This One Thing

it's so damn hot. if i didn't know better i'd say it was the fourth of joo-lai!

They say that if you love something, you should let it go, and if it’s truly meant to be, then it shall come back to you. Easier said than done, for some (especially difficult if you're letting go of a person, and you're sitting in your underwear crying whilst scrolling through their Facebook profile, wailing "BUT THEY'RE MINE").

I wasn't letting go of a person, instead I'd decided to let go of music for a while — or rather, go on a slight hiatus as I focussed on other things I had going on in the summer: spending time with people and making new friends, settling into my neighbourhood, writing my book (for those of you interested, I sort-of decided that a fun thing to do would be to spend July writing a novel about the moon, the plot of which spans a thousand years… don’t ask) etc. So when Mum or Dad would ask over Skype, “How’s the music going?” I would put my hands up and say “I’m leaving that for a bit now, don’t ask me any questions about it, just let me do my thing.”

I had been stressing out about music as well, which is weird, because it’s something that makes me so happy. I’m sure a lot of you will feel me on this as well: do you have something that you really, really want to do? Do you get really excited and emotional when you think about it? Does it scare the living daylights out of you?

It’s really easy to see this really really important, amazing, exhilarating, terrifying, incredible thing as a single entity, this One Thing — one eureka moment, one shot, one chance, one moment to “arrive” at success, no second chances. That’s how I was feeling about music — that’s how I still often feel about music, sometimes. It’s ridiculous, of course, but I’ll make it clearer to understand: imagine you’ve met the love of your life, and after years of courtship, you’ve decided that you can’t live without this person, and you have to tie the knot. You plan your proposal: flowers, champagne, flying doves? You start worrying because you feel like the proposal has to go perfectly — it has to be exactly the way you picture it in your head, or else it will all go horribly wrong. What if the proposal is a disaster? What if, as you’re taking out the ring, you drop it on the ground and it falls into a drain? What if the tiniest, tiniest thing goes wrong? Your sweetheart will reject you! You will have failed! It’s all finished! You’ll never love again! Time to go out and get a cat/dog/iguana and kiss your 2.5 children and holidays in the Spanish Riviera goodBYE because you messed the whole damn thing up!

…that’s when I realised that if you really love something, it doesn’t make sense to be afraid of it. If something that you love becomes too perfect to touch, too beautiful to approach, then you’re thinking about it the wrong way, and you’re never going to even allow yourself to attempt to get what you want. Compare this to my novel idea (not a novel idea, but an idea for a novel, rather): I do not give a flying monkey’s about this book I’m attempting to write (and write badly, may I add). I’m not looking for a publisher (pPPFFF), I’m not looking to share it with the world, I’m not going to worry if people will like it or not, I’m just going to write it because I want to write it, and I’m not afraid make mistakes.

So why not take this approach to music? Stop getting too attached to it — it’s not your Future Husband, Olivia (we can worry about that one later, ahah, ahahahha, ahahahahhah *crawls into a hole*), just take a step back and do music because you love it and want to do it, and don’t be afraid to mess up along the way.

So... I took a step back. My guitar sat in the corner of my room for a week and I didn’t feel guilty about it at all, because I was busy doing other things. But it wasn’t going to stay like that for long.

North By North East started on Wednesday, lasting throughout the weekend, and I had managed to score a wristband to go see some shows. I went and discovered music, listened to some of my favourite bands, saw St. Vincent fill Yonge-Dundas Square with her killer aura and riotous guitar licks, connected with a small band from Detroit, and spent an afternoon on a rooftop mingling with AB co-workers and music industry-types. Somewhere in between all of this crazed activity, I found myself sitting with my guitar in my hand in my bedroom. I don’t know how it happened, it just did.

I have a somewhat obsessive personality (hey, Scorpio!), and when I get fixed on something, I get really fixed on it. Before I knew what was happening I had written a song and was now recording it, and gathering archive footage to make a music video. I was up until 2am that night, sitting on my mattress in my underwear surrounded by plates of cherry stones and teacups (this is how I find my genius... shhh), going over and over clips of an old NASA release from the Seventies, trying to piece together something that I could post to Youtube that night. A couple of days later, I recorded another song and was up late again, doing the exact same thing, except this time with footage of beauty pageants and 1950’s dance parties.

 

When I watched the video over, I was happy for two reasons: firstly, I was really happy because I felt I’d produced something I really liked and was proud of; secondly, I was happy because it wasn’t perfect, it could be better, and that meant that I had so much space to learn and get better and grow… I knew that the next time I made another little Bandcamp release, it would be even more exciting and impressive. It’s all about the learning process.

On Sunday night I decided to get out the house and go to my open mic slot at Supermarket. I hadn’t played live in a while, and I planned to play two of the new songs that I had written and recorded that weekend. I was weirdly nervous, but the evening was amazing, because instead of doing my usual thing of sitting in a corner and maybe talking to one or two people and then leaving after my set, I sparked connections with several different people. By the end of the night I was talking to a ridiculously talented vocalist called Keeley. Just as we were chatting, the stage filled with the Supermarket regulars, and one man took to the stage with the microphone, asking us for random words for him to sing about. “You have to watch this,” Keeley said, turning to face the assembly on stage. “I went to high school with this guy and he’s really talented. Give him a word that doesn’t rhyme with anything, and see him fit it into his song without a hitch.” We yelled out the word purple.

The bass kicked in and this guy started rapping freestyle effortlessly. I’d never seen anything like it — “these people try to trip me up they give me words like pur-ple, but I can deal with all of that just see me jump those hur-dles” — and then during the instrumental break, as the refrain Don’t Play The Blues If You Ain’t Got The Money was being belted out by one of the guys, the lead jumped into the audience, picked up a chair, set it up on stage with the microphone put in the position on the stand so that… he could then place his head firmly on the seat of the chair and push his legs upwards, now doing a handstand whilst rapping, upside-down.

This is why I love Toronto. This is why I love the scene at Supermarket, and the music scene over here in general. From up-and-coming indie bands on sun-soaked rooftops to iconic robot goddesses in the Times Square equivalent to head-standing rap improv to me, sitting in my bedroom, writing and recording songs, it’s all happening, right here.

So, tell me: what are you scared of? What do you want to do so much that you’re afraid of “getting it wrong?” There is nothing too precious to achieve, I promise you. Let’s keep each other going. I believe in you!