Return to the Kingdom of the Dead
Lonely.
I am working on a new song. The bassline and the first verse are set, but I’m unsure how to create adequate tension and progression in the chorus and subsequent verses. I am doing what I said I wouldn’t do last time; treating the song like a story, or a poem. I asked Harry for advice. He wrote a beautiful chorus to counterpoint the sadness of the first verse, and then suggested for the writing the rest that I “lead with love.”
Immediately, I flew into a rage that has lasted 72 hours, from the ashes of which this post is slowly metastasizing. I have been triggered in this way perhaps half a dozen times during the past week alone by people using the word “love” as though its meaning were clear, its value agreed upon, its presence in human affairs evident to all.
In some ways, I feel very like a person who speaks in language enabled by love. Every creative act is, for me, more-or-less a labour of love, however much I might panickily try to come across as mercenary so as to be taken seriously in a commercial/employment context that figured out long ago that it can simply devour artsy types with impunity. Everything I do as an artist is more-or-less an attempt to reach out to something; an attempt to alleviate pain through touch, as lovers do.
On the other hand, I don’t know how anyone kids themselves that love is real – or, if it is real, that it is enough.
James Baldwin: Love has never been a popular movement. And no one has ever wanted really to be free. The world is held together – really, it is – by the love of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you’ve got to remember is that what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.
I’m haunted, too, by Simone Weil’s conviction that atheists are better believers than the devout – because at least when the atheists deny, the vision of the almighty they refuse is fuller than the vision the theists are enabled to see.
I sometimes wonder which is stronger: Harry’s faith, or my despair.
If I was your love
You would be happy
You know it's true
I've fallen in love
With every breath and thing you do.
Oh my darling
I've been loving you so long
I've been loving you so long
Oh my darling
I've been loving you so long.
You, you,
You could be better to me, me,
But I still love you completely
Oh I love you darling
From the moonlight to the moon.
Love.
Love.
Love.
I want to puke and then die.
The love that I know is a game of espionage, careful evasion, and barely-stifled screaming; a bargain struck for bodies, properties and prospective children for the purposes of status; a legalistic set of tricks and obligations backed by prison systems of loneliness and shame for those who do not comply. Love is straightforward theft of time, potential, money – I, for one, never loved anyone without going through their pockets first. The love I know lives in flickers and starts of glimpsed possibility; the loneliness sweeps back in before you fall asleep. Or, if it survives the night, it won’t endure the morning. If it endures the morning, it won’t survive the day. If it survives the day, it will drown in the year. Or, if it somehow survives to illuminate one life, or two lives, or one set of lives, or three, the world at large will remain harrowed by a lovelessness that deepens by the hour. It is driven far more by dead obligation and a going-through of motions than by Baldwin’s love of a very few people.
Love is a profitable illusion.
The longing to make music; to write; to care; to defend; to labour with love – all of it is implicated in the desperate battle to not completely waste one’s life in an absurd prison awaiting death. We desperately attempt to become loving individuals because we are too weak, too cornered by obligation and regret, to express ourselves adequately in any other way. And the longing to make art, too – to be selfless, to make something that might improve the world in some way – is nevertheless shot through by commercial imperatives that grow harder to separate from one’s true feelings. This post, too, obviously, is an attempt to commodify a feeling, as was the song that prompted it. A way of turning some desperate, degenerate profit from a disturbed emotional reality.
Of course, you can despair.
You can write a song that repackages your alienation as something cool and catchy, and hope that nobody catches anything from the poison you breathed all over it.
You feel no joy
When you’re reading Tolstoy
And Proust don’t give you
A boost like he used to.
You can write something that repackages your simple isolation as a grand negotiation with history and death; a drama centred on yourself of which you are sole author and reader. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 4:
Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.
But I would rather write a song that feels like a song. I would rather labour with love. Love’s false visions of infinity bend and warp the arc of our shared world for the better; the confident declarations of emptiness and despair, almost always for the worse. I would rather presume to imagine I can think with an apparatus deeper than the soul I know I have. I would rather borrow God from the believers and write as though I could presume to imagine such a majesty. I would rather sing as though I might somehow comfort someone far away, who might hear through my words proof of a conviction I cannot share.
I know it isn’t real, as does the loneliness that chews on my bones.
But it would be nice to help make it seem real for someone else, even if only for the width of a song.
