The Tarot of Songwriting 04 - The Emperor
The Sea, Ibsen’s Women and The Pleasure of Constraint
I was 17 when I wrote my first album, Alas I Cannot Swim. And like most 17-year-olds, I knew the square root of fuck all. This is not to dismiss the dizzying intensity of being a young person, nor the spectrum of experience it is possible to have at any age. It’s just been on my mind recently - provoked, I suppose, by the intermittent presence of the 18-year-old childminder I’ve lately employed to help me out for a few hours a week - the daughter of a friend. It’s frankly embarrassing how much I look forward to our few minutes of chat before my daughter drags her by the hand out the door. She’s so full of interests, concepts, opinions, places she wants to go and things she wants to understand. And I, too, electrified by this proximity to a kind of youth with which I have otherwise little cause to encounter, want to know so much: what books she's reading, what she thinks about this or that, whether anyone listens to albums anymore - the list is endless. And she’s wonderful company by the standard of any age. When we speak, I forget how young she is but restrain myself from mentioning it. People used to tell me all the time I was beyond my years. I remember finding it flattering but also loaded as if being or acting my age was unflattering somehow. The Pavlovian achievement of being grown up became something I had to unpick in my mid-twenties, mere moments before my own lamp of youth began to dim.
My daughter is currently obsessed with boats and water. So this weekend, we brought her to Dungeness, one of my favourite places on earth, to meet the sea for the very first time and see up close any number of the beautiful washed-up fishing boats in varying states of decay that rest indiscriminately across the beach. From the cottage we rented, the sea is obscured by a pebble dune but no more than 50 ft from the door. Trying to convince my daughter that there was anything better than the pebbles that surrounded the house, however, was near impossible. No matter how many mentions of boats, how big, how colourful, could persuade her to join us on the minute journey to what would undoubtedly be the most mind-blowing experience of her life so far. But pebbles! Everywhere! And they’re right here. Of course, we were able to pick her up, literally drag her to the main event. And she was appropriately awed by what she saw. The rest of the weekend was spent acquiescing to her requests to see the water again, ferrying her back and forth on our shoulders to the shore. It made me think, how do you teach your children that there is more out there to experience than they could ever imagine.
My sometime obsession, Lou Andreas-Salome, wrote a collection of essays about six of Ibsen’s female characters, Ibsen’s Women. The final essay is a parable in which she thinks of her chosen characters as six wild ducks, confined, as in the play, to an attic from which there is no apparent escape; two of them are content in their ignorance of a world outside of which they know nothing, two are disturbed by and aware of their confinement but unmotivated to find a way out, and two are incensed by their knowledge of all the possibilities of freedom that lie just outside the insuperable walls which contain them. In the case of the latter, to remain confined would be a fate worse than death. Yet these ducks and their varying degrees of reality live amongst each other.
I imagine that most people can relate in some way to all of these states of mind. For some, the cage is gilded, for others it's a breezeblock prison - but for some the feeling of nothing containing them is an unbearable reality of its own. This category is absent from Salome’s essay, a consequence of the time in which it was written. What of the contemporary agony of too much freedom? In songwriting, bondage has often been my muse - the times in my life in which I have been afforded too much freedom have almost always been fallow.
At 19, when I wrote I Speak Because I Can, I was writing about a woman reflecting on the breakdown of a marriage to which she had given her entire life. I cooked the meals and he got the life, now I’m just old for the rest of my time. I don’t know where this came from - but my best guess is that as a young woman, I had an instinct for, and fascination with, the potential tragedies of my sex. If you don’t keep an eye on freedom, you might give everything and end up with nothing.
Out of the context of what it was to be a woman in Ibsen and Salome’s time, the allegory is now applicable across the sexes - late capitalism has made prolitariates (in the roman sense) of us all, as our seemingly expanding freedoms conspire and contract around us; we are not really free, or at least we are unable to extract meaning from freedom.
This brings me back to my daughter - as I dragged her across the dune to meet the sea. Her father and I are, for now, the structure within which she will come to understand the world - in that sense it is our duty as parents to inform her that the pebbles are plentiful but the sea is rare. I want to create for her a balance between desire and duty. This balance is vital in creative work, where you must create for yourself a structure within which potentially miraculous things may occur. I try to practice guitar and read every day, and to forbid myself pleasures that I might then find all the more gratifying. I don’t always manage this but when I do, it seems to be the formula for songwriting. This is also why I shouldn’t have been suprised that becoming a mother did not interupt me creatively as I had feared; the tiny corners of time I find to play guitar or write are perfect examples of how constraint provokes inspiration - making it vital. There is a sweet spot between structure and freedom - within which is the spirit of The Emperor, in my understanding.
The Magpie section will be available later this week.
When I recall myself at 17--no dummy, starting college at Berkeley, with dreams of being a writer but not yet a stitch of the ability--I still find it hard to fathom how you were able to create such a profound and beautiful work of art at that age. Many I am sure were equally baffled, and applied terms like "wise beyond your years" and "old soul" as a way to explain it. "Ghosts" reminds me of a brilliant Bernard Malamud story, "The Magic Barrel." "Dora" is like an ingenious feminist inversion of "Pinocchio." Many of us live a lifetime and would trade everything we've done for one song this good. At 19, you wrote "I Speak Because I Can," a far more profound album: "Goodbye England," "Blackberry Stone," "Rambling Man," "What He Wrote," and the title song all stand the test of time as stone classics. It was similar for Dylan, who wrote "Hard Rain," "Blowin' in the Wind," and "Don't Think Twice" at 21. I wonder if you've given any thought and can share what went into forming your strange genius at such a young age. Modesty aside, you must realize how unusual it is for anyone to create such mature work at such a young age. Given you are 20 years younger than I, I am looking forward to enjoying your genius for the rest of my life. With gratitude...
This really struck a chord with me. I am sat in a cafe waiting to pick up my 17 year old son upon his return (on a 7 hour bus trip) from Boarmasters Festival. It’s the first time he’s been away from home on his own as far as I can remember. I’ve heard very little from him which probably means he’s had an amazing experience. Your piece made me reflect on whether my own relatively slight wanderlust may have constrained him. I hope not. But thank you for making me aware of it.