The Wild West

A reminder why I don't play gigs...

To begin with, it was because I never saw myself as a traditional singer/songwriter perched on a stool singing earnestly and sincerely like James Taylor. Although I like some singer/songwriters in that vein, the songwriters I admired the most were band songwriters. I started out on a 4-track portastudio so creating interesting arrangements, atmospheres and textures was a big part of the enjoyment of making songs for me. I was preparing for a band situation, not to be a solo singer/songwriter.

Then I found out about the masonic control system running throughout all of society. Within the music industry that means there are paths already carved out for you that you are expected to go down. The hierarchical structure. First you play pubs, move up to clubs and so on, get noticed by someone and more doors open for you... if you agree to play that game. This never made sense to me. Surely it is about Music, no? A good song is a good song whether it's written by Paul McCartney or some unknown guy.

What I began to realise was if I played in those conventional places, even as an indie artist, there would be nowhere to go. Stuck playing covers in a bar to half-interested people or if you want to move out of that, you must take the industry opportunities that come your way. ie. signed to a label or whatever, because you aren't going to go further up that ladder without taking those industry opportunities. What Kate and I tried to do in SoulJahm was break away from that and create our own thing, create our own opportunities and ecosystem to exist in and synchronicities served us very well in every other way except with people. To make it work we needed help and people are complicated to deal with because they have loyalty to the masonic control system. It has given them their house, their job and holidays and all the things they think make up life. So nobody wants to leave that and take the risk of trying something new. Yet life itself is a risk! The safety you think the system is offering is illusory, which more and more people are beginning to find out. I didn't have a choice, I got thrown out of it all by something bigger than me (call it Higher Self or Soul or whatever) before I had barely entered the adult world. Since all people know is the masonic system when someone comes along with an alternative most people run the other way because the unknown is frightening.

That leaves someone like me in a kind of limbo land. I've become aware of too much to go back into the masonic control system (even if I wanted to, which I certainly don't) and yet I can't move forward either because there are no places outside of that system where I can play freely and do my own thing. You find this out when you busk because that is the closest to being able to play live freely that I could find and still the police and yellow jackets and various people will hassle you because they are obsessed with control. They need to have everything organised and monitored in some way. The world I'm trying to get to is a place where I could get a bunch of people together and play in a field or something. The Wild West may not have been perfect but it was certainly better than what we've got now (endless control and rules and regulations). For all the rules & regulations, I'd say it's more of a Wild West now than it ever was so all this control hasn't solved a damn thing!

So working within the limitations of this mad society, the closest I can come to playing live for you are these videos: