🎧 Only The Shit You Love: The Podcast (Damian Cowell)

14 responses on “🎧 Only The Shit You Love: The Podcast (Damian Cowell)”

1. I have long been encapsulated by Chilly Gonzales and his ‘musical genius’. Whether it be his work with various artists, pop music masterclasses and minor christmas album, I have been enamoured with the way in which he manages to break music down to capture what is essential. I was therefore intrigued by a book on Enya.

   I purchased the Enya: A Treatise on Unguilty Pleasures in good faith with little idea what to expect. I thought it might be some sort of technical breakdown of Enya’s work. Although I am always interested in what Chilly Gonzales has to say about any sort of music, I was not sure how interesting an extended breakdown of Enya’s music would actually be. What I had not expected was the way in which Gozanales used Enya and her music as a frame for his own memoir on music.

   It was almost a joke that rose up from my unconscious. But it was my way in. With Enya as a constraint, I could finally write a musical memoir, the very book the publisher had asked for years ago.

   http://www.chillygonzales.com/books/enya-a-treatise-on-unguilty-pleasures/

   Fine Gonzalas spoke about the Enya’s lullaby quality, the guilt often associated with liking such music, her use of the pizzicato strings on the Roland D-50 synthesiser in lieu of a rhythm track and the way in which she has managed her career by continually say no. However, often these references are merely jumping off points for Gonzales to reflect upon his own memories and experiences with music. Whether it be the relationship between harmony and melody:

   Harmony is melody’s bitch, with no life of it’s own.

   http://www.chillygonzales.com/books/enya-a-treatise-on-unguilty-pleasures/

   His desire for music that can be both serious and drop into the background:

   This is what my Enya book is about. This idea of music that sounds good while you eat or party or take a bath, versus music that you give your full attention to. And you guys are having the wrong argument. It’s not that all music falls into these two categories. The goal of music should be to function on both levels. It’s like with people.

   http://www.chillygonzales.com/books/enya-a-treatise-on-unguilty-pleasures/

   Disdain for loud voices:

   Vibrato is a bit like my formerly beloved jazz fusion: technically very difficult to learn but even more difficult to listen to. But to sign with no vibrato at ll, to let the music itself do the emotional work is the purist’s choice.

   http://www.chillygonzales.com/books/enya-a-treatise-on-unguilty-pleasures/

   And his preference for the music over lyrics:

   Wordlessness works for me. I was never a lyrics junkie outside of my affection for listening to rap. Rap lyrics are direct, playful and journalistic, standing in contrast to the impressionistic, poetic style of singer songwriters. With some exceptions I listen to music where the lyrics are in the passenger seat. No one really hears or cares what the Bee Gees are singing about, and I doubt that a single Bee Gee would even dispute that.

   http://www.chillygonzales.com/books/enya-a-treatise-on-unguilty-pleasures/

   In some ways Gonzales’ reflection on Enya reminds me of Damian Cowell’s Only the Shit You Love podcast. Like Gonzalas’ constraint as a guide, Cowell uses his video series as a starting point from which to reflect upon music past and present. They are both musical memoirs of artists engaging in artifice. Maybe the real purpose of such texts is not to uncover the author but to provoke the reader (or listener) into considering their own thoughts and finding their own good mother in music.

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   Review – Enya: A Treatise on Unguilty Pleasures by Chilly Gonzales by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
   

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2. One thing that I have noticed in listening to the Only the Shit You Love podcast is the wide range of music and styles referenced. I have therefore compiled a playlist to dig into some of the ‘secret shit’. I am finding that music provides an interesting insight into a different time.

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3. Kaitlin Sawrey, Amelia Chappelow and Frank Lopez reclaim Daniel Johns narrative from myth and innuendo. It was interesting to get a different perspective of Johns’ music and some of the thinking behind it, including trashing the recordings of an early album. I was also intrigued by Johns’ lack of interest with technology.
   Although I was intrigued by the conversations with Paul Mac, Natalie Imbruglia, Van Dyke Parks and Julian Hamilton, I felt that voices of Billy Corgan and Kevin Parker were a bit token. This is one of the things that I have enjoyed about Damian Cowell’s podcast, other than an episode involving Tony Martin, the names feel like context.
   One of the funny things about this podcast is that I had to listen to it on Spotify. This then lead to a whole series of recommendations by Spotify around podcast.

