And now I write.
Like making music, this is both a form of self-indulgence and an act of generosity.
On the one hand, in putting these musings out to be read, I am demanding your attention, your witness to an aspect of my experience that I deem fit to be preserved, crystallised out of the flow of life, assumed to be mine and exported to the reader, whoever you may be.
On the other hand, I am laying myself bare, exposing my experience to the world, allowing myself to become vulnerable, in the hope that it may give you some feeling or insight.
~
The lyrics of my first album were described by one reviewer as “naive”. The critique was generally positive, but this description has nonetheless lingered in my memory, creating a sense of insecurity. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same word were used to describe the opening track on my new album.
There is a deliberately simple song, musically and lyrically. The repeating guitar riff and lyrics probably are naive. Yet, given it was written as a lullaby for a newborn baby, I can at least say this is intentionally so.
The aim of the song is to express love for my nephew as a baby, a child and older. This needn’t be complicated, and yet there is more to this.
~
It was written 10 years ago when I was approaching 25. This was a pivotal period for me as a songwriter because it was around this time that this is what I decided I needed to be.
Listening to a lot of Nick Drake and Elliott Smith, as a 20-something songwriter should be, I became aware of my tendency towards melancholy. I also began experimenting with alternative guitar tunings and stumbled upon this - C# A C# G# A E.
Everything I played now had a depth and tenderness that made my previous songwriting feel too light. It also felt distinct from the music I was listening to. It had a melancholy hue for sure, but it had what I can only describe as a lilac warmth that felt specific to the songs I wanted to make.
I don’t know if I have synaesthesia, but this feeling has sustained and I still use the tuning today.
~
Sufjan Stevens was 25 when he released his first album. I know this because, listening to Seven Swans and his then-new album Carrie & Lowell, I googled his age to see how old songwriters generally are when they start putting out music, or more accurately, how old they are when they start to find an audience. I would be 26 when I put out my debut, first person singular. I’m not sure what age I’ll be when or if I ever find an audience.
~
I was hungover and 25 walking up Borough Road towards the market where I was to meet the rest of my family for, what seemed at the time, a random get-together for lunch. There, my brother and sister-in-law announced at the table that they were to have a baby, the first in the next generation of our family.
I always felt melancholy when hungover. Listening to Carrie & Lowell on that warming spring afternoon, walking back home from the market, with the still-crisp, light yellow sun above, the day had taken on a poignancy that I can still recall vividly. I was to become an uncle.
~
It’s strange that Sufjan’s grieving album, following the death of his mother Carrie, would part-inspire, along with my new tuning, my decision to write a lullaby album for my not-yet-born nephew. There and a track called Apollo and Dionysus were the first songs I wrote for this collection - both original versions are still on Soundcloud. 10 years later, There would open my third album, Blossoms Invite the Butterfly. Apollo and Dionysus would make it onto the first.
Yet, while the lyrics for There are unambiguously warm and tender for a child who I will always love, and the guitar riff simple, the song, for me at least, has depth and poignancy.
“Don’t you ever regret, things you thought, things you said,” I sing, a missive into the child’s future perhaps, but maybe a reflection of my own.
~
On hearing my brother’s news, the realisation dawned that this was a moment I would not myself share. I think most gay men grapple with this at some point in their lives. Even those that end up becoming parents by other means surely have a moment when they realise the biological constraints of their desire.
I knew then, regardless of societal change, that fatherhood was a path I would not follow. I had thought this before, but I really felt it at this moment.
~
“I should have wrote a letter, explaining what I feel, that empty feeling,” sang Sufjan. He did write a letter though, a letter through song. Even if his mother had passed by the time he wrote it, his music was a testament to her, or at least his love for her.
My music would become a testament of my love - for my nephew, yes, but also an as-of-yet directionless love, a love that perhaps still hasn’t found its destination and maybe doesn’t need to.
“My brother had a daughter, the beauty that she sings, illumination,” Sufjan also sings.
~
The nephew is now a boy, almost 10 years old. I see family traits in him - he has his father’s smirk.
I know his parents played him the lullabies when he was in the womb and as a baby. I don’t know if he’s heard those songs since or if he’s heard any of my other songs.
“What’s the point of singing songs, if they’ll never even hear you?” sang Sufjan.
It doesn’t really matter if he hears those songs again, but they will always be there for him - maybe on the CD I made at the time, or at least scattered across my albums since.
These songs will always be there for me too, crystallising that moment of self-realisation both as a songwriter and uncle, if not a father.
In this sense, like any artistic creation, it’s a song for myself as much as it is for my nephew or anyone else. And yet I share it with the world in case it resonates, at whatever level is needed, naively or otherwise.
I listen. I try to listen deeply.
“The key to multi-level existence is Deep Listening - listening in as many ways as possible, to everything that can possibly be heard, all of the time,” writes the composer, writer and practitioner Pauline Oliveros.
“Deep Listening is exploring the relationships among any and all sounds, whether natural or technological, intended or unintended, real, remembered or imaginary.”
Sound has long been my way into deepening awareness. A large part of my musical practice is tuning into sonic environments, creating worlds for my compositions through recorded birdsong, the creaking of wooden floors, the dripping of a tap, the steps of passersby.
