When Self Belief Deserts You

How I Rekindled My Musical Confidence and the Lessons Learned

I had no idea that I was living outside belief.

It wasn’t until it stirred that its absence hit me.

Curiously, it arrived in an old DDR bunker in Weisensee, Berlin.

Converted into a studio some years ago by an eccentric Englishman called Cameron Laing, “The Famous Gold Watch” has become not only my own musical home but also to many artists in Berlin’s underground.

It’s there that many of my recording sessions have taken place this year, helmed by my friend Bob Spencer (co-producing).

This week, I entered its labyrinthine maze for my 5th recording session of 2024.

It was there the elusive angel returned.

And so, this week's newsletter is about belief. 

No matter your journey, there will come a time when you have to go forward when belief has deserted you.

Here are my reflections on my journey this year, what I have learned, and why my belief returned.

Entering the Abyss

On the 1st of January, I trekked down to my new room at Mahalla.

It was cold, late and vast.

I sat there for a moment, contemplating the void.

I had no songs, and even if I did, no pathway, support or infrastructure to put them out.

I sat grimly in the dark, and I remember thinking:

Are you really going to do this to yourself again?

I had the feeling I was starting again, but it was a different type of starting again.

Earlier in my life as a songwriter, I’d been half crazy, fuelled with fire, and willing to sacrifice everything.

I may have lacked many things, but not belief.

I knew I had to do this.

No matter how bad things got, I knew this was the path for me. Despite outcomes rarely corresponding to my inner experience, I just felt things would work out.

And dam, every moment I was chasing song.
Writing, writing, writing.
Thousands of ideas, chords, lyrics, melodies, sequences.

Now, all these years later, I had something I didn’t have back then.
I had a degree of health.
Through all the ups and downs, I’d worked on myself continuously.

The man who sat surrounded by Mahalla’s vastness was one who’d been rewritten on the inside.

By the blade of life, the piston of experience, and the courage to put health at the heart of my journey.

During these years, a fundamental shift had taken place. 

Back then, I wasn't defined by who I was; I was defined by what I did.

It is different now.

I am who I am, not what I do.

The result of a twenty-year ego-death cycle.

Beneath it, I found the face I had before I was born.

Yet, as I sat in Mahalla at the start of the year, I realized I could no longer draw from that old fuel source—the younger man's furnace of belief.

Or the wilful delusion that things would just work out.

I gazed into the darkness without illumination.

If I were to enter this canyon, it would have to be without a torch.

The Nature of the Call

In my earlier years, when I was teetering on the brink, the mania I felt was a type of defence.

You contend with how fucking terrified you feel by resolving, grittily, to go on - even if the price is that you contort yourself into a version of yourself you don’t recognise.

The Doing itself acts as a form of salvation.

Or at least it's a promise. 

In some ways, thank God for defence mechanisms.

Sometimes they act to protect us before we are ready to face what lies beneath them.

It’s why we experience panic attacks. Not because something alien is coming out of us - which is how it feels. But because the health erupts from our deepest source, breaking off our masks and disguises.

But while we experience it, it is utterly terrifying.

Yet, what I felt at the beginning of 2024 was different.

During the pandemic years I went through a long conversation with mortality, the nature of suffering, what it means to be alive, and the question of what to do with our lives.

“The Isolation Diaries” was the product of those conversations and was the final chapter in a 20-year journey of healing my younger self.

I broke down, and I rebuilt.

Yet here I was, sitting in Mahalla, faced with a new challenge. 

What happens after your equinox point? 

What comes next?

On some level, I had completed my artistic journey. Or at least what I had set out to do.

What now?

My adult self knew that, according to any metric of normal thinking—time, finances, career path—I was being called to go exactly where I shouldn’t go.

It was utterly tormenting.

Especially knowing what lay ahead.

Are you really going to do this to yourself again?

And yet, the call was loud.

Howling.

Not the old call.

But something even more ancient.

The call of the wild. 

This time, I would have to walk into it not with the certainty of finding my way through the wild, but with the knowledge that its monsters would likely devour me.

This is the nature of the sacrifice.

It demands you leave something behind. 

That’s the blood on the altar.

One version of yourself will be killed so that another version of you can be born.

Are you really going to do this to yourself again?

I felt caught between resistance and compulsion. 

I quite liked the idea of safety, companionship and, well… nice things.

Yet during all those dam years, I’d got to know myself too well.

I could hear that voice.

I knew that not to follow would be to kill the wrong self.