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4. Ann Powers uses Get Back to reflect upon the myth of ‘band guys’.

   The band guy’s footprints forged the genre’s path from the early 1960s onward, from Liverpool’s grubby Cavern Club to Seattle’s dingy Dutchman rehearsal space, in leather boots and Converse sneakers. Blending Hobbit-like charm with Aragorn-ish glamor, this figure took shape within the dreams of countless men following in the wake of John, Paul, George and Ringo teaming up as the Fab Four. The romance, familial connection and creative exchange that sparked for The Beatles in their Cavern Club days grew mythic as they became the biggest act rock ever produced, pulling rock’s ring from the hands of solo artists and duos and making fellowship the primary energy empowering rock’s quest. Over the decades, band guys traded leather for Spandex for skateboarder shorts, blew up the genre like punks and reassembled it as grunge; but what bore repeating was that story of men growing up together through music, turning into a family and finding glory on the battlefields of rhythm and noise.
   @NPR https://www.npr.org/2021/12/21/1066022789/beatles-get-back-band-guys

   Associated with this is the irony that as the world was becoming less segregated, music was become more so with the appropriation women and culture. In particular, “The Beatles brought white America a sense of relief.”

   It’s not a coincidence that the music industry itself became more segregated during a period when civil rights defined the spirit of protest in America. The Beatles and the other English soul transformers/appropriators that quickly followed in their wake, from The Rolling Stones to Joe Cocker, personally protested the divisions that greeted them on tour and sometimes in the recording studio; yet as they became rock’s norm, they allowed white fans to enjoy what the late great music writer Greg Tate identified as a pasteurized form of Black culture: “everything but the burden.”
   Women of any race were also pushed out of the band-guy narrative, despite the very real roles they played in the British Invasion, from Tina Turner teaching Mick Jagger how to move to The Shirelles inspiring The Beatles’ harmonies.
   @NPR https://www.npr.org/2021/12/21/1066022789/beatles-get-back-band-guys

   This is an insightful piece. It had me thinking about the balance of guys and girls in Dave Grohl’s autobiography. Although there was discussion of Joan Jett, this was wedged in-between living in the van and Pantera’s strip club.
   It also had me thinking about Damian Cowell’s discussion of white male rock in his podcast. What is intriguing is how the group may change, but the myth carries on.

   The group sound doesn’t always feed the myth of the band guy, but as water tends to find its own level, it’s become intertwined with it. It’s not imaginary, this sense that musicians making music together over time produce something that both enhances and exceeds each participant especially when they are composing together. This is one way to understand jazz, for example. But in rock the fascination with “the group sound” melded with a romantic view of masculine freedom and prowess that made the band not just a conduit for artistry, but a way of life. Even as the multiracial revolution disco wrought overtook it in the 1970s and, simultaneously, punk’s antics knocked it down a peg, the band lived on as the most potent signifier of rock’s ability, in the words of its post-1970s high priest Bruce Springsteen, to “bust this city in half.”
   @NPR https://www.npr.org/2021/12/21/1066022789/beatles-get-back-band-guys

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5. Inspired by Kath Murdoch, I have long had an approach of selecting one word as a focus for the year. Last year, my word was ‘ideas‘. I think I had the idea that I would dig into different ideas. I started off reading Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy. Although this started many threads, life got in the way to tying any of them together. The year subsequently became a collection of beginnings:

   Once you start grasping how deeply we are products of our time, you can almost invert the idea of genius. Maybe the genius isn’t so much in the inventor as in the age. When an idea’s time is ripe, maybe that idea is just gonna happen: The voltage is so strong it’ll course through several different people at once.