“Thought is included,” Oliveros writes.
In meditation I try to deepen my listening to both the world around me and the world inside.
~
What are the first sounds you remember? It’s a question Oliveros asks us to ponder.
For me, it’s the sound of children playing in the schoolyard next door to my childhood home. Waking to birdsong in my first bedroom. The lightly crunching sound of footsteps in gravel in the driveway just outside. Hushed chatter.
These are also the sounds that accompany my song, Blossoms Invite the Butterfly.
~
The Bardo Thodol, widely known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, can more literally be translated as ‘liberation through hearing in the intermediate state’.
In short, by hearing the Bardo Thodol just after dying, you can supposedly gain freedom from samsara.
The word ‘hearing’ feels too passive, though.
“Hearing represents the primary sense organ - hearing happens involuntarily,” Oliveros writes.
Maybe we ought to be liberated through Deep Listening.
“Deep Listening represents a heightened state of awareness and connects to all that there is.”
~
It was listening to Songs from the Bardo, an album by Laurie Anderson, Jesse Paris Smith and Tenzin Choegyal, that I knew I needed to take my meditation more seriously and to explore Buddhism.
The album mesmerised me. I didn’t understand much of its content - all the Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and wrathful deities. Yet it resonated deep into my consciousness and stirred an untapped energy I didn’t know existed.
“What is heard is changed by listening and changes the listener,” writes Oliveros.
~
It’s often said that, despite its better-known English name, the Bardo Thodol is as much about life as it is about death. My first learning, through this musical rendition, was that I needed to listen more deeply and more actively in the here and now.
~
Can you hear the sound of a butterfly flapping its wings?
~
It’s been over half a decade since I first listened to Songs from the Bardo. I have a more developed meditation practice now and continue to explore the Dharma. I’ve also discovered Deep Listening. Incidentally, Oliveros was known to be a Buddhist.
Given the Dharma’s emphasis on there being no such thing as a fixed self, I’m not sure it makes sense to say “I’m a Buddhist”. That said, and on the face of it, I do a lot of Buddhist activities - meditation, puja, studying the Dharma, going to Sangha events.
On a 10-day ‘intensive’ meditation retreat last summer, much of which was in silence, my listening certainly deepened. This happened both when on the cushions and off them, including tuning in to the retreat centre’s beautiful surroundings in the countryside.
Butterflies felt very present in my experience. This was in part because I named my latest album after a line from a Ryokan poem, Blossoms Invite the Butterfly. There was also a surge in butterfly populations last year, so there were literally more of them outside.
Their presence felt serendipitous and inspiring. At moments of heightened awareness - whether cycling, walking or sitting in nature - they appeared. It was as if they were leading me somewhere, attuning my attention in some direction. They were also present inwardly, in my deeper meditations, appearing in my mind’s eye when I sunk deeper into experience.
As with anything that comes up in meditation, I try not to grasp onto them, knowing that to do so would be to inject my will into experience, to act upon reality and not allow it to express itself directly. When they appear, I try to allow them to flitter onwards, coming and going like clouds in the sky, a visual metaphor for thoughts that don’t take hold of my attention but simply arise and fall.
How does a butterfly flying sound? I try to listen deeply, not imagining the sound, but allowing it to naturally seep in.
~
The intermediate state after death is a moment in which you can either gain liberation from the cycle of samsara or you are reborn. So goes the Bardo Thodol.
On Songs of the Bardo, Laurie Anderson describes us as witnessing the brilliant lights of the five mythological Buddhas, particularly the luminescence of their compassion and wisdom, as well as various other figures from Buddhist cosmology. She implores us to “listen without distraction”.
As the album progresses towards the listener being reborn into samsara, it becomes clear that, unenlightened as we are, we don’t listen deeply enough. We become distracted. We grasp for samsara. The iridescent brilliance of enlightenment is overwhelming and we can’t help but fear its limitlessness.
Although our consciousness is unbounded from the body, we end up feeling for the ground beneath us. Our grasping returns us to bodily form.
I don’t know what happens after we die and I’m not sure if the Bardo Thodol needs to be taken too literally. I am, though, deeply touched by its mystery, by the unnerving wonder of it, and its call to pay attention to experience.
~
Life is an intermediate state. It flows between birth and death.
Through practice, I strive to pay attention to this, to listen deeply to the evershifting dance of existence, always passing from one state to another, loosening the idea of an ever-prevalent I, allowing changing reality to affect listening itself.
~
Ryokan:
The flower invites the butterfly with no-mind;
The butterfly visits the flower with no-mind.
The flower opens, the butterfly comes;
The butterfly comes, the flower opens.
I don’t know others, others don’t know me.
By not-knowing we follow nature’s course.
~
What sound does a butterfly flying make?
When I try to imagine it, the butterfly disappears, I become distracted by thoughts about what a butterfly’s flapping wings sound like.
Listening more deeply, let the butterfly sing its song, not yours.
Listening, ‘I’ flies. Listening, without distraction. Follow nature’s course.
I breathe in. I breathe out.
I learnt meditation as a teenager, though it wasn’t until my 30s that I developed a regular practice. I now meditate at least 40 minutes most days.
