Mark reflects on songwriting as the finishing touches are put on his upcoming album Slow Dawn.<\/p>\n
Author:\u00a0 Mark Seymour.<\/p>\n
Date: 5 December 2019.<\/p>\n
Original URL: https:\/\/markseymour.com.au\/about<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Article Text<\/p>\n
There was a process. Two years of thought, copious reading, South Africa, the U.S, Ireland, scribbled notes, rough recordings into the iPhone, random band sessions that went even further back, long before the album was even an idea. In fact, we\u2019d gotten used to jamming for the hell of it really, in random rehearsal rooms across Melbourne, so by the time Nick DiDia walked through the door we were well beyond conjecture, argument or discomfort.<\/p>\n
Songs had either stood the test or they hadn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Albums never land as expected. After Byron, I swear I will never take my shoes off in public again. But with all of that, there was something deeper at work that only really surfaced in the performance. A niggle that kept growing right up to the moment when the mixes erupted in Nick\u2019s hands. A niggle that only the songs could address.<\/p>\n
Why?<\/p>\n
There was a suicide in the music community just before we went north. And the burden of human striving weighed heavily on me in that Central Coast chapel, surrounded by so much grace in the face of tragedy.<\/p>\n
My mother died four years ago. I\u2019ve been married for 25. My daughters have become smart, gifted women. I have a lot to be thankful for. I\u2019ve pressed on with what I know, polishing the work, kneading, sifting, but still, shocking though it might sound, suicide has never surprised me when I\u2019ve heard of it. Of course it\u2019s terribly sad for those who are closest but we can never fully know each other, no matter how much we might like to speculate. And song writing is just that.<\/p>\n
Speculation.<\/p>\n
We are a dangerous species and there are reasons for everything.<\/p>\n
To look outside yourself at a world you helped create, to try and see it as it really is, not as you wished it might be, can be a deeply enriching experience.<\/p>\n
This album is crucial for me. It distils some very basic questions. Who am I? Is life worth living? Millions are asking these questions right now, in your lifetime and mine, across the planet we share.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t pretend to have answers. I don\u2019t believe in a higher purpose. I\u2019m not sure I actually \u2018believe\u2019 in anything really. And yet some songs rise up and roar because they feel truthful even when they are built on a lie! Sometimes a lie has the truest ring. Believe me, I\u2019ve lied a lot. To myself mostly.<\/p>\n
I vividly remember the first time I sang in public and how powerful it felt. Then came the yearning to feel that power again, a search for the words that might bring it back. A yarn that would turn heads.<\/p>\n
\u201cListen to this! This matters!\u201d<\/p>\n
The song.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been decades and if there\u2019s one thing I\u2019ve learned it\u2019s this. Words matter. Language is thought made real. Without it we cannot relate, build communities or even love each other.<\/p>\n
There are moments when we see ourselves as we truly are. They might feel random and chaotic at the time but they are wrought by the sum of every experience we\u2019ve had right up to that moment and somehow, we know instantly in the midst of it, our lives are changing.<\/p>\n
I vividly remember the time my mother kicked me under the table when I was 8. Or maybe 9.<\/p>\n
Reason being I was told later, that loose talk would \u2018upset your grandmother.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018Upset grandmother\u2019 meant the old lady sitting up at the end of the dinner table would start panting, throw her head back, eyes rolling and almost fall off her chair right before your eyes. It was spectacular. A grown up lady totally losing it for no explicable reason. Everyone would stop eating. The roast went cold. All because you, or one of your siblings had said something \u2018untoward\u2019, whatever the hell that meant.<\/p>\n
And it didn\u2019t end there.<\/p>\n
Dad, who\u2019d grown up witnessing his mother\u2019s \u2018turns\u2019 would descend into one himself, which could go on into the night, the sound of parents hissing at each other in the master bedroom. We\u2019d lie there listening as the wind howled around the eaves of the mountain bungalow, quaking beneath the covers.<\/p>\n
There\u2019d be gloomy walks the next day. Little chats down at the end of the garden, Mum\u2019s soulful murmurings into her husband\u2019s ear, to help him get back on his pony while his mother went into the full bedroom retreat, intoning endless rosaries to assuage even the slightest possibility that she might not make it to heaven now, having borne witness to some dreadful comment a child had made in complete innocence.<\/p>\n
But the innocence didn\u2019t last.<\/p>\n
What had I said? A phrase, a word? Something just slipped out. But then patterns emerged, as they do. I figured out what they were as all kids do who go looking for hypocrisy. Anything to do with God, sex, or defecation somehow rattled the cage.<\/p>\n
It was great!<\/p>\n
Take for example the sin of blasphemy. Saying the lord\u2019s name in vain. What is that exactly? See, in our world it wasn\u2019t simply a matter of saying \u2018Jesus\u2019 over a dropped fork, or forgetting to dip the brow when you were saying Grace. If you didn\u2019t have a solid reason for saying \u2018Jesus\u2019 you just couldn\u2019t say it at all right? End of story. Problem was, the goal posts kept moving. You couldn\u2019t pin down when it was ok and when it wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
I remember years later working in the tax office, muttering \u2018Jesus\u2019 over a sales tax receipt and the bloke next to me stiffened.<\/p>\n