   Clive Thompson https://marker.medium.com/who-was-first-with-a-big-idea-its-often-hard-to-know-d64291cea550

   It’s great starting a project when you’re limited to these instruments and limited to this scale, and you’re working out what can you do with it rather than just, you know, everything being possible. I like to know what I can’t do and then work inside that.

   Alex Ross https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/how-jonny-greenwood-wrote-the-years-best-film-score

   In Graeber’s classroom, such questions of status had little weight. Even the big-name theorists he discussed — in Graeber’s telling, “they were just dudes,” said Durba Chattaraj. One of his Ph.D. students at Yale, she remembers lectures speckled with the personal foibles of the greats. Apart from the entertainment value, there was a message: These thinkers “were smart, but they were doing something that anybody can do if they read enough and think hard enough, which is creating theories about the world around you.”

   Molly Fischer https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/11/david-graeber-dawn-of-everything.html

   The vaccine against monoculture is tolerance.

   Edward Snowden https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/culturalrevolutions

   Many think of punk as a style or a category or a thing, but it’s much more interesting if you think of it as a process, a way of doing things, a disposition, a spirit.

   https://austinkleon.com/2021/11/03/punk-is-not-a-style-punk-is-a-spirit/

   CP: What always saves me is that someone will tell me a story, and I’ll spin this other story as a way of escaping that pain. No drug has ever got me as high as a good idea. You get that idea and, oh my gosh, you’ve got nothing else. You don’t need oxygen. That idea is meth. You don’t need sleep and you don’t need food. Because that idea is going to run you for a year. That little idea is your armor and it’s your savior.

   BLVR: I get that. The little idea is better than drugs because it has an engine.

   https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-chuck-palahniuk/

   Art, by definition, is artifice. It’s fake. It’s not “real” in the sense that a sunset is real, or a trout or a pomegranate. Art is a work crafted with calculation, forethought, and skill to create either the simulacrum of something real (a painting of a sunset, say) or to express an insight into, or attempt to bring order out of, nature or the experience of life.

   https://stevenpressfield.com/2019/12/art-and-authenticity/

   There are endless arguments to be had when new ideas arrive. The challenge is in being clear that we’re about to take a side, and to do it on the effects, not on our emotional connection to the change that’s involved.

   @ThisIsSethsBlog https://seths.blog/2021/09/defending-change-or-the-status-quo/

   Whenever you are out of ideas, there’s someone, somewhere, with bad ideas that need to be corrected. But you don’t necessarily have to talk about the bad ideas, or take them on directly, you can just articulate the good ideas that cancel them out.

   https://austinkleon.com/2021/08/12/what-to-do-with-your-feelings/

   Feedback is oxygen for your ideas. It will help them grow and get stronger, starved of it, and your ideas weaken.

   @tombarrett https://edte.ch/blog/2021/08/15/feedback-is-oxygen-for-your-ideas%e2%80%8a-%e2%80%8astart-with-a-minimum-verbal-prototype/

   Those of us back here in reality must work together to enact a Gentle Awakening for our friends and loved ones who have gotten addicted to this video game. There is no man behind the curtain, no secret cabal controlling our destinies, no marvelous or nefarious plan driving Covid, vote counting, or global affairs. They need to awaken to something way way more frightening than politicians eating children: shit just happens, no one is in charge, and chaos reigns. There really is no scapegoat — never was. The only way through is to find ways of coming together, instead.

   One step, and one day at a time.

   Douglas Rushkoff https://gen.medium.com/plunging-into-the-abyss-dbb898faa144

   This sets pragmatic genealogies apart from evolutionary psychology’s conjectural depictions of hominin life in the Pleistocene. Pragmatic genealogies prove themselves not through the detailed accuracy with which they depict the actual historical development of our concepts, but through the way in which they help us grasp connections between our practical needs and our concepts. Imagine having to explain to an alien why your car has the shape it does. Instead of painstakingly walking the alien through the stages of the assembly line on which the car was actually constructed, you could explain how its shape answers to a combination of practical needs: the need to move from A to B, the need to stay warm and dry, the need to steer and brake, the need to have a good view of your surroundings, the need to see and be seen in the dark, etc. The best way to show how the car’s shape is responsive to our needs isn’t to work through the distractingly intricate causal process through which the car was actually constructed, but to reconstruct the car’s shape as a response to a series of needs – perhaps through a narrative or an animation showing how, if we start from some primitive shape and successively warp it to meet a series of needs, we end up with something recognisably car-like. The State of Nature does the same to help us understand the shape of our concepts and their relation to our needs. It offers us an idealised, uncluttered model that we can tailor to our interests and tinker with in our imagination.