It helps me see the shape of my mind as well as what’s on it, the way my thoughts arise and flitter away, the hopes and fears that linger longer. Through it I connect with the body and, when it is going well, this helps me tune into experience in and of itself, rather than into thoughts about it.
It has probably helped with anxiety and stress down the years, but it is not a tool for eradicating these feelings. They are part of my experience as much as they are of anyone’s. Hopefully meditation helps me to see how my mind works in moments of stress, helping me decide actions and thoughts more consciously, rather than falling into habitual patterns or negative thought loops.
~
Learning the shape of a mind is a life’s practice, and it is always changing.
I’ve long had a tendency towards shyness. An order member of the Buddhist community I practice in once said being introverted and shy are different. Introvertedness is a character trait, shyness a habit that can be acted on.
Finding ways to overcome timidity, to prevent it holding me back from doing things that I want to do, while being cognisant of the effects that social interactions can have on my energy levels, as an introvert - this is a practice.
Meditation helps me to see the habitual thoughts behind my shyness. Seeing these, I can direct attention elsewhere, to inner resources that allow me to be otherwise, when I need or want to be.
Sometimes I can overcome this habit of mine. Other times, when timidity holds me back, I feel frustrated.
~
I would describe myself as honest. This is at least my intention.
The only time I perpetually lied was as a teenager when I’d say whatever was needed to keep my sexuality hidden.
“Teenage shy, and don't know why, I always lie every time,” I sing on my song Breathe.
“Breathe in, breathe out, don’t be afraid, they won’t care,” I also sing. “You’ll be fine, it’s time for pride, do not hide behind your lies anymore”.
I did eventually come out, and this song is right - for the most part, I was fine. The idea of hiding this part of my life now seems absurd. I don’t know if I ever felt proud at being gay, but I definitely felt freer to live the life I wanted when I didn’t have to hide it anymore.
I thought a lot about coming out as a teenager. There was a lot of imagining what it would be like, a lot of hope, fear, anxiety. These thoughts felt so real. I spent so much time with them.
These thoughts don’t occur now. The reality of my life turned out to be quite different from what I fantasised about as a teenager.
In Buddhism, the word ‘prapanca’ is used to describe unnecessary mental elaboration, thoughts upon thoughts taking us further away from our actual experience. These thoughts aren’t real in that they don’t necessarily correspond to our actual experience.
I did a lot of prapanca around coming out. These thoughts came to nothing. They were there in my head and a big part of my life, until they weren’t.
Breathe in, breathe out. Meditation brings us back to experience as it is. It helps us to take a step back from our thoughts, to see them as coming and going, without needing further elaboration.
~
I walk into a room and notice it is full of people I don’t know. There is a loud hubbub of conversation. I may feel an initial reluctance or hesitancy, and this is fine, this is how my mind tends to react.
But I needn’t then have thoughts of self-doubt or questioning: “Why am I awkward in these circumstances?” “Have people noticed my quietness?” “How do I get away from here?”
Breathe in, breathe out. What is the experience in front of me? How can I think and act differently? A life’s practice.
~
Someone very close to me came out as trans just after the pandemic. Their experience is different to mine in that they were in their late 30s and deeply entangled in what had been, superficially at least, a heterosexual man’s situation.
They had endured mental health problems for a long time. These have spiralled in recent years. Her suffering has been difficult to witness.
She is a different person to who she was before, that is obvious. Buddhism teaches that there is no such thing as a fixed self. We’re always changing.
Her changes seem more pronounced though. I do not and cannot know her mind, only she can. But what she describes as “negative thought spirals” sounds a lot like prapanca.
She has a really difficult set of conditions, many of which cannot be easily changed. She has come out as trans, she has a certain family situation that has been shaped by years of actions and occurrences, she has done various things that cannot be undone.
This is what, in my understanding, Buddhism broadly calls karma - the idea that our actions, and the intentions behind them, can shape the conditions of our lives. The world we live in is partly a result of our previous actions, and it will be shaped by our current and future actions. There are other factors too, but what we can control or work on is our intentions going forwards.
My friend has regrets. She once told me she mourns the life she could have had if she’d realised her identity earlier.
“Some years lost, you know the cost, extra time of your life,” I sing.
Regret, remorse, hopes, and fantasies of the past and future are prapanca - thoughts upon thoughts taking us away from the actual experience we are having right now.
Breathe in, breathe out. Can you see the mind’s tendencies, see the thoughts as they arise? Can you see that, not being real, they come and go?
“But here you are, here you are,” I finish singing.
~
Coming out as gay was an obsession for me. Being gay became an identity. I don’t think about it much now, nor really identify.
This is a blessing. It’s also an irrelevance. Thinking about sexuality is a distraction.
My experience of the world is not gayness. Sexuality as an identity is a thought upon thought. It has shaped my mind, but its grip is not as strong as it was. My attention goes elsewhere.
Here I am. Breathing in, breathing out. Thoughts come and go. I practice seeing this. I practice choosing what thoughts to follow.
I change. I have changed.
“Looking good today, do you want to play a lover’s game?” I sing on N1.
I don’t know if I still look as good as I did then. People called me handsome when I was in my 20s, or at least some did. My ego was flattered.
