Lessons from Creative Savagery

Five Takeaways from Five Months into My New Project

Dear friends,

I am now five months into my new project.

I want to share some of the lessons it has taught me.

Why now?

Because every project has an arc.

We do not know its story before we set out.

Yet something calls us.

Despite the modern world’s obsession with planning and strategy, matters of the spirit do not fit into the neat boxes.

Even if you try to outsmart life and do set out with a compass, it doesn’t prepare you for the moment you lose or smash it.

You have to learn survival strategies in the wild itself.

When your life depends on it.

And so it is with any creative project.

You are setting out into your own wilderness.

It is not about staying in the safety net of the known.

Five months ago, I embarked on a journey to the frontier of my spirit, determined to meet what lived there.

I have undergone a transformation through what I’ve wrestled with there.

I have made camp at the borderline…and don’t intend to return until I’ve found what I’m looking for.

Here are my five lessons so far.

1. Name the Beast

The most challenging day on the project was the first.

Why?

Because I had to name the beast.

Nothing feels more uncomfortable.

What did this mean for me?

It meant confronting reality in its most brutal terms.

I knew that every handbook was telling me to give up music.

I was no longer earning from it.
I had had my chance.
I was too old to pursue a dream.
My playing had gone backwards.
I had no songs.
I had no label.
I had no support.
I had no band.

Worse still, there is a point where courage in pursuing a path makes you a clown.

I’d finally completed “The Isolation Diaries” and had the chance to bow out gracefully.

I could release the 20 songs as a double album and, irrespective of the outcome, place a triumphant full stop on my musical life.

Instead, I tramped through the snow to Mahalla, where my office is based.

Ten thousand square metres of German factory.
- 10 degrees.
Deserted.
Except the pigeons.

I sat in the darkness, wondering if I had the strength for what lay ahead.

I didn’t.

I was beyond my breaking.

In the shadow zone where things don’t even hurt any more.

I thought of one of my own heroes, Dostoevsky, and remembered his words.

Sometimes, a man must be willing to become a clown so that the Great Idea may not die…

I laughed.

Cried.

Breathed in the cold night.

Into the basement of my being.

Because I had already been through enough life cycles to know.

That along the road you will sometimes feel pathetic.

I’d entered a place of absolute vulnerability where all I could do was ask for help.

And that is what I did.

I whispered to the void.

I would become a clown in the service of the Great Idea.

I knew that if I were to lay my life bare under the terrible microscope of capitalism, it would be a fair assessment to say I had failed.

But I also knew that I was in the heart of my story.

And through that story hurt, it was my own.

It gave me the greatest feeling of relief.

Sitting there amidst the immeasurable dome of Mahalla where no stars filter through.

It was at that moment that I found my resolve.

Not to fight the beast.
Nor to confront it.
I could no longer even fear it.
What lurked in the shadows were only trifles.
I had faced every insecurity.
I had confronted every demon.

My life was no longer about where I had been or where I was going.

It was about the doing itself.

I resolved to see what would happen if I continued living in conversation with the dark.

This first lesson was that in naming your fears, you no longer fear them.

Name the beast.

2. To Mine, You Have to Enter the Pit

It shocked me how low I felt at times.

I analysed it with despair, too.

Surely, if I am having such a bad time, that is another sign that I should give up…

It is very easy to misdiagnose the creative experience.

Why?

Because we go onto Instagram and see nothing but shiny faces and nice little tea cups painted with cute monsters on them.

Try meeting my monsters…

Here’s the thing: creating something is an expression of spiritual change.

It places the pressure of the aeons upon you.

To mine something, you have to dig deep into the earth.
To suffer the heat.
To feel the grime on your skin.
The callous of your hands as they grip onto blunted pickaxe.
And the wearying taste of sweat as it drips from your brow.

But the miner digs, knowing that diamonds exist.

I was searching for Song.
But not Song as I know it.

And nothing is more resistant than song.

It is the toughest jewel of the arts to mine.

Through January, I realised that there was no point in trying to mine unless I first worked on the tools themselves.

I had to get better.
Getting better meant surrendering to time.
There will be no rushing here…

I started sleeping at the office, in my little room with the cracked windows letting in fluttering snowflakes.

And then - I struck gold for the first time.

It was a song called “At Your End”.

It has a guitar riff that is better than what I can write.

It didn’t feel mine.
But was.

I knew it was good.
I knew it was borrowed.
I knew that it was given.

The songs were not coming easy.

But I had entered the pit, and the mine had spoken.

By making the decision to go after whatever it was I was fucking going after, something beyond me had revealed itself.

I took it as a sign.

These were the terms under which the revelation would be given.

There was a purpose to the dark.

And it was only by entering it that it would reveal its secrets.

So here’s the thing.

Because you feel low, anxious, depressed, sad or in pain - it does not mean you are on the wrong path.

It might mean you are on the right path.

Because if transformation asks that you go into the dark, then into the dark you must go.

So, on your creative journey, remember this:

To mine, you have to enter the pits.