Choose your death wisely.

I could not escape the realisations that had visited me during my great isolation.

Reading this back, I know my language sounds ritualistic.

But to pursue something is to enter its cult.

And make no mistake, if you are serious, it will cost you everything.

The Laughter in the Heart of Eternity

It was then that I cackled manically into the void, so much so that even the void itself laughed back.

Ten thousand square metres reverberating Self upon Self.

It was in that moment that I made my decision.

I would commit, regardless.

Irrespective of the cost.

Irrespective of where it would lead me.

I could hear the call.

But with it came no sense of belief.

Sometimes the wolf goes out not knowing if he will make it back. 

I did find something new though. 

The courage to go forward irrespective of belief.

All I could do was listen to the call.

It was ancient and howling.

I felt as the wolf feels.

When he leaves the pack and goes into the dark,

Somewhere in the wind, the distant scent of prey.

No matter how deep the yearning in his belly, the hunger in his spirit and the fear in his heart, all he knows is that he must step out into the dark.

And so I set out on my new journey.

The path that has led me here. 

When Belief Deserts You

I had no idea then, the extent to which belief had left me.

Every time I set off to my rehearsal room I felt afraid.

Afraid, because I wondered not just if I had “talent” but if I had ever had it.

There are times when you disconnect to the sense of value in what you do.

And it's a tough space when you feel it backwards, and you feel it forwards.

On the creative paths, your demons list themselves. 

Like a sprinter before the race, seeing the hurdles.

I spent many nights warring with my own soul.

When Mahalla was deserted, I howled ungodly things.

Hoping, maybe, that a melody would form from the battle.

And when I knew people were there, I could hardly bring myself to play at all, so utterly bereft of belief in my ability I felt.

I don’t write this for a tug of the heartstrings.

I write this because I want to be transparent about the brutality of the process.

It can be goddam awful.

But that is what you are tasked with when pursuing an elixir.

You can’t experience the challenge without being in the challenge.

Its tests are no joke.

But I was in a genuinely new place.

I had fallen outside the world.

The belief which was once a comfort was gone. 

Okay, so this is something new…how do you do this?

That became my task.

What Did I Discover?

In between the calling one feels and the faith one has in oneself is a space. 

To create something is to live in this space until something forms from it.

Or forms itself upon you, and you record it. 

This is why the creative process - when you’re really in it - feels separate from time.

Because part of what you sacrifice is the life you would be living while you are in this space, this absence of time. 

The psychological challenge is that you don’t know if what you seek will visit you.

You hope, but you don’t know.

So when the dam thing doesn’t come, you can feel very alone and very outside life.

Why am I committing so much to something that isn’t even there?

You have married something invisible. 

You sit in its house.

You call out to it.

You fumble after it.

You lay out traps to catch it.

But ultimately, it has its own will.

It doesn’t like it when you try too hard.

But it doesn’t like it if you don’t try hard enough.

What is it you fucking want of me!?

Months with an Invisible Partner

During this time, my life was no longer about my life.

It was about making myself available.

Songs were not coming.

I had to be okay with that.

What if I just stay here?
What if I outlast the dark?
What happens then?

And so I kept on going in.

Mahalla was a sanctuary, a haven and a battlefield.

I was a little bit miserable and would try to disassociate from my own thoughts. 

Am I making the wrong choice?

Gradually though, I started discovering something on the other side of unhappiness.

And it was in this space I made my new training.

I know what I am writing is very abstract in nature, so I want to formualte it in “real” terms.

What do you do when you are getting nothing from the outside and nothing from the inside?

Well, there’s only one thing that you can control in these times.

And that is the decision to improve.

So that’s what I committed to.

I bought a loop pedal, and I started playing over different chord sequences.

For hours and hours at a time.

I started sleeping at the office in the same sleeping bag I’d used in the Alps during the Isolation Diaries (the temperature wasn’t dissimilar!) 

And then something curious happened.

The will of the void started to weaken.

I was outlasting it. 

Whatever vast blockade had been there began to wilt.

Little ideas started arriving.
Ideas unlike I’d had before.
I’m not sure if they were better or worse.
I didn’t care.
I just made myself available to them.
Welcomed them.
Hugged them.
I felt so dam grateful to each one that sometimes I’d find myself weeping.
Weeping from a deep fountain as I sang.
And the void responded to these tears.
They were the blood it wanted placed on its altar.

Those tears came, not because I’d received something again, but because I’d touched the source of the call.