N1 was the postcode for the flat I lived in at this time. That whole period was a state of flux. My first years in London - finding new friends, moving between jobs, coming out as gay, flitting between would-be partners. It was exciting, full of potential.
Three of us lived together in an Old Street flat, one of whom I met randomly in the British Library. He introduced me to the other.
I slept with both. Then the point came when I could only continue to do so with one. I had to choose, to commit.
“I’m in a triangle, it’s going to break,” I sing.
It did. The life I’ve lived since emerged from this.
~
“I didn’t mean to say, but I won’t take the blame,” I also sing, leaving out whatever it was I did say.
It was never my intention to hurt the one I met in the library. I still remember that day we met so clearly.
I was reading a book for my Masters, I looked up, and there he was, glaring across the foyer at me, intensely. After a few moments, he came over and asked if I wanted to go for a drink. I asked if he meant coffee. He said something stronger. Off we went.
Another time, after a house party we hosted in N1, we woke up in the same bed and the sun was streaming in through my windows, my blinds always open. It was a bleary-eyed morning, sky endlessly blue.
He glared into my eyes. Sheepishly I looked away but he jolted me, demanded my eyes lock with his. I felt vulnerable. His stare reached deep into my being. And yet, I saw into him too. We were intensely connected in that moment and time.
~
It wasn’t meant to be between us.
He never wanted to commit to any sort of relationship until I had started sleeping with the other. Even then, I don’t think he wanted a relationship. He didn’t like the idea of someone else having me. He grasped at what must have seemed a slipping opportunity.
I ended up hurting him and the choice I made was painful. When you connect with someone deeply, the separation hurts more. It wasn’t my intention for him to suffer.
I chose to be in a relationship where there was actual commitment. For all the connection I had with the library boy, I trusted the other more. I chose a life of love rather than a few moments here and there.
~
“I’ll leave this flat one day,” I also sing. “I’ll move away, someday.”
I did move away. I moved back in with the one I met as a flatmate.
He had moved out of London for a few years to go to med school in Birmingham. When he moved back, we lived in N4 for a couple of years. We later bought a flat in Dalston, back in N1.
It’s been a decade since that triangle broke. I’ve had relative stability throughout this time. I work for the same company, no one that’s close to me has died, I still make music.
We’ve had beautiful times together. We’ve seen the world. We’ve partied all night. We’ve argued. We’ve sat in silence. We’ve made each other countless coffees. We’ve played music. We’ve grown together. We’re growing older together. We’re changing, together.
~
Something is shifting in me. My priorities are changing. My Buddhist practice increasingly frames my experience. I am deepening into it. It’s creating different choices. I am making different choices.
There is a tension in my life, a potential.
The conditionings of the last decade of my relationship are strong. I love him. He is my closest companion. I love our cat, Tofu.
Yet, the centre of my life shifts. I follow what inspires me.
In my deepest meditations, I’ve caught glimpses into a state of being that’s completely unbounded, egoless and mysterious. My practice is opening a trajectory I feel compelled to follow, something bigger than the life I’ve lived so far. I don’t understand it, but inspiration moves me.
It’s frightening. My boundaries of ego, established over more than three decades, are resolute, difficult to budge. They arise fiercely when I deepen into modes of being that seek to prize them open. Yet something draws me to want to let go, to loosen these confines, enter something new.
~
My partner is not interested in Buddhism, on the face of it.
It’s hard to communicate with him the states I’ve tuned into through practice. Words like beauty, wonder or mystery don’t do them justice, but are the closest.
When I try to explain, I know he doesn’t understand. How could he? It’s my experience, not his.
Our separateness, as two distinct individuals, is unavoidable. All human beings are distinct and individuated, even in love. This causes pain.
~
In deepened states, the ego dissipates, at least a little. What emerges is indescribable, unbounded and limitless. It is the opposite of separateness.
The most apt Buddhist word for it, I think, is ‘sunyatta’. This is often translated as ‘emptiness’, but for me it’s ‘openness’. It’s a movement into a space where growth can happen. Sunyatta draws us out of ourselves, out of the bounds of ego.
To me it’s also love. That sounds corny, but it rings true. It’s something that stirs what is universal in our selves and yet moves our experience beyond the self and into that which is bigger. That sounds like love to me.
And yet, in everyday life, this unbounded love doesn’t flow as easily. The ego protects itself. It separates and closes off this energy.
Solitude is the burden of the self, by its nature distinct and apart from a reality that is ‘other’.
~
With my partner I feel less alone. He is my closest friend. He is the person who sees my egotistical self at its most immature and unenlightened. Despite this, we still share our selves, our lives, and commit to each other ongoingly.
I think our connection is maturing too, in subtle ways. Wanting to deepen my love for all beings, I now try to hold my love for him more lightly. To cling to him tightly would be to entrench my relationship as part of my own ego, to deepen my separateness from the wider world.
He is not mine to possess and thinking so would cause us both suffering. I learnt that from the boy I met in the library. Love isn’t possession.
~
I am changing, my priorities shifting.
I think I am growing, gaining new depths, becoming less selfish. I hope I am becoming more loving, not just for my partner, but for all beings.
It’s a journey of uneven steps though.
Our relationship is changing. I think it’s maturing.
We are both growing, in our own ways, together.
I still know your name.
I sing this bittersweetly.
