End Of The Strangers Revisited

'End Of The Strangers', an album I released in 2019, has now been moved from it's own Spotify page to my solo David William Spotify page and also the SoulJahm Spotify page. This was to do with the way streaming services categorise multiple artist names. It used to categorise 'David William & SoulJahm' as one entity, and so a separate artist page was created for 'David William & SoulJahm', which was annoying because anyone who visited my solo David William or the SoulJahm Spotify pages would not be aware of this album. Now, it registers David William & SoulJahm as two separate artists and hence, the album now appears in the discography of both. I'm happy it's now sitting alongside my other work and easy to find.

That's all boring, technical stuff that you don't need to know... you can just pretend in the case of this album and the '2020' album (also released as David William & SoulJahm) that it's me with my invisible band! Which it pretty much is. They back me up from another dimension!

This album features the song "Nobody Wants You To Be Free", which is a good place to start in what I'm about to say next. A video that happened to pop up on my YouTube homepage talking about how people hate to see you striving creatively made me feel like writing this blog post. A lot of these videos on YouTube, although sometimes truthful in what they say, seem to be more about getting your attention and engagement than about actually caring for the issue they are speaking about. In the past I've engaged with this kind of stuff feeling it may connect me with like-minded souls but it never has. So my tendency now is to talk about it directly on my own website.

What I've noticed almost universally across the board is that every single person in my life who supported and encouraged me in the early days when I was starting out has either disappeared out of my life or will now only interact with me over superficial, everyday stuff. They will almost never mention the creative work I do, completely ignoring it, as if it's not there. It doesn't matter whether it's friends or family, they've all done it. Sometimes those people will even interact with me on my social media channels, which are ONLY there for my creative work, and use it like a messenger app to instigate a conversation with me, usually to tell me something about their life which I'm not even interested in.

I first noticed this occurring at the point where I took more control of the whole process from start to finish. Before the means were there to do it all independently, people assumed I'd go the conventional way of trying to get a record deal or a publishing deal, and in those years I seemed to have more support. When it became clear it could all be done independently, that should have opened up the possibility of more involvement from others around me, but instead I found the opposite happened. People pushed it further away with an attitude of "that's your thing". I found that very strange at the time but I've come to see it's that people are ok with you being creative when they see it going nowhere or where the chances of success are one-in-a-million, like getting a record deal. They never really believe it's gonna happen but they enjoy the discussing and talking about it phase. Most people are like this in life anyway - they talk but rarely act. When you grab the bull by the horns and really go for it, that's when their attitude changes. Suddenly you find yourself out on a limb alone.

Freedom and creativity are one in the same. You are only truly creative when there is freedom within you, and wherever freedom is, creativity will automatically flourish. There is so little creativity in the culture today because so many freedoms have been restricted. That's why only content creators do well these days but not artists. Everything is a re-make or re-hash of something else - it's just content, not true art. That's why the AI thing is so all-pervasive. It's fake creativity, not the real thing.

When I wrote the song "Nobody Wants You To Be Free" I was thinking wider than creativity, I was talking about life in general. I observed that nobody wants you to be free. Not your parents, not your family, not your boss, not your teachers. They all want to contain you within a limited field because their roles and identities depend upon it. The status quo must not be disturbed at any cost is the underlying message in all their care, concern and advice. Don't rock the boat, get a nice career, or at least a mundane job, get married, get a family, get a mortgage, be a respectful member of your community. I'm not having a go at those who choose those things but why do you need me to join you? If you are happy living with those things it should stand for itself, it shouldn't need me to also join you to validate your choices.

The sentiment of this song can also be applied to what I'm speaking of here with creativity. I could've titled the song "Nobody Wants You To Create". They don't want you to create because it reminds them of how they neglected their own creativity for the sake of comfort and convenience and to conform. Seeing you struggle as an artist makes them feel better about that and that's why the society is set-up to make it as difficult as possible for artists to thrive. The society is built on the labour of bitter, frustrated people who never followed their dreams and took the easy way and artists make those people feel uncomfortable. They don't want to face that so making artists struggle unnecessarily is a way of them avoiding that reality. They can feel better about their own lives, because, at least they live in comfort. Yet they know deep down they can't do without art otherwise they will go insane.

We are all the same at the deepest core - One Love, One God, One Consciousness. Yet we are unique and varied as individuals. I don't have a problem with people who wish to live conventionally and conservatively but what these people need to understand is we are unique in our expressions as individuals. We don't all want the same things. It's funny, people like myself are often accused of being arrogant or smug because we live differently but the biggest arrogance comes from the masses who assume and try to force their ways on everybody else. Don't take your frustrations out on me because you weren't brave or bold enough to take the risks I've taken.

I've had to live with uncertainty everyday for years in all areas of my life. I've never had the stability or security that most take for granted. I've had to get used to working with and embracing uncertainty. It's a tough, lonely road at times because it puts you out of sync with almost everyone else. You don't have the same common ground to relate to others. That's one of the reasons I've tended to avoid people at times. They can't relate to my life and I can't relate to theirs and so it becomes awkward, tense and stilted interacting with each other. So I've always sought out similar souls to myself whom I feel comfortable with. Still, even at this stage, I wouldn't change it for anything. The creative rewards make it all worthwhile and I know that most of the difficulties are not natural, they are deliberate and enforced by a system full of bitter, frustrated and vengeful people. So I try to keep myself clean of that and when I feel their energies are muddying my own, I retreat and withdraw. It's not worth it to become like that just so you can be more successful, which is a trap I see many other artists fall into.

A strange phenomenon I've observed in all of this in trying to seek out similar souls is that those people who want to stay connected to you in some way but show no support or encouragement, even often stubbornly getting in the way of your progress, seem to take an attitude akin to that song from the 90s, "Don't Speak" by No Doubt. They pretend to be oblivious to the clear tensions, resentfulness and incompatibility of their relationship with you that they neither want to let go nor drop their stubbornness. Instead they just allow the misery to go on and on. Since they align with the system and they have all the resources on their side, albeit only because they have stolen what actually belongs to us all (the land and resources of the Earth), people like myself have nowhere to go. Our power comes from unification with each other, putting our resources together and assisting each other but we can only do that if we come together and that is constantly being made difficult because the stubborn ones energies get mixed up with ours and make it difficult to identify each other clearly. The internet has made this much easier which is another reason for trying to get everyone living their lives online. A screen is like a mask so it's harder to see the real person behind the screen.

The 'End Of The Strangers' album has this theme running through it, breaking away from parasitic energies so that those of us who wish to live in freedom, love and creativity are no longer strangers to each other.