   aeonmag https://aeon.co/essays/our-most-abstract-concepts-emerged-as-solutions-to-our-needs

   Ideas only travel as far as the minds ready and willing to take them in.

   https://austinkleon.com/2021/06/22/bad-ideas-get-stolen-plenty/

   One way to define our identity is to fall in love with an idea (often one that was handed to us by a chosen authority). Another is to refuse to believe our identity is embodied in an idea, and instead embrace a method for continually finding and improving our ideas.

   @ThisIsSethsBlog https://seths.blog/2021/05/identity-and-ideas/

   Here is an idea I love that may or may not be true:

   Some books have a centripetal force— they suck you in from other books.

   Some books have a centrifugal force — they spin you out to other books.

   https://austinkleon.com/2021/03/29/books-that-suck-you-in-and-books-that-spin-you-out/

   In the end, I actually ended up committing myself to a return to reading (or listening to books). In part for ideas, but really for solace.

   Therefore, having felt like 2021 was something of a right-off in regards to achieving my own desired outcomes, I was not sure about 2022. Like Austin Kleon, I feel dormant. I therefore thought having a focus was not a priority. I thought then that instead of having a word with particular outcomes perceived, I would instead return to a meditation on a theme or topic.

   One of the strange things about the current malaise is that I feel like I both have too much time to think and too little time to do anything. Listening to Damian Cowell’s podcast associated with his album involving diving into his early years, I was led down my own rabbit hole. Associated with this, I started reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. This only furthered my reflections on the past. I therefore decided that my word for 2022 would be memories.

   Whether it be reading more memoirs, such as Tony Martin’s Lolly Scramble, writing reflections of my own, such as my post on Changing Tracks, or simply diving into the idea of memories in general. I am going to dedicate this year to letting go of setting stringent expectations on myself and commit myself to letting my mind just wonder. Start often, finish rarely?

   So what about you? Have you got a word or any thoughts on memory. As always, comments welcome.

   If you enjoy what you read here, feel free to sign up for my monthly newsletter to catch up on all things learning, edtech and storytelling.
   
   My One Word for 2022 is Memories by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
   

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6. Although a little late, here is the music that soundtracked 2021 for me and how it kept me surprised.

   Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land – Marina

   I always love serendipitous discoveries. Bored one day, I created a set of arbitrary rules on Spotify to decide what I would listen to. It was something like clicking on the fifth artist in the ‘Fans Also Liked’ three times. Doing this, I came upon Muna’s remix of Marina’s track Man’s World and I went from there.

   I feel like this album has a bit of everything. There are aspects of slick pop production, balanced with a mix of punk, all done with a touch of melodrama. Overall, it is shouty without actually shouting. As Damian Morris explains:

   Anti-misogyny manifesto pop could easily become clumsy and overwrought, but the joy Marina invests into her mannered, quasi-operatic delivery makes sedition sound seductive.

   Damian Morris https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/jun/13/marina-ancient-dreams-in-a-modern-land-review-ambitious-manifesto-pop

   Sixty Summers – Julia Stone

   It is interesting how there are some artists that you overlook because you presume you already know what they are about only to discover a whole other side that you were unaware of. In 2020 it was Sufjan Stevens, while in 2021 it was Julia Stone.

   It is easy to imagine another version of Sixty Summers at the hand of somebody like Stuart Price. Although it always threatens, it is always held back. Whether it be the tempo or the particular mix. Overall, I really liked the delicate and sparse nature of this album. In part this is a product of Stone’s voice, but I also feel it is result of Thomas Bartlett and Annie Clark production.