I wrote the lyrics for Your Name in my mid-20s as a reflection on friends who had changed, their youthful exuberance becoming something more settled.
“You used to be a punk, but now you’re living with live laugh love; you used to be one of the boys, but now you’re staying in and you are watching Bake Off,” I sing.
I never actually watched the Great British Bake Off. The idea of it didn’t attract me at all - a twee Britishness I’ve always struggled to identify with.
The song is framed around a wedding where I am watching my friends go up the aisle, knowing they’re moving away from me and towards each other.
I played the instrumental of it at an actual wedding of two close friends in the first summer after the pandemic. I met both the bride and groom when I was 18 and we’d go on to forge many memories together across our young adulthood.
They now have a young family. Like with all my friends who have children, I see them less often these days and the conditions in which we meet now are different - whether due to there being kids around or my friends being exhausted.
This change happened almost imperceptibly somehow. Their lives transformed without me realising it.
~
I’ve been reading Vincenzo Leatronico’s Perfection- the book that’s now a signifier of the millennial malaise it describes.
It describes the heavily-curated, Instagram-friendly lives of couple Anna and Tom - graphic designers living their best, fashionable lives in Berlin. As they grow old together, with their friends starting to move out of the city for careers or families, Leatronico writes:
“They would have liked things to go back to how they were before. Either that or they needed a drastic change. It had all become too samey. Something needed to be rethought. But what? They didn’t want children, didn’t want to move to a new city; inevitably it came down to money”.
Attempts to give their lives renewed meaning by intensifying their work didn’t bear fruit in the end. I don’t think money or career is the answer for me either, yet I sympathise with the question.
~
On the opening track of my first album first person singular, settle down, I sing of an immense wonder that I sense in the universe.
“I am the stars of the universe, I am the stars of the lid, I twinkle, I twinkle for you my shiny crazy diamond,” I sing.
The song finishes with a question to the listener: “Why don't you just settle down?”
This song is more manic and intense than Your Name, which is sonically more pastoral, but thematically they are cousins.
My response to the idea of people ‘settling down’ has mellowed over the years. This is, in part, because I now see how the alternative route - a life without kids where art, career, travel or hedonism become more central - can itself become staid.
When I see my friends who’ve had children, the change in them is noticeable. There is a direction to their lives.
In my own experience, there have been moments where I’ve been clubbing, at a festival or travelling that I’ve felt an uneasy sense of familiarity.
When Anna and Tom ponder the sameness of their lives, I can’t help but do the same. Without children, what is the drastic change that can induce a new feeling of energy into my life? How can I maintain that same flicker of wonder that once led me to urge people not to settle down?
~
You don’t need children to settle. You can do so over pints, pills at clubs or travelling to far-flung places. You can become too comfortable on any path.
Anna and Tom’s despondency in Perfection reminds me of verses in one of the songs of Milerapa, the great Tibetan yogi.
“Now I’ll give you some advice
Trying to control the events of this life,
Trying and trying to be so clever,
Always planning to manipulate your world,
Involved in repetitive social relations—
In the midst of these preparations for the future
You arrive unaware at your final years,
Not realising your brow is knit with wrinkles,
Not knowing your hair is turned white,
Not seeing the skin of your eyes sink down,
Not admitting the sag of your mouth and nose.”
​
These verses were read out as part of a ritual that was performed every evening at an intensive meditation retreat I went to last year.
​
“Not knowing where rebirth will occur,
You still maintain a complacent contentment.
Now’s the time to get ready for death—
That’s my sincere advice to you;
If its import strikes you, start your practice.”
​
Hearing this, I knew I wanted to commit my life more fully to Buddhist practice.
~
I often ask myself, why did I go to a Buddhist centre so soon after lockdown? I don’t think the decision of friends to have families was a direct cause but, looking back, it probably wasn’t a coincidence.
I’ve nonetheless found something in Buddhist practice that has re-engaged me with that urge to forge my own path, to live a more creative life. In following this, I’ve not just found teachings about change, I’ve been able to reconnect with the wonder of life as something perpetually changing.
~
An irony of this realisation, at least as it relates to my song Your Name, is that the path it’s taking me down is one in which my name may itself change.
I recently began a process that, if completed, would see me become a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order. In becoming ordained, I would be given a new pali or sanskrit name.
This name would represent a relinquishing of my former self to become spiritually reborn as someone more fully integrated with the Buddhist path. It will also be a teaching, a koan guiding me towards how I can be most effective as a Buddhist in the world, helping others to find their own paths.
~
I realise that the refrain I sing on Your Name, that I still know the name of the person I’m singing to, is itself a form of clinging. I was grasping onto the idea that my friend’s younger exuberant self was still there somewhere, despite the changes they’ve undergone.
The more I myself change, the more I see why this refrain can only ever be bittersweet.
I wish to love people for who they are becoming, not who they were. It’s a process of letting go of the past and of growing into the future.
I performed. I will perform again.
It took me half a year to gig following the launch of my most recent album, Blossoms Invite the Butterfly.
I typically find it hard to give energy to the marketing side of releasing music. However, when it came to finally gigging, the process of arranging, promoting, preparing and playing was energising.
At the time of writing, I feel as though I want to perform again and on a more regular basis.
