singles while I pull that next body of work together. There are always songs that I love but that don’t really fit into the concept of an EP or album project so it will be really fun to give them a life out in the world. So, stay tuned! (That pun was accidental, I swear.)
- Finish my album – During my final project, I started writing an album that I’m really excited about. I feel really good about it but there’s still a lot of work to do if I want it to be as good as I think it could be. With the Masters imposed deadlines now out of the way, I can go back to the songs and work on each one more slowly, using everything I learned throughout the process of the project (something that the earlier songs didn’t have the advantage of). I think this album could really be something and I want to give it all the time and attention it needs to achieve that potential.
- Get back to writing on here – I’ve really missed blog writing while I’ve been working and I’ve had to actively restrain myself from writing blog posts when I should’ve been working so I’m very excited to be back and writing here. My brain is bursting with ideas and I’m struggling to figure out how to fit them all in, which, all in all, isn’t a bad problem to have.
There are also things that I’m less excited to do but they are important and I’ve been putting them off, either because they took too much time and energy away from working or because I was worried about how engaging with them would break what felt like the very fragile hold I had on my concentration, like it would be impossible to concentrate on my project again if I stopped, even for a little bit.
So things like continuing my Pain Clinic appointments, getting the prescription for my glasses updated (my current pair are at least four years out of date or whatever the phrase is – it must be doing a number on my eyesight and it’s probably not unrelated to all of my headaches), figure out what’s going on with my therapy situation, make a definitive decision about my medication, and try again to tackle my Trichotillomania. None of these will be fun or easy but hopefully they’ll all improve my life in the long run so they are worth doing.
So there’s my list. I love a good list. I find that they help me organise my thoughts – my often very restless, whirlwind thoughts. It’s been a tough few months but I’m looking forward to diving into all of these things.
Finding Hope 