   Deep States – TFS

   There is a quote from Peter Goldsworthy that I come back to again and again, “cartoon descriptions, how else to describe a cartoon world.” I think that there is something to be said about TFS being the soundtrack for the current crisis. As Gareth Liddiard suggests, maybe the world has just caught up with a perspective they have been plying for years.

   “With TFS, I think the world just caught up to our thing. We’ve been plying our trade for years and I think the world has finally become as anxious and neurotic as we’ve always sounded,” says Liddiard.

   @beatmagazine https://beat.com.au/how-gareth-liddiard-overcame-give-a-fuck-fatigue-for-tfs-third-lp-deep-states/

   I must admit, there are times when I listen to TFS and I just feel kind of stupid for not following all the references littered within the music. Maybe that it how it is meant to be, not sure. Overall though there is something compelling about it that just keeps me there. There are moments where the clouds clear and clarity shines through, such as in GAFF.

   I’ll take the wages of sin over the minimum wage
   I’d blow myself up too, man, it’s been one of them days
   But I’m not a kamikaze, I don’t wanna die a martyr
   I’m just looking for a latte and a fucking phone charger

   https://tropicalfstorm.bandcamp.com/track/g-a-f-f

   Divine Intervention – Client Liaison

   I remember seeing Client Liaison perform for the first time for ABC’s New Years Eve This Night is Yours concert. One cannot help be transfixed. Are they for real? I guess artifice comes in many shapes and sizes.

   Divine Intervention is an album in search of higher power. There is something about their slick sound that leaves me both full and yet wanting more. In some ways, just as Roger and Brian Eno’s album felt like the perfect album for the start of the pandemic and the world wide lockdown, Divine Intervention seems the right album to shake out the blues and get out on the dancefloor again and the new normal, even if that dancefloor still may be alone in a kitchen with headphones.

   Only the Shit You Love – Damian Cowell’s Disco Machine

   Damian Cowell has a knack of taking a morsel of an idea to its nth degree. In the age where bands release a series of singles prior to the album launch, Cowell took this a step further releasing his who album on a weekly basis as a YouTube series, until finally release the album as a whole.

   Only the Shit You Love is a snapshot of the modern world.

   The modern world, product placement, continuous improvement, the culture of engagement, the diminution of language, the moronisation of television, imposter syndrome, subjectivity, my career demise, the heard instinct, popularism, the death of reason, nostalgia, love, lose, tolerance and friendship.

   https://damiancowell.bandcamp.com/track/episodes-1-and-2-only-the-shit-you-love-and-disco-machine

   As always, it contains Cowell’s usual witty observations on the world. However, one of the changes to the first two Disco Machine albums was exploration of different dynamics and tempos. The usual upbeat tracks are still present, but they are contrasted by a number of slower numbers. Overall, coupled with a weekly podcast, this album was the perfect ailment for what felt like a perpetual lock-down.

   One of the things that music offered me in 2021 was a sense of surprise. With so much of life in lockdown somewhat mundane, these albums each in their own was offered something new, unexpected and seemingly novel.

   So what about you? What albums soundtracked your 2021? Were there any themes that tied things together? As always, comments welcome.

   If you enjoy what you read here, feel free to sign up for my monthly newsletter to catch up on all things learning, edtech and storytelling.
   
   Music of 2021 in Review, or the Year of Serendipity and Surprise by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
   

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7. In an interview with Lol Tolhurst and Budgie on the Curious Creatures podcast, James Murphy discussed how when he started out, he would begin his sets with an instrumental during which he would do soundcheck. This made me think about Damian Cowell’s discussion of prog rock and the place of equipment in music.

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8. I was recently inspired to read Clinton Walker’s Stranded – The Secret History Of Australian Independent Music by the deaths of Ken West and Chris…

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9. This exploration of stardom after the lights go out reminded me of something that Damian Cowell discussed in his podcast. Maybe not about pop and a little less famous, but he touched on the way in which that person with a hit on RRR years ago is also an ordinary human being working a day job.