\u201cExcuse me\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cHey?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cExcuse me.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s up?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve just insulted a very good friend of mine.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fourteen years later and I still didn\u2019t have blasphemy down. Idiot. I mumbled an apology and went for a piss.<\/p>\n
See, at the tender age of eight your innocence is still supposed to be intact, which makes the error acceptable. But by the time I was twenty-two I was throwing \u2018Jesus\u2019 round like a dog\u2019s dinner. I\u2019d spent years experimenting with it. I mean let\u2019s face it. \u2018Jesus\u2019 is a very cool word. It sounds great!<\/p>\n
I just loved saying it so surely I could be forgiven for failing to recognize where the goal posts actually were right before I spat it out.<\/p>\n
But hey, I get it now. The bloke just didn\u2019t want to hear the name of his good friend mentioned in the tax office on King St.<\/p>\n
Fair cop.<\/p>\n
And there were all the other \u2018dirty\u2019 words of course. Like \u2018cunt\u2019 or \u2018fuck\u2019 which, back in the days of incense and altar boys, wrought physical retribution that was truly awful, often delayed until sunset for maximum effect.<\/p>\n
The strap. One on each hand.<\/p>\n
But see, you would have had to be a total moron to go there deliberately, given there were so many lesser words that rattled the family cage just as well, without the sting of the lash!<\/p>\n
And there lay the really fun stuff.<\/p>\n
Over time it turned into a kind of emotional blood sport. There merely had to be an anatomical reference, right? Words that doctors might use, like \u2018vagina\u2019, \u2018penis\u2019, \u2018sex\u2019, \u2018cock\u2019, \u2018tit\u2019, \u2018period\u2019, \u2018semen\u2019. I could go on. Anything relating to the nether regions could trigger absolute mayhem or a sort of deadening effect. It was hilarious. A triple whammy. You got to say bad stuff, which felt god-like to start with, then you got to witness your grandmother, or Dad, come unstuck, which was also great, and then to top it all off, there was no direct physical retribution to deal with afterwards.<\/p>\n
I mean you could hardly bring out the hard leather over a word like \u2018vagina\u2019 surely?<\/p>\n
\u2018What? I said vagina. I get the strap me for that? When half the people here have got one?\u2019<\/p>\n
Well, actually\u2026<\/p>\n
In fact, the word \u2018vagina\u2019 could be said with great dignity and calm if you did it under your breath. Maybe not in St. Patrick\u2019s Cathedral but hey, I actually did that once. I was twelve I think. Just to see what would happen. Nobody heard of course. Certainly God didn\u2019t, given I\u2019m still here. Strapping fit.<\/p>\n
Actually, to her credit, my grandmother had a way round the anatomy which was sort of cute, when the little boys needed to go for a piss outside on the lemon tree. Your cock was your \u2018joey possum\u2019, your \u2018John Thomas\u2019, or more practically, your \u2018apparatus\u2019. For the girls it was their \u2018water works.\u2019 Although of course, the girls weren\u2019t allowed to give the lemons a spray\u2026<\/p>\n
Because they were girls.<\/p>\n
With all this jousting over words though, by the time I hit the roaring twenties, when all the normal stuff started, which I won\u2019t go into, I decided in retrospect that for the first two decades of my life there had been a concerted attempt to shut down an entire world of language and self-expression. And who were the culprits? My parents of course. But there was religion as well and with all due respect to my parents, they were as much victims of that as I was. And of course there was historical stuff I\u2019d read about. The banning of words, stories, book burning. It was all the same thing to me. In fact everyone was in on it. It was a global conspiracy.<\/p>\n
So, there was a lot to sort out by then, right? But instead of shutting the fuck up like Pavlov\u2019s Dog, I figured if you went around saying really insulting shit because it was truthful and then handle the punch that followed, you were ahead. I\u2019d walk away bloody and proud but people just thought I was an idiot.<\/p>\n
Song writing proved to be a much less painful. When people hear music they tend to \u2018disarm\u2019 which means you can sneak stuff in that you just can\u2019t get away with in normal conversation.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not just words that matter. Using them truthfully matters even more.<\/p>\n
See, the thing is, in order to feel safe, human beings need to believe that what they think is true is also right which is why they are easily offended if you say something that undermines that assumption.<\/p>\n
But the problem is, truth and fact are not the same things. The truth itself isn\u2019t objective. It is merely a point of arrival, albeit compelling and powerful. It\u2019s still relative. What is truthful in one age can prove to be a tissue of lies in the next.<\/p>\n
Still, people will believe in something long past the point of no return, when facts have blown it right out of the water, especially if they believe it collectively, which is where the \u2018elephant in the room\u2019 comes in. Governments know this. Deliberate misinformation has been an effective tool of power for thousands of years.<\/p>\n
Ignoring the elephant is easy. You just don\u2019t \u2018mention the war\u2019 right? When there\u2019s conflicting truth, silence will prevail.<\/p>\n
But not forever.<\/p>\n
The truth will wriggle up to the surface one way or another. People find stuff out and eventually get it even if there\u2019s carnage along the way.<\/p>\n
Climate change is a good example.<\/p>\n
My grandmother believed in \u2018hell.\u2019 It was so real to her that if a child blasphemed at the dinner table, there was every possibility we were all doomed simply for having heard the word at