~
I hadn’t done a full set for over half a decade. I’d done the odd wedding, fundraiser and open mic, but this was my first proper gig since before the pandemic.
Why so long? I’m not sure there’s much to be gained from dwelling on this. The possibility that interests me more is that something has shifted.
I don’t want to leave it so long this time.
~
I didn’t sing on stage until my 20s. Before then my guitar playing was a largely private practice. In my mid-20s, I started putting out music as William Patrick Owen, and played a few gigs to promote my first album, first person singular.
The performances were simple - guitar, vocals, no pedals and limited on-stage chatter. People were complimentary about my voice and guitar playing. My partner said he understood me more after hearing me play.
I got comparisons to Nick Drake. I liked hearing this, having been deeply moved by Pink Moon. I would play Place to Be at some of these gigs, as well as covers of Sufjan Stevens and Elliott Smith. I played up to the melancholy singer-songwriter schtick, and got a few support slots playing alongside other artists who did the same.
Then, my music shifted. My second album, Dreams on the Moon, was less guitar-focused and more textural. I released it during the pandemic and never felt motivated to play it live. Maybe, like my experience of the pandemic, my music practice had become more introspective.
It was also around this time that I started deepening my practice of meditation and exploring Buddhism.
~
In the run up to my first gig of the Blossoms Invite the Butterfly era, I stopped taking intoxicants. This was an intensification of a trajectory I had already been going along to support my spiritual practice.
I’ve known for a while that to deepen my wider spiritual practice I would need to start making different choices. This would mean avoiding things that took me away from meaningful meditation, from being able to act more consciously on my mental states, and being truly present with others.
Renunciation is a difficult process. It being a process is important to acknowledge. Not many people can suddenly drop all of their favourite pleasures, habits and ways of being around others.
I also have no regrets about the hedonistic life I’ve previously lived. Intoxicated all-nighters and love-ins with queer east London friends, seeing different parts of the mind on hallucinogenics, getting into Berghain - these experiences and memories matter.
I wanted to do these things. I was drawn to them. They opened something in me and expressed a desire to live life fully.
~
I once called myself a ‘bad Buddhist’ because I’d go from being on a retreat one weekend to a ‘sesh’ on various intoxicants the next. ‘Bad’ or ‘wrong’ are difficult words though.
Buddhists would say ‘skilful’ and ‘unskillful’ instead. The skilfulness of how we act depends on how our actions affect our capacity to be truly mindful and aware, and our ability to act ethically, in relation to others, based on this.
My path is one of uneven steps and I haven’t been able to just drop all of my previous ways of living in a single swoop. And yet, I am slowly but surely making different choices. In the run-up to my gig, the performance I wanted to create became my priority, a goal that unified my energies in a single direction.
In my previous gigs, I had a beer on stage and a few afterwards. This time, I wanted to savour the moment, go deeper into my performance and connect with the audience.
I had a non-alcoholic beer instead. It was called ‘Nirvana Helles’.
~
In preparing for the performance, I also crafted who or what I would be as a performer in 2025 - a different persona to my previous gigs.
I wanted to be more ambitious musically, dropping the melancholy songwriter schtick, bringing in the textural aspects of the second album, and creating a more expansive atmosphere.
The spiritual practice I’ve established was always going to have an impact.
After the gig, people said my performance had been meditative, peaceful and even transcendent.
Someone told me that my spiritual practice had clearly influenced my music. I replied, sincerely, that they are one and the same.
~
The week after the gig was difficult. I felt drained. I’d put a lot of energy into it. I now felt aimless and unfocused.
I would look back at my friend’s Instagram stories to try to relive it. There I was and I sounded good!
“I’ll take you to my shows, the ones where I glowed,” I sing on Only Yesterday.
That song name refers to a Studio Ghibli film in which the main character reminisces on her youth. The ending to that film is ambiguous. She opts to stay in the countryside where she grew up, rather than moving back to the city where she had lived as an adult.
I remember feeling a sense of sorrow in her nostalgia though. The film is laden with the heaviness of someone who hadn’t let go of their past.
~
The energies of my life are shifting. Writing a week after the gig, I see a path in which I can, and I hope will, make different decisions.
I didn’t just perform my music, but I performed the life I wanted to lead. The process of preparation and the performance itself were an expression of my practice.
Choosing between this and the intoxicants of my past was no longer an act of renunciation, but of consciously following what inspired me.
~
The gig is already a memory. The Instagram stories don’t capture the process of preparing for and doing it.
“I’ll let it go, I promise you, I’ll let go,” I also sing on Only Yesterday.
Practice doesn’t dwell in the past. Neither does it look to the future. Practice roots you into experience as it is, not thoughts upon thoughts about it.
Whether it’s music or meditation, or anything that deepens awareness and makes you feel present, practice opens your experience as a space in which to grow.
~
Memories remind us of things we value though.
The gig gone by is no longer what orients me, but it reminded me, it reminds me, of the urgency of practice, that it is something I must consciously choose to prioritise, to perform again and again.
I contemplate death. I try to face up to impermanence.
This is what Buddhists do.
The contemporary Buddhist author Ocean Vuong does this. On podcasts he talks about meditating on death. His debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, fixates on this, particularly in relation to his grief for his mother.