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10. I listened to Jarvis Cocker’s reading of his book Good Pop, Bad Pop. The book involves the Pulp frontman going through a loft full of objects he had stored there seemingly for a situation like this.

    Good Pop, Bad Pop ambles through the 25 years before Saint Martins, tracking Cocker’s worldview as it takes shape in his home city of Sheffield. It opens in the present day, as he’s clearing out the loft of his London house. There is a lot of stuff in there, and each item has a story. His task is to decide whether to keep each thing or “cob” it (throw it out). Mulling over these ancient treasures puts him in philosophical mood, and the book soon expands into both an autobiography and a treatise on pop.
    @guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/25/good-pop-bad-pop-an-inventory-by-jarvis-cocker-review

    Through tales of buying second hand clothes, the embarrassment of the first gigs and the boredom associated with recovering in hospital, Cocker teases out his creative pathway. This is not to provide a model for how to be the next Pulp or the next Jarvis Cocker, but instead to help others find their own spark, maybe to just keep going.
    In some ways, this reminded me of Damian Cowell’s podcast associated with the album Only the Shit You Love. Just as Cocker uses the collection of keep sacks as a jumping off point, Cowell uses the various tracks as a means of conversation. Both have a penchant for the small incidental stories, always wary about getting too Glenn A Baker.
    ᔥ “Conversations” in Jarvis Cocker and the Pulp master plan – ABC (12/15/2022 23:10:49)

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11. I stumbled upon Faith, Hope and Carnage via an interview Nick Cave did with Richard Fidler. There was a part of me that thought I knew Nick Cave. Maybe this was from following his blog, The Red Hand Files, or just the nature of him as an artist. However, there was something about the conversation with Fidler that really caught me. That lead to reading the book.

    Faith, Hope and Carnage is a meandering on and off conversation between Nick Cave and journalist, Seán O’Hagan, captured on the page through fourteen chapters. Beginning at the start of the 2020 and carrying on through to the end of 2021, Cave walks through the process of creativity as it happens, as well as reflecting upon the death of his son, grieving, life and music. It is very much a pandemic project brought about by the strange times.

    It really did feel like the end times had arrived, and the world had been caught sleeping. It felt as though, whatever we assumed was the story of our lives, this invisible hand had reached down and torn a great big hole in it.

    Cave goes into how he wrote Ghosteen, the writing of Carnage, the creation of his ceramic figures and The Red Hand Files. He reflects upon the change to a more disruptive narrative after his son died, “narratives pushed through the meat grinder.” Cave also talks about the various inspirations, such as Stevie Smith, Elvis, Flannery O’Connor, and Rodin.

    Built around conversation, the book seemingly goes where it goes. I imagine in another world, it might have been scrubbed of its contradictions, repetition and edges, but I feel that it is this disjointed nature is what makes it special. It provides an extension to Nick Cave the musician, extending the usual approach to his music to the actual text. Just as he explains that the wider “creative process is life and all it brings”, in some ways this all or nothing approach applies to the act of creativity.

    Strangely, Faith, Hope and Carnage is a book that would not have worked any other way. The conversational nature allows the book to go to places and explore topics that might have otherwise be cut by the editor. It really feels like sitting in on a personal conversation. I think this is epitomised by the conversations about his mother or Anita Lane who both died midway through the project.

    O’Hagan tries to structure the conversation. For example, there are times when he brings up old quotes which demonstrate this. However, as each chapter unfurls the topics stretch beyond any sense of expectation. Capturing this generosity, Richard Fidler describes the book as an ‘act of kindness’ for the reader.

    Throughout, there are many themes explored:

    Grief

    Although grief involves ‘some kind of devastation’, Cave explains that grief often defines who we are and how we see the world. Working through this is usually about getting on top of the small things. On the flipside, grief provides a gift and opportunities, a ‘reckless’ and ‘mutinous’ energy, a sense of ‘acute vulnerability’, defined by the fact that the worst has already happened. In the end, we may not have a choice over life’s circumstances, however we do have a choice as to how we grieve.

