The Tarot of Songwriting 07 - The Chariot

On poetry and economics

I signed my first record deal when I was 16 before I even had a manager. I remember being courted by various (harmless, I suppose) old dudes from a few major labels. They bought me and my sisters drinks and drove us around in their chauffeured cars. It seems completely ludicrous now, given how spectacularly uncommercial my music career has turned out to be. It was a different time - the tail end of something. A turn was about to be taken from which the music industry would never fully recover - certainly not in its previous form. I signed a spectacularly shit deal for five albums (which only got shitter with the emergence of streaming) - all of which will never return to my possession. If you’ve ever wondered why I don’t spend a lot of time promoting or re-pressing those albums, that’s why - I will never see any financial benefit from doing so. My children will never own or benefit from those albums. Maybe I’ll pull a Taylor Swift someday - but honestly, I don’t like to dwell on it. What’s done is, legally speaking, done - I’m told. Overall, I consider myself lucky that I got any shot at a music career.

Shortly after signing the contract, I met a great manager with whom I would work for the next ten years. Over the course of that time, our relationship changed a lot - he went from working with a child to working for a woman - it was confusing for us both. His company also saw massive, stratospheric success with another band they managed, so my relatively meek career fell quite far down their list of priorities, and things began to unravel. Having so little to offer them financially, I can’t say I blame them. It was a matter of fiscal fact. But of course, it was heartbreaking and provoked tensions from which there was eventually no recovery. I came to the terrifying realisation, after the release of my sixth album, that I was going to have to leave the company and limp out into the wild, alone. It was an emotional time as it had once been a kind of platonic love. It felt like leaving behind a failed marriage. We were those people who couldn’t make it work.

As is so often the case, tumultuous tides would reveal hidden treasures. Shortly after I left the company, I was texting with a friend who is a wildly successful model. I told her how awful and scary it had felt to leave. She responded by saying that finding the courage to leave her first agency, the one that plucked her from obscurity (then treated her terribly for the years following), had been the best and most emboldening thing she’d ever done for herself. It was the first glimmer of excitement I felt, perhaps because it came from a woman older than me, whose career and morals I admired. It inspired me to take up the reins a little and get under the hood of all my contracts, incomes, numbers, etc. Deeply dull stuff. But what I got from it was a realistic picture of my worth in stark terms - because critical success has only limited value, in stark terms. This gave me an entirely new perspective on how I was going to be as an artist and what kind of help I needed from a manager, what I should realistically expect of their time, and what they could realistically expect from my output. I CANNOT RECOMMEND THIS EMPHATICALLY ENOUGH. Don’t be scared. Look at the figures. It will shed all kinds of light on what you want and who you need.

Subsequently, I met with tens of managers and did trials with two that didn’t feel right. So many of them had me make meeting arrangements with their assistants or insisted I come to see their sleek, expensive offices (why?) or talked about how much they looooove women (ok?). Some were clearly bullies; some were grifters. Many were lovely - some were simply busy or based in the wrong country. It was, all in all, a massive tiresome drag. The only thing that saw me through to the finish line was having a solid sense of what I was - to them and to myself. And when the right one appeared, entirely unassuming - who met me at the cafe I wanted to meet at - I felt confident in my choice. And indeed, it has been transformative for me as an artist. To settle gently where I belong - supported in all the right ways. I feel very lucky - particularly as subsequently, I have been contacted by so many other artists who had heard on the grapevine of my resolved management troubles, for whom this is not the case.

You don’t often hear artists talk about the team behind them, perhaps because it lifts a veil - and for obvious reasons, an artist thinking about themselves in economic terms is both dull and sad. It is important, however, and necessary, if only to remind people that they can have more control over themselves and their careers than they previously believed. In my case, eternal growth, fame and world domination are not on my wish list - so I am better off understanding what my own economic possibilities are.

I personally believe that patriarchy does not exist in the soul of man - but is rather the indiscriminate disembodied thing which gapes at the market in awe - believing that its movements cannot be intervened on, that its terrible, incessant slouch towards growth is a marvel that must be obeyed - against all instinct towards fairness and human dignity. It is the force that provokes people to look at the world solely through the prism of growth at any cost, turning humans into workforces, mothers into strains, artists into products - the earth into a garbage heap. I feel suspicious of artists who shield themselves in virtue while forcing their baited, adoring fans to pay astronimcal ticket prices and deliver fevered merch drops, forcing them to participate in a cultural spectical that produces so much waste - while at once understanding this is the world we live in, the system I also partake in. These thoughts were provoked around the time I changed managers and got interested in economics, by a book I read by the Italian philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi called The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, which centers around how the philosophy of market growth advances human misery. It’s a very good book.

This is all to say that taking the reins of ones life, ones career - whatever, can be of course be daunting and tiresome. Getting under the hood of your carriage confronts you with something complex and messy - and holding the reins too tight might send you flying at the slightest bump on the road. Like all things - the touch is a balance - a process, mutable. I try to hold them lightly and see where they guide me. This is the spirit of The Chariot, in my understanding.