For many years, making music was really all about making connections: with collaborators, with audiences, or with listeners…

…My school friends, pretending we were a band as we floundered around, banging on our instruments.

…The bond I have had with many later collaborators — like a marriage of sorts — where we felt a solidarity, locked into a beat, and as we revealed our music to the outside world. 

…The excitement of picking up the threads of collaborators’ song-writing ideas, and building something out of them, together.

…The pride of telling strangers that I am part of a creative group, and by extension of a musical community in the city around me (here’s an article I wrote about one example of this).

…The excitement I can still recall I felt when, looking upward through my long hair into an audience in some rundown pub in Liverpool, I could see that (if no more) I had their attention.

Even through the home-studio-focused production work I’ve been doing for the last few years, I’ve been so happy to be able to mark the end of some of these productions with a single gig, supporting bands I deeply respect, to feel like I am still part of a musical community.

Now those connections are more distant, I’ve also made efforts to keep a connection to the musical world outside my house, periodically playing and reading at open mic nights in the city.

Over the years I have steadily traded more and more day-to-day collaboration with others, for control and flexibility in my process. I make music when and how and want, and that is profoundly fulfilling. I’d be happy to work with others if it was feasible, but that ability — to be free to make music as I need to — has to take precedence.