    A choice, a kind of earned and considered arrangement with the world, to be happy. No one has control over the things that happen to them, but we do have a choice as to how we respond. Page 103

    Life

    Like the gift of grief, for Cave, ageing is about growing into the ‘fullness of your humanity’, continuing to be engaged and respecting the ‘vast repositories of experience’. One experience that leaves its mark on us are those who die, leaving us like ‘haunted houses’.

    I think these absences do something to those of us who remain behind. We are like haunted houses, in a way, and our absences can even transform us so that we feel a quiet but urgent love for those who remain, a tenderness to all of humanity, as well as an earned understanding that our time is finite. Page 148

    Alongside the respect for experience, Cave suggests we need to celebrate regret as a sign of self-awareness or embracing uncertainty and the world of possibilities. We also need to be able to make mistakes and with that forgive.

    We need to be able to exist beyond disagreement. Friendships have to exist beyond that. We need to be able to talk, to make mistakes, to forgive and be forgiven. As far as I can see, forgiveness is an essential component of any good, vibrant friendship – that we extend to each other the great privilege of being allowed to be wrong. One of the clear benefits of conversation is that your position on things can become more nimble and pliant. For me, conversation is also an antidote to dualistic thinking, simply because we are knocking up against another person’s points of view. Something more essential happens between people when they converse. Ultimately, we discover that disagreements frequently aren’t life- threatening, they are just differing perspectives, or, more often than that, colliding virtues. Page 246

    However, the greatest challenge is to keep turning up again and again.

    if I look back at my past work from the certainty and conviction of the present, it appears as if it was a series of collapsing ideas that brought me to my current position. And what’s more, the actual point I’m looking back from is no more stable than any of the previous ones – in fact, it’s being shed even as we speak. There’s a slightly sickening, vertiginous feeling in all of this. The sense that the ground is constantly moving beneath your feet? Yes, exactly. So how do you deal with that? Well, I have learned over time that the creation itself, the thing, the what, is not the essential component, really, for the artist. The what almost always seems on some level insufficient. When I look back at the work itself it mostly feels wanting, you know; it could have been better. This is not false humility but fact, and common to most artists, I suspect. Indeed, it is probably how it should be. What matters most is not so much the ‘what’ as the ‘how’ of it all, and I am heartened by the knowledge that, at the very least, I turned up for the job, no matter what was going on at the time. Even if I didn’t really understand what the job was. Page 247

    This reminds me of Austin Kleon’s book Keep Going.

    Religion

    For Cave, religion is ‘spirituality with rigour’. With this, faith and God are the search itself, where God is both the ‘impetus and the destination’, and the question is itself the answer. He suggests that religion often serves a utility beyond sense.

    Why would I deny myself something that is clearly beneficial because it doesn’t make sense? That in itself would be illogical. Page 78

    For example, It provides a language of forgiveness often missing in secularism.

    Challenged on his belief, Cave argues that scepticism and doubt are actually a means of strengthening belief. Interestingly, Cave talks about prayer as a form of listening.

    Prayer is not so much talking to God, but rather listening for the whispers of His presence – not from outside ourselves, but within. It’s kind of the same with the questions that come in to The Red Hand Files. I think they are singularly and collectively trying to tell me something, which may just be ‘I am here’. I think they reflect my own needs. There is an exchange of a sort of essentialness, wherein we attend to each other through a sharing of our collective need to be listened to. Page 190

    Music

    For Cave, music is about transcendence, spiritual yearning and the sacred essence. It fills our ‘God-shaped hole’, our desire to ‘feel awed by something.’ It has the ability to ‘improve the condition of the listener’ by uniting people and ‘putting some beauty back into the work.’

    Music is one of the last great spiritual gifts we have that can bring solace to the world.Page 204

    Reflecting upon his current process of writing music, Cave discusses the way in which he makes music from the disparate parts found through improvising.

    The nature of improvisation is the coming together of two people, with love – and a certain dissonance. Page 57

    Associated with this, Cave talks about the ‘ruthless relationship’ he has with his initial ideas and his willingness to discard words.

    the lyrics lose their concrete value and become things to play with, dismember and reorganise. I’m actually very happy to have arrived at a place where I now have an utterly ruthless relationship to my words. Page 15

    He actually suggests that he has a physical relationship with his words and knowing what is right. This all reminds me Jon Hopkins’ process of building something to destroy it.