31/08/2026
In The Air
Looking back on my life, it feels like the one thing I spend longest doing is sitting in my room, staring at the wall or the ceiling, thinking I should be somewhere else or be a different person.
I love it when it rains. When it rains, I have a reason to be inside; it feels right to be sheltering. The rest of the time, I don’t understand what I am trying to take shelter from. I find solace in abstract promises of future disaster; I tell myself that I am right to be afraid of a world that seems to be contracting into atomized panic; a world that seems ever less capable of coming to terms with its own fundamental situation, let alone acting to try to repair it.
Today in the UK, the maximum temperature will be 36 degrees Celsius. The fields outside are the colour of leopardskin. It is physically difficult to do much more than sit in front of a fan, bashing at a keyboard, trying to find a way to bring some semblance of sense to what is happening.
I am sitting here thinking about music.
We recorded my first song, “No Joy”, in July. I have been struggling to write a decent track for months. I can’t help but approach songs like poems – like I’m onstage, musing ostentatiously in order to be overheard by a sympathetic and cultivated audience that knows better than not to clap at the end. I am convinced that no good song was ever written in this way. Poetry is a genre so entrenched in the sanctioned exhaustion of tradition that it permits lavish degrees of naval-gazing, oversharing, amateur philosophy, and lame rhyming. Music is different. Music is intravenous. For me, there is only and only
Music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.
When I sit down to write a poem, I feel as though on some level, I have to say something. I worry so often about fully succumbing to despair; about our society fully abandoning what remains of its capacity to make sense of things; about our propensity as a species to lie down and lick boot in front of what simply asserts to us, over and again, that we are doomed, and we were wrong to ever believe anything else.
Writing “No Joy”, I did not try to say anything at all.
It doesn’t matter if no-one’s worth loving anymore;
it doesn’t matter if you’re getting old.
You got your books, got your movies,
Got your vinyls, got your tapes.
But you take stock of what you got;
you got nothing.
I don’t know if music has ever had any power. Tom Waits: music is mostly just something pretty to do with the air. It can’t make the air colder, or put castles of cloud up ready to burst in a parched sky. Can it give the air some special charge that makes reality look different? I want to believe that it can. I want to believe that saying things – that sharing careful articulations of experience – is worth it.
I doubt we listen to music as well as we used to. It is too easy, now. If you are like me, you still let algorithms and internet searches guide you through the world of music. You “listen to everything”. There is music everywhere, and most of it bad; unintentional, unconsidered, a kind of cognitive littering. A good song, though, still, I think, is like a terabithian bridge into a place where we can at least entertain the idea of being able to see what’s missing from our world more clearly. A good song can give the idea of being people who could theoretically endure – or even resist – their unfolding predicament. Harry creates bridges to these kingdoms of thought by communicating a surpassing sense of calm. Rowan Williams: “Humility is the capacity to be a place where others find rest.” Harry creates these places through song; these places where, for a few minutes, the ideals of love and loyalty have no real opponent. Reference might be made to challenges and difficulties, but he shelters the listener from their impact by allowing the serenity of his lyrics to find an analogue in the structure of his songs. Layered harmonies; repetition; dulcet piano, clean lines, and the woody sonority of acoustic guitar.
I cannot give you these things.
“No Joy” is a rant with a wicked bassline.
Its message is sneering and cruel, but maybe necessary: that we cannot take shelter in our cultural output while the world is eaten away around us. I did not get around to writing a hopeful verse. It would have made the song too much like a poem; too much like the sanctioned guff that leaves you with a little hopeful smile for half a minute before you forget.
I cannot remember poems anymore.
I remember basslines.
I hope my song does not make you miserably look at your wall and wish you could have lived in the days of Proust or Tolstoy or Kurosawa, or make that you think you're a coward if you do.
I hope it makes you feel like how I felt sitting in that studio with a sweet-ass tobacco sunburst Fender Jazz – setting it up, unamped, to be captured by multiple microphones. Or how I felt salvaging makeshift instruments for the percussion, hitting bits of old ship engine with nails picked up off the pavement. Or hearing Harry’s nervous suggestion that he do a guitar solo on this one.
I hope it jolts you. I hope it’s rocket fuel.
I hope, as an Apollonian-Dionysiac pair, we do something beautiful to your air.
Gerard K
14/08/2026