“I went into a tailspin. The next three days I went into a depression that was devastating. Now it is Monday and I am all weak and shaken. I am forced to lift myself out of the despondency by the bootstraps.”

This excerpt is from Steinbeck’s “Journal of a Novel,” a diary he kept while writing “East of Eden.” It is magnificent, and I highly recommend it.

3. Keep Paddling through the Depths

My first song was a signpost.

I had paddled out into the unknown.

At times, it had felt like a stagnant swamp

But I’d reached an estuary.

It had been much tougher to get here than I’d anticipated.

The fool in me thought that after everything I’d been through with “The Isolation Diaries”, this project would be one populated by people.

Instead, I had to revisit the hulking loneliness from where things are born.

The signpost, though, said: Go On!

Dam, I needed something from the world.

It answered with a song.

One in the locker, motherfuckers…

It told me that though I was struggling with the loneliness of trying to reinvent myself, at least there was something out there.

What would happen if I just kept paddling?

And so that is what I decided to do.

Emboldened by my first breakthrough, I decided to go into full “Monk Mode”.

I gave up alcohol.
I made full-time camp in the office.
I started recording my process on camera.

Before entering the estuary, it had been dark.

Because it is always darkest before dawn.

But I had found the current.

And a signpost had emerged - not as a clear sign - but as a broken arrow.

Is it saying this direction or that?

At this point, the chosen route matters less than the decision to choose.

I kept paddling.

And during my time in monk mode, I went very weird.

But a new song emerged: “Wolves at the Door”.

I had surrendered to the waters, and now I no longer needed to force my way through the stagnant swamp.

I had found flow.

It taught me:

When in the depths, keep paddling.

In Mahalla in the dead of winter.

4. The Dark is Combustible

“Vampires” arrived as an explosion of energy.

I had met the dark full-on.

And found it combustible.

I was shrieking terrible things into the night in Mahalla.

These were noises no human should hear.

Anyone who heard those noises would say

That is not music.
That person should give up.

And so I fucking howled more.

In the heart of any howl is a prayer.

Please, Lord, alleviate this pain.

But this howl was a different form of prayer.

It was about reconnecting to that primal energy.

That stuff of which we are made.

The archetypal cry at the beginning of time.
The primordial shriek at our birth.

I AM HERE.

And that is where my voice returned to.

To the beginning of me.

You don’t reset yourself by thinking about it.
You don’t reset yourself by doing what you’ve always done before.
You don’t reset yourself by hoping things will change.

You reset yourself by offering the prayer.

This prayer consisted of my whole life, outputted into each breath and submitted to the dark for inspection.

I didn’t know it, but I had broken through the basement of my own being.

And in it, I found joy.

Loud, disruptive, unapologetic joy.

Joy that is dangerous.

That breaks shackles and shatters chains.

My dogfight had led me back to rock ‘n roll.

Not as I had known it.

But as I was discovering.

As my spirit cracked upon that great void, its subatomic potential erupted.

You have to break out of where you were and into what you are.

It may mean getting decibel-breaking loud.

But that’s when the dark knows it is dealing with someone.

And a reaction takes place:

The dark is combustible.

5. There’s No Beauty Like Dawn in the Wild

I am entering the sixth month of this project.

I have learnt through my journey the absurd extent to which darkness is linked to joy and breakthrough to suffering.

Never has my music sounded like it is beginning to sound.

It has nothing to do with the world's trends.

It is utterly dismissive of all fads.

Something is happening.

It is a “happening” beyond expectation or hope or need.

Instead, it writes its own law.
Its own story.

I never captured the duality of dark and light in the same breath as I have done in this project.

I know I am doing my best work.

I can feel it in my bones.

In the way the songs are forming, as if resisting being dragged out of the dark lair where they slept.

My dream was never about making it.

It was about self-becoming.

And after that, to make a life in the arts.

I am within my dream.

In the journey of becoming whatever it is that was meant of me.

To that, I am being true.

That is where my freedom comes from, and it crystallises into the music.

Recently, I wrote the fifth song for the project.

“Be as One”.

I hated the title when I wrote it.

That’s so fucking naff, idiot…

But it stuck around long enough for me not just to like it but to own it.

I named the beast.
I entered the pit.
I mined the dark.
I paddled the depth.
I found dawn.

These have not been easy months.

But they have been some of the best of my life.

There is a joy that can only be found in the greatest depths.

In fact, I’m inclined to think it can only be found there.

Wherever you are, no matter how dark, painful, or hurtful, have faith.

Faith that the ways we suffer have purpose.

Because we don’t know what it is yet does not mean it does not exist.

And when we emerge from it?

There is no beauty like dawn in the wild.

To Conclude

At this moment, I would ask that nothing in my life be different.

I know that I must wrestle more.

It will take tremendous energy, energy that I often feel I don’t have.

But you expend so that you might receive again.

And to my understanding, that is when grace arrives.

When we are broken even beyond our surrender.

From it, something erupts we never knew was there.

I hope that this reflection might help some of you who are wrestling with your own lives or projects.

For now, love to all and keep on in all you are doing.

It is worth it.

Right, back to it!

Jim

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