Are We Ever Ready?

The Story of Recording Two New Songs & My Creative Takeaways

Dear friends,

I’ve spent January developing the nuts and bolts of my new project.

It’s a time of experimentation and of auditioning life.

My main goal with the project is to document my creative process and share what I learn.

As such, this week’s newsletter covers two things.

First, a video documenting my internal resistance and creative breakthroughs while writing my new songs.

It was edited by my talented friend Tiago Pöx. This project marks a shift in my strategy as I've decided to bring in a team after 20 years of doing everything myself. It's liberating and a step toward achieving my creative goals this year.

Here is the video!

Please let me know what country you’re watching from in the comments!

Second, the main newsletter explores the question:

Are We Ever Ready?

It documents why I chose to get back into the recording studio despite the project being embryonic.

With love,

Jim

PS I'll share a new song from my unreleased 'The Isolation Diaries - Volume 5' EP in each upcoming newsletter. I want to prioritise you, my supporters, here by giving you early access to my work.

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Are We Ever Ready?

INTRO

This week, I returned to the recording studio.

Was I ready?

No.

Did I know that I should be in the recording studio?

Yes.

We want safety, we want security, we want control.

But fear itself can be a creative tool.

I’ve written before about Albatross Projects. Those projects we dream of but never start. Or projects we start but never finish.

We don’t notice it at first, but three things crush us:

First, the weight of our own expectations.

Second, the fanciful notion of perfection.

Third, the demonic compulsion to hoard stuff.

In today’s newsletter, I will examine my relationship with “readiness” and how using it as a creative tool brings out the best in me.

From it, I will draw four takeaways which I hope will help anyone wrestling with the question:

Am I ready?

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1/ Living Potential

“Dean Is Home”, a great musician based in Berlin who is playing on the new songs

I believe the deepest dream of a human being is becoming who you are.

Why, then, do so many of us feel outside our “potential”?

We feel a relative satisfaction with our lives.

At yet something gnaws.

The voice we try to suppress.

The voice others don’t hear, yet which torments us in the inopportune hours when the noise of the world dies down, and there is, finally, no one to listen to but ourselves.

Courage is this:

To invite those voices into our lives.

They do not come to wreck us.

They come to create us.

Creativity is a dualistic force.

It comes to break us down, just as it does to create.

There is no creativity without discomfort.

Because to go from one state to another involves the dying off of one part of your being, just as a new one forms.

And yes, you risk everything when you create.

Over and over.

Creativity is a mirror.

And it reflects an atomic sun back into our being.

Of course, you are not ready!

Who is ready to become something they have not yet been?!

It is only your adventure because it is damn well terrifying.

And it’s only terrifying because it casts off that which you once were.

Takeaway:

Remember that “feeling not ready” is a rite of passage. Before each new endeavour lies a test. As if life is saying, “This is what you could be. Do you have the stomach to live up to your own potential?”

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2/ Hero Stories & Transformation

Suzie Fleur who is guesting on “Wolves at the Door.”

Why do we look to “hero” stories?

Because the hero undertakes not just the journey but also undergoes the transformation.

Are you in your story?

The story you set out on?

The story that is meant for your life.

Over and over, we diverge from our true path.

Courage is not setting out into the wild.

It is the commitment to find your way once we get lost.

There are few guarantees in life.

Except that you will get lost.

We get stuck because we find ourselves too afraid to venture deeper into the forest once we do.

And so, at the last, we have to decide.

Will we remain forever where we are?

Or will we risk taking the deepest breath and heading back out?

This week, I set out again.

But something strange happened.

Rather than being devoured by the beasts, I became part of their pack.

Takeaway: the greatest growth takes seed in us when we are most lost.

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3/ The Summoning of the Godhead

My new creative space in Berlin’s Mahalla

When I arrived at my office at the start of the year, I was confronted by 10,000 square metres.

Black-hole silence.

Arctic cold.

With your creative self, you are faced with both vast emptiness and eternal promise.

God, it’s scary.

To be confronted by what you might be.

And the devil who tells you you’ll never get to it.

What did my devil say to me?

He told me that I’m done.

That I have nothing left to give.

That the market place had made its decision.

Why have I returned to the start?

Is this the “right” going on?

But something stirred within me.

