I write good...
A writer friend once told me that I write good. This was when we were unconventional penpals; he was a music writer and record store owner in his late 50s and I was a 20 something singer-songwriter on my overseas adventure, dragging my 76 note weighted keyboard from bar to bar on the London Underground, cursing that I never learnt to play the guitar. He was a friend of my parents back in the 70s when they were in bands, but this was the 90s and email was a new thing, so I’d sit in the Easyjet café in Victoria eating a curried egg baguette and for £2 an hour I’d type away my woe to my old friend back home. We grew this kind of therapy between us, bonding over the most cringeworthy moments of our respective lives, dripping with sarcasm and embellishment to humour each other and lighten our respective loads. He would keep me up to date on all the gossip about people I didn’t know but knew of, in a way that made me feel like a trusted confidante, like part of a scene I wasn’t. From the outside looking in, my nose pressed against the glass, I imagined he might one day write to others of me. He believed in me in a way that my family couldn’t, my lyrical content too close to the bone, my lack of self-belief inherited, passed down from generations of people who didn’t feel good enough at the thing they were good at. He taught me I guess that to write gave angst reason. He told me I write good and I believed him. I was a little bit gothic, excessively empathic and full of feelings I couldn’t quite express in my songs. He got me, saw me. He drew those thoughts out of me and onto the screen. He liked my music even when it was a bit shit. He gave good feedback, honest critique that wasn’t too offensive and which I appreciated because of his expertise. He was well respected in my country for his writing and commentary. When I returned home I’d go over for dinner at his beautiful house with his wonderful wife and their famous friends, and sometimes I would bang out a new tune on the piano in the pool room. I always felt honoured to play for him and I miss those days, even when we were sometimes socially awkward in real time and liked each other better from inside our computers. He’d come out to see my band and the next day would email me his insights, often less about the music and more observations on the punters around him in the bar, or the interpersonal dynamics of the band which anyone who has been in a band will know is 95% of being in a band, the other 5% being actual music. I still have some of those emails printed out and I treasure them now that he is gone.
