Splitting Atoms

Reflections Before Tomorrow's Recording Session in Berlin

Creative life is like splitting atoms.

You feel a universe within, but accessing it requires all the tools of the ages.

For me, the mystery lies not in what you find inside, but in the journey of learning how to access it.

It was this recognition which led me to start this newsletter.

I wanted to explore the space between the life one lives, and how we express it.

Too often, there is a block between the two.

I recognised that the creative process is really life process.

For this reason, my newsletter has become more personal. I can’t treat the creative process as something that I prod with a stick.

It doesn’t help to talk about it in the abstract.

It must be lived.

So either I share what I live or I become just another theorist.

Our lives are shaped by circumstance.

Sometimes with you, sometimes against you.

With Donna’s theft over the last weeks, it’s felt that the only thing the world wants is to keep me from recording my new songs.

And yet, here I am on the doorstep of the next recording session tomorrow.

Honestly, I am nowhere near ready.

Not being ready always offers a choice: commit or delay.

My creative life has taught me to get comfortable with being not ready.

Or, to phrase it clearer:

Can you get used to living uncomfortably?

The funny thing is, you don’t.

Not really.

This year has shown me that last-minute anxiety, the urge to cancel, self-doubt, and pre-event dread are as present as ever.

I know it sparks the question, “Why don’t you just go easier on yourself, man?”

But here’s the thing:

Life will always ask you to delay.

You have the energy to go forward, but life pushes against you.

You are shaped in that relationship.

Life is sculpting you, refining you like ore in a smelter.

At the beginning of this year, I faced the painful recognition that I am in a dogfight for my musical life.

Again, it is easy to ask: why consider it a dogfight at all?

Well, sometimes you have to name the challenge precisely as it is.

It does no good to hide.
It does no good to run.
It does no good to pretend.

So here I am, six months later.

Every session has arrived before I am ready.
Every session has said “delay”.

But each session has been a provocation too.

What have you got left, Jim?

I am reaching deeper inside myself than I ever have for these songs.

Goddam, there is blood on the altar.

Each one is a fight between existence and non-existence.

I’ve been recording my journey and posting a weekly video on YouTube. It’s sometimes felt harrowing; to see my own struggle laid bare each time a new video is ready.

Do I seem depressed?
Am I depressed?

And then I get back to my conversation with Mephistopheles.
He answers:

“No, son, you are just fighting like hell.”

Arriving at my studio, I never quite know what to expect in myself.

Sometimes, you scratch upon illumination.
Sometimes, you are cast down into the dark.

Because that is the thing:
In your creative life, you have to confront it all.

And when no shape forms from the abyss you find in yourself, it remains just that: an abyss.

Those deeps can feel hollow, vast, even frightening.

To accept everything you find - or don’t - is merciless.

And yet, I am evolving out of these conversations with the dark.

And the light, too.

Something IS happening.

It unfolds in slow motion, revealing the mysterious ways the spirit expresses its forward movement.

That IS creativity.

That IS how the spirit forms.

That IS how soul-stuff moves from “here” to “there”:

At times, I find myself in league with hellish communications.

But the songs ARE coming.

Tomorrow, I go into the studio and will begin recording the 8th and 9th songs of the year.

They sound unlike anything I’ve ever done.

I feel so proud of how raw and alive they are.

They sound nothing like anything out there.

Analogue.

Pounding.

Replete with human traces.

An embodiment of those hell-fire communications.

Struggle, laid raw.

I don’t know how I’m going to release any of it.

I don’t even know what the project is called yet.

The abyss is shaping me, and I am shaping the abyss.

We have befriended one another.

Like all the sessions this year, I am going into the studio tomorrow with a new band.

They have never heard the songs.
They’ve never had a rehearsal together.
Hell, they’ve never even met each other.

Each of these songs has been created from nothing.

They are formed by the abyss itself.

So here’s my takeaway:

To find something you’ve never found in yourself, you have to have the courage to do it in a way you’ve never done before.

Unreadiness comes with a price tag.

You may feel you are fragmenting.

But there is a reward, too.

You will never feel ALIVE like you do in these times.

When the void starts knitting into something that wasn’t meant to be - you are never closer to the origin of life itself.

That IS the mystery.

Something from nothing.

Life, defiant against the void.

Something made from the dark itself.

Thank you all for your support, guys.
You have no idea how it keeps me going.
The messages from last week's newsletter kept me going this week.

So as I take a deep breath to go into the studio tomorrow, I want you to know - these songs are for you!

Love, Jim