    Surprisingly, writing music for Cave is not continual, but a deliberate time-based process. Something that reminds me of Mark Ronson who I vaguely remember suggesting that it was time to write a new album regarding Uptown Special. With this, the challenge with a new project is getting beyond the easy residual ‘deceiving ideas’, to “write away from the known and familiar”.

    I tend to find that when I first sit down to write new songs there is a kind of initial flurry of words that appears quite effortlessly. They seem to be right there, at hand, so there is a cosiness about them, a comfortableness. And because they aren’t too bad, really, you immediately start thinking, this is all going to be easy. But these are the deceiving ideas, the residual ideas, the unused remnants of the last record that are still lurking about. They’re like the muck in the pipes, and they have to be flushed out to make room for the new idea, the astonishing idea. I think a lot of musicians deal in residual ideas, because they’re seduced by the comfortable and the familiar. For me, that’s a big mistake, although I can understand the temptation to create something reassuringly familiar. And, in a way, the whole industry is set up to cater to that – to the well-known or second-hand idea. Page 144

    All in all though, Cave explains that songs change when played live, it is when the fullness presents itself. A record is only ever one part of that journey.

    Creativity

    Cave talks about the way different mediums, such as The Red Hand Files or The Devil – A Life series of ceramic figures, allow him to step outside of his expectations.

    My best ideas are accidents within a controlled context. You could call them informed accidents. Page 23

    He explains that it is important to have an element of risk, such as taking on new and challenging projects or just being naïve, to produce creative terror that helps drive things forward.

    I think to be truly vulnerable is to exist adjacent to collapse or obliteration. Page 45

    The problem is that ideas often slowly rise and hold hands, with the gap between boredom and epiphany being very close. Astonishing ideas usually require faith and and patience. Sometimes ideas just need air in order to prove their validity. This is why conversation is so important. In the end though, although writing music may start with a ‘date in the diary’, Cave explains that the wider creative process is life and all it brings.

    I really don’t think we can not talk about it if we are talking about the creative process. It’s simply part of the whole thing. The creative process is not a part of one’s life but life itself and all that it throws at you. For me, it was like the creative process, if we want to call it that, found its real purpose. Page 104

    This reminded me of Damon Albarn’s description of ‘creativity as a condition.’

    What I liked about the book is that in itself it felt like a form of conversation with the reader. With Cave seemingly changing stride mid-sentance, the reader is invited in almost as an equal. This had me thinking myself about grief and the importance of being vulnerable.

    Additionally, I appreciated seeing a different side to Cave, not a real side, but a different presentation of ideas and thought. I think that this is also captured by the Cave and O’Hagan in the epilogue:

    O’Hagan: I thought I kne youCave: I didn’t know that either until I opened my mouth.

    I had a similar experience with Damian Cowell’s Only the Shit You Love podcast and Jarvis Cocker’s Good Pop, Bad Pop.

    Written during lockdown, it also provides a reflection on life lockdown during lockdown as it happened, not as some retrospective. The initial positive potential to be able to do nothing, to put aside our issues, but then the growing frustration of such strange times.

    We blew it. We squandered it. Early on, many of us felt that a chance was presented to us, as a civilisation, to put aside our vanities, grievances and divisions, our hubris, our callous disregard for each other, and come together around a common enemy. Our shared predicament was a gift that could potentially have transformed the world into something extraordinary. To our shame this didn’t happen. The Right got scarier, the Left got crazier, and our already fractured civilisation atomised into something that resembled a collective lunacy. For many, this has been followed by a weariness, an ebbing away of our strength and resolve and a dwindling belief in the common good. Many people’s mental health has suffered as a consequence. Page 154

    I cannot remember the last time I read a book where I wanted to begin again as soon as I had finished it. I wonder if this says as much about me as it does about the book and Nick Cave.

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    Review: Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
    

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