I cite this book in my song, Nothing Lasts.
“Here on earth, briefly gorgeous, all points contained in this moment,” I sing about an intimate encounter I imagine taking place at the point of my death.
“Dinner comes and then it goes, boat now takes us to the shore, on the other side, I’ll meet you in the garden”.
The ‘shore’, that well-worn metaphor for death, transcendence and enlightenment.
“I’ll meet you in the garden” - a reference to Rumi: “Somewhere beyond right and wrong, there is a garden. I will meet you there.”
This verse I came across on the New River walk between Canonbury and Highbury, carved on a bench, a stranger’s epitaph.
My song grasps towards some feeling around death. It is melancholy.
~
I think most people imagine their funerals. I’ve thought mine a sombre affair, heavy with grief.
I mull the sad music that will be played - #21 from Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, From the Morning from Pink Moon, maybe a couple of my own songs.
This is vanity. My death will be very sad because people love me, I think. Of course they do.
This is egotistical. I’m not sure this is what Buddhist practitioners mean when they talk about contemplating impermanence.
~
I’ve not encountered much death. My grandparents all passed long ago, three of them when I was too young to remember. Someone in my year at university died early on, tragically. I grieved then, though more for a person I could have known than someone I did.
Yet I’ve been moved by death. Reading and listening to Vuong’s grief for his mother affects me. Patti Smith’s writings about Robert Mapplethorpe also strike my heart. On seeing him suffering with AIDS, she writes, in Just Kids:
“He would be a smothering cloak, a velvet petal. It was not the thought but the shape of the thought that tormented him. It entered him like a horrific spirit and caused his heart to pound so hard, so irregularly, that his skin vibrated and he felt as if he were beneath a lurid mask, sensual yet suffocating.”
I feel smothered by his torment reading this.
“I’m lost in a life elsewhere, a velvet petal fallen upon the floor,” I sang on the closing track of my debut album first person singular.
Smith and Mapplethorpe’s story was always going to affect me. I read it after breaking up with a girlfriend following the realisation that my sexuality made our relationship unsustainable. The same thing happened with Smith and Mapplethorpe, who were once lovers.
This reflection from Smith threw impermanence into my mind. If I was born 20 years earlier, I would have suffered like Mapplethorpe and so many others with whom I share the same desires, I thought.
~
In the Bardo Thol, we are told, as we enter a state between death and rebirth, that we shall wonder:
“I am dead! What shall I do?,"
And feel great misery,
Just like a fish cast out of water on red-hot embers.
You may wonder whether you will ever return.
Familiar places, relatives, people known to you appear as in a dream,
Or through a glass darkly.”
Here my imagined funeral reverses. I am dead but my consciousness still perceives, grasps for life, for loved ones. The image of a fish cast out of water, flapping helplessly, is another that has stayed with me.
Yet, despite this sorrowful metaphor, the Bardo urges:
“Trust your guide,
Trust your companions,
Trust the Compassionate Buddha,
Meditate calmly and without distraction.”
The Bardo Thol, taken literally, is a teaching of how to gain liberation from the realms of samsaric rebirth while in the intermediate state between life and death. More pertinently, for the living, it is a teaching about letting go of our grasping for life, our own and others’, grasping being the cause of suffering.
~
I have not experienced much death in my life, but I know I will.
I sometimes consider what it would be like for my cat, my partner, my parents to die. I will need to feel that pain, to suffer, but I will need to let go. I will need to do so in the belief that they wouldn’t want me to suffer on their behalf.
I should feel the same about those who I will leave behind. I should drop the Aphex Twin fantasy.
~
During an intensive meditation retreat recently, I had one sit where I became so deeply absorbed that the sense of a ‘me’ having the experience almost disappeared.
I was doing a stupa visualisation, in which I contemplated elements of earth, water, fire, air and space itself appearing before the ‘blue sky’ of consciousness, before contemplating each element being subsumed in the other - earth into water, water into fire, fire into air, air into space and space into consciousness, before imagining even consciousness itself dissipating into void.
It’s a practice I’ve done a few times before, but on this occasion, it affected me profoundly. I had built up strong conditions for deepening over the course of the retreat. I had also started to come down with a cold.
The symptoms made the visualisation feel embodied in a way it hadn’t felt before. The heaviness of my aching body pulled to the earth, liquid phlegm swirling around, feverish heat rising, air constricted through my nostrils.
I unravelled these sensations, visualising them fading one into the other until I came to the point where consciousness itself should dissolve. The ailing body had subsided from view and I was left with a stiller consciousness than I had before encountered.
The ego was there, but it felt thin, like a whisper. There was gratitude towards it, for leading towards this state. It had taken consciousness to a precipice, before a chasm of an unbounded, indescribable expanse.
And the whisper urges, warmly, to die. It is not a suicidal thought. It’s a calling for a complete opening up, for a letting in of something else. Its tone is pure compassion.
It lasts but for a moment, just a glimpse. Body returns, consciousness reappears, the ego’s voice returns, though now softer.
It may take a lifetime to process this experience, but I become determined to honour it. At that moment, I contemplated my death fully for the first time in my life.
At that precipice I felt complete love for existence. It was a love that felt completely selfless, open to a world more beautiful than I’d previously imagined.