The voice that is deeper than success, failure, time, status, or our fixed form.

Can you hear it?

I’d spent the last years entertaining the abyss.

It brought me here…

To an ending that shape-shifted into a beginning.

I opened up my little office.

Instruments.

You never abandoned me.

Even when I tried to walk away from you.

Why are you stirring my spirit so?

I thought I’d made peace with you…

I don’t know if I have the strength to follow your calling.

I took the guitar from my little office.

And walked into the centre of Mahalla - the vast space where my office nestles.

And I howled into the void, its reverb pulsing like an unspeakable resonance of the Godhead.

In my mind, a vow.

Here is my spirit.

I present it to you.

Let us play Russian Roulette with my life.

If a song should come, it will be my sign to follow.

In such moments, our life is written.

By what the void chooses to do with what we are willing to project into it.

That is creativity.

A song came.

Did I summon it?

It is the type of song you have to follow because to ignore it is to forget the deeper part of yourself.

“Wolves at the Door”

In such moments, our contract with our futures is written.

And so, there it is.

I have been summoned once again by the calling.

By the path.

Takeaway: heed your spirit’s call, even in doubt and uncertainty

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4/ The Dream of the Moment

I wrote two new songs.

• Vampires

• Wolves at the Door

Dam, what to do with them?

I’m so done with hoarding…

The problem we have as creatives is time.

The time between the conception of something and the time it takes until it is birthed.

So much gets lost in between…

During this time, the potential creation tests us.

Will we bring it into being?

Starting my project, I have one thing on my mind.

To transform the relationship between the moment of creation and when it is released into the world.

A few days after writing the “bare-bones” of the two songs above, I booked a studio.

Thus, I arrived at the studio on Monday - The Famous Gold Watch - and got to work.

Was I ready?

Of course not.

Are we ever ready?

Of course not!

But I wanted to dance with the unreadiness.

Why?

Because I sensed that by not having a clear map, I would walk in new directions.

I wanted to enter the unknown.

To safeguard against having the option to “play it safe”, I did two things.

I think of these as my “magic initiators.”

First, I booked an entirely new band

Second, I told them, “No full band rehearsal”.

And so we arrived at the studio.

Five musicians who had never played together before.

It was an extraordinary experience.

To put great players into a room and to make decisive creative calls in real-time.

No second guessing.

No overthinking.

Only gut instinct and creative fire.

We stepped into the void, and we brought something back from it.

It felt Promethean.

The last two days were two of the great days of my life.

As usual, I pushed everyone over the edge.

My new creative partners provided the parachutes.

It’s easy to romanticise.

Because there were challenging moments.

Commitment does not mean the absence of uncertainty.

But it does bind the abstract into a concrete form.

Takeaway: We are never ready. But sometimes, it is only by following the unreadiness that you learn the tools you need to face life.

5/ The Invitation of the Future

Thank you everyone for the support!

This year is critical in my creative life.

But then again, they all are.

It’s easy to think of it as a dogfight.

Rather than basing your foundation on the gratitude for what you have.

A creative life is a good life.

It is worth fighting for.

Whether your project is personal or expansive, listen to how it calls you, and as best you can, follow it.

It’s okay if it's frustrating.

It’s okay if it’s slow.

It’s okay if it causes self-doubt.

What matters is that it is.

For all the struggle of creativity, it never fails to bring joy.

Joy and growth.

And though we love the idea that it might, at some point, get easier -

Would we want it easier if it meant sacrificing the growth?

I’m so grateful that things have always gone well enough that I can continue.

But always just tough enough that I have to keep pushing through thresholds.

All I want in my life is the exchange now.

With people.

With life and love.

With the beautiful burden of trying to coax the abstract into some physical form.

The reward isn’t the result.

It’s not even the journey.

The reward is the relationships.

That is how I want to leave this week's newsletter: with gratitude.

For you, who support me.

My musician friends and collaborators.

You here, who support me - from wherever you are in the world.

What a thing that is.

To be in life, grateful and supported.

That is enough for me.

Always was.

With love,

Jim

With Suzy and Dean the day before heading to the studio - trying to work out what the hell we’re doing!

Working on the lyrics for “Wolves at the Door” at my favourite cafe.

A Studio Portrait by Suzie Fleur!