Welcome!

Hello and welcome to my blog!

I've decided to start up a blog again alongside this new website so I can perhaps give my audience more of an insight into who I am, my background and what I am about. I would also hope to get to know you better and perhaps build a little community here, bonding over this Music I am creating, away from the chaos and madness of the usual online places.

I've played around with blogs in the past, most notably during the SoulJahm era in continental Europe, and you can read those blogs here:

https://europeisthesoil.blogspot.com/

https://sketchesofeuropa.blogspot.com/

Things move so fast in the online world and after that SoulJahm era came to an end, I did try to keep those blogs going but there seemed to be little interest and everything was moving more towards social media and that's where I found myself too, signing up to Instagram, using Twitter more frequently. It seemed then, around 2016, that everyone was using social media as the preferred way to interact and I reluctantly joined in.

I've also experimented a little with talking on video on YouTube, and liked the immediacy of that format, that you can see body language and facial expressions so perhaps be more understood in what you are trying to get across but because much of what I feel to say is not always directly music-related, I felt it was confusing for the audience. Is he trying to come across as a musician or another of the many spiritual guys on YouTube?!

People would sign up to YouTube after seeing me play Music on the streets of Edinburgh and then find videos of me on my channel discussing deep spiritual and alternative reality stuff. I even considered creating a secondary channel for talking videos more aimed at the spiritual/alternative side of things but I never went through with that because I didn't want to get sidetracked and lose focus on the Music.

First and foremost, I see myself as a musician. A singer/songwriter. That is what I've given all of my adult life to and its what feels most natural to me. Yet the spiritual and alternative side of things has been a huge part of my life since it exploded into my reality back in late 2006/early 2007. As my life has went on its been harder to separate the two. I can look back at songs I wrote years before 2006 and see that the spiritual was always there, trying to break through, I just wasn't consciously aware of it in those days. So many strange events and experiences have happened in my life since that point in 2006/2007 that it couldn't help show up in my writing as a songwriter. Afterall, artists are supposed to express their experiences, their observations of life, and put out in their art to the public what the public is reaching for or knows deep down but can't articulate for themselves.

So where I've come to now and why I've decided to start this blog is I feel writing this way best suits me. Writing gives me time to consider my insights and thoughts more easily than the immediacy of talking to a camera, where you always feel you missed out this or that or could have said it better. Writing this way - on a blog - as opposed to social media offers the opportunity to go into subtleties and nuances that you simply can't get across in the limited forms of Twitter, Instagram, etc. When you are dealing with some of the stuff I am, that is incredibly important, because its hard enough to go into this stuff as it is and be understood! It's also less intrusive. I can say things here and its there for people who want to delve in and get to know me better but the blog isn't in your face if you simply enjoy my songs and don't want to know anything else.

So this is a space where I'll express all sorts - music related stuff, going into the background of songs I've written, recording experiences, experiences making music videos, perhaps some little exclusives, alongside some of the strange events I've had happen in my personal life (and my reason for going into those is mainly because it might help you get more insight into your life as often these things connect up with each other), but also where I can put across my views on things going on in the world and how I interpret them from a more spiritual perspective than the mainstream version of events.