Awareness glowed.
And now I move on. I will finish these writings.
This project, the album Blossoms Invite the Butterfly and these musings that have followed, will come to a close.
What have these songs and writings been about? They began as lullabies for a yet-to-be-born nephew. These lullabies became reflections on my own life - my sexuality, my lovers, my practice, my choices.
I finish writing in the months leading up to my 35th birthday. The historical Buddha was 35 when he gained enlightenment. I make no pretence to thinking I’ll do the same, but the age does feel significant.
When I first created the first songs on this album - the opener There and the closing track Offline - I was 25, newly out of the closet and still excitedly exploring London as a city I had only just started living in. I wanted to see the world, to indulge in it.
Soon to turn 35, I know I have been changing of late, my motivations shifting. In finishing these writings, I feel like I am letting go of something. I don’t want to say it’s my youth, as I still feel young, or at least I don’t yet feel old. But I definitely feel as though I’m letting go of some sense of self that no longer coalesces with the direction my energies strive towards.
~
When I gigged for the first time in years recently, the first half of the set consisted of songs from Blossoms Invite the Butterfly and the predecessor album, Dreams on the Moon. In the second half, I played new tracks from an album not yet made or fully conceived.
A friend told me afterwards that the chronology of the set transmuted a feeling of growth. The first half felt more introspective. The last songs felt more outward-bound, as though I was reaching out into the world.
What he said feels right. The music I’ve made to date has felt melancholy and reflective. I’ve absorbed myself in these atmospheres. They’ve been an inherently personal affair.
The music I’m working on now feels different. Although still nascent, with ideas still percolating, yet to be refined and actualised, it feels more expansive and less self-centred.
When I think about Blossoms Invite the Butterfly and how it makes me feel, I think of the earth. I imagine my childhood self playing outside, close to the ground, earthy mud caked on my skin and in my fingernails, the air smelling of freshly mown grass.
When I imagine my next album, I see a bright blue, endless sky.
~
The process of writing about Blossoms Invite the Butterfly has been therapeutic. I got out of the habit of journaling in my early 20s, not long before I started writing those lullabies. The album has, in effect, become my journal, a memoir of my 20s and early 30s.
Although I’ve been writing on my Mac, it’s notable how little the technologies of the last ten years feature in my memory. For all the impact social media and smartphones have had on the world, they do not feel that significant or real when it comes to reflecting on my life.
Yet, I have no doubt that I have spent an unthinkable amount of my life online over the last decade - for work, in creating and promoting music, and passively idling the time away scrolling through feeds.
Contemplating the experiences, people and motivations that have actually mattered, it’s only the ‘IRL’ stuff of the world outside that features in my memory.
How much time have I wasted, forgettably, on my phone? It doesn’t bear thinking about.
~
On the track that closes Blossoms Invite the Butterfly, Offline, I sing:
“I think it time you saw the world with your eyes,
I think it time that you go on with your life,
Oh the world goes round and round all the time
And going to sleep’s the only time you go offline.”
Like There, Offline is a song written for a newborn baby, though this time the daughter of my other sibling. Like There, the lyrics of this song are as much a message to myself and to anyone else listening as they are to my niece.
~
The founder of the Buddhist movement I practice with once said that to properly practice Buddhism is to more fully experience life, to become profoundly awake to it.
The risk posed by the digital world is a commonly discussed topic at Buddhist centres. There is a consensus that an unhealthy, neurotic addiction to our phones, to consuming content, to notifications, even to work, can take us away from our actual experience.
This is not to say that technology is an unadulterated curse. The Mac I’m typing on has been a key tool in my reflective writing, in recording and mastering my music, in listening deeply to the music of others, watching mind-expanding films, even learning Buddhist thought. Yet the addictiveness of these technologies is considerable.
As I approach finishing this final part of my Blossoms Invite the Butterfly project, I intend to spend a little less time on my computer.
~
If I could change one lyric on my album, it would be on Offline where I tell the listener to “see the world with your eyes”.
If I’d read The Everlasting Gospel by William Blake earlier, I’d have asked you to see the world through your eyes instead. He writes:
“This life's dim windows of the soul
Distorts the heavens from pole to pole
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not through, the eye.”
If I want this song and album to be about anything, it would be to urge the listener to see the world through their eyes, not with them, to actively engage with the world, to be more mindful, to work on their awareness, to become more fully alive to experience.
Buddhism has awakened this urge for me, though the Buddhist tradition has no monopoly over insight or mindfulness. Whatever it is that works for you, find what helps you to feel more alive. Otherwise, you might as well just sleep.
~
And now I will finish this project. The album and these writings began as a series of lullabies for a soon-to-be-born nephew, became a process of reflection on my own life and its changes, and now finish as a movement outwards, a going forth back into the world.
I will begin work on a new project, one that has begun as a vast blue sky, expanding eternally, brimming with possibility. Whatever this idea will become, if it becomes anything, will also come to an end one day.
In ending this current process - whether that’s the end of the first draft, the final edit, or clicking an upload button to my website or social media - I am letting go of a part of myself.
I will return to my body. I will breathe in and breathe out, feeling the earth beneath me and my head rising upwards towards the sky.