I no longer felt abandoned by the mystery.

Or rather, as I realise now, the mystery was teaching me something new.

This was the next part of my education.

The point of my new journey.

It made me feel so joyful to receive the pain of its lessons that I would get onto my knees in prayer.

Not to have received something quantifiable; but much rather, something much vaster.

There is no reward like the education of the spirit.

I knew, more than ever, why I was doing this.

For this.

Within Prayer

I have lived in this space since it invited me in. 

It drew me out of me. 

The hardest thing has been splitting myself in two.

To be in my working life and the requirements of the real world - while secretly inhabiting this daemonic space.

At times they’ve clashed rather awfully.

It’s why I was so suspicious of conversing again with the musical gods.

Because they ask everything of you.

They have no qualms about fucking up your life. 

I have had to stand on guard because I do not want to be pulled into the pits of old, the patterns of yesterday.

You can visit the void but must build guardrails around it.

Many have been consumed by it.

Truthfully, some bad habits have reared and I have to monitor myself. But that is for another day.

For now I want to come to the heart of this and it is a message for any of you who are living outside belief.

The Return of Belief

So there I was in “The Famous Gold Watch”.

The first day had gone absurdly well.

Leading up to it, I had lived a week of desperation and torment trying to get the songs ready.

And yet my new band took to the task, and we got both the songs I’d prepared down on the first day.

It took me by surprise.

Assuming we’d never nail both rhythm tracks on the first day (since they’d never heard the barely finished songs), I booked the band for the second day, too.

But down they went, and so we congregated on the second morning.

What have you got for us, Jim?

I only had a scrap of an idea.

I knew it was good.

But miles off being ready.

So we got to work.

The result?

A new song called “Dreams are All We Have”.

I’d written it howling in Mahalla.

I had a few lyrics I’d scribbled down, but mainly the hook line:

Sometimes baby, out in the wild, dreams are all we have…

Because I’d been living in the wild, and dreams were all I had.

Once we’d worked the song up, we laid the rhythm track down live.

And I just got the tingles.

What the hell’s that?

And it struck me.

Belief.

After all these months of self-doubt, questioning and wrestling with the void, something returned to me.

Or rather, something new was born.

I don’t know what it is yet.

We were playing.
And I knew it was good.

That was all.

It reminded me of the recurring line in Genesis “And God saw it was good”.

It was just such a joyous feeling.

To have been broken down in the darkness.
To have knitted something from the void.
And to know it was good.

Keep Going and Keep Trusting

I know there are many challenges ahead.

I have no idea what I will do with these songs.

Maybe they are the first songs I ever wrote where I have no expectation.

Their existence is enough for me.

How could I have known that on the other side of unhappiness would be an uncontainable joy?

One that doesn’t exist where I was before.

All this was a necessary rite of passage.

It asked its price and in return gave belief back to my musical life.

My message to anyone struggling with belief — in yourself or your project — is that living outside belief for a while is part of our education.

You can’t know yourself fully when things are going only well.

When things are not going well, all your everyday reliables desert you.

Learning who you really are starts when you live without those constructions. 

It’s okay when they break down.

Necessary even.

I didn’t deconstruct those scaffolds gladly.

And once they were torn down, there wasn’t even brute strength.

It was just surrender.

Not giving up.

But giving in.

Surrender yourself utterly to whatever it is life is asking of you.

Listen closely.

What is that call?

Can you catch its scent upon the wind?

Does it drive you deep into the starry night, away from the pack and beyond the tracks?

To follow it does not mean you must never come back.

But if you do, you may bring something back that wasn’t there before.

Who knows, maybe it’s a gift someone out there needs.
And more than you can imagine too.

Your education is not yours alone.

You come alive when you pass it on.

When whatever it is you sought goes full circle and passes on from you and into someone.

It might be in the form of love.

It might be in the form of song.

It might be in a form you don’t even know yet.

All I can tell you is this: the Call is worth following and worth fighting for.

Its rewards may not be tangible.

But they will leave the greatest imprint upon your life — and others, too.

That’s called a legacy.

The compounding of everything you give in this life.

That is something worth suffering the dark for.

As for me, I feel the spark of belief.
Maybe it becomes a flame.
But for now, I’m just glad it’s here.

From the void, I’ve wrestled ten new songs.
I just can’t understand it.
But feel so grateful.
It makes it all worthwhile.

And for now, if you don’t mind, I will bathe awhile with belief, this most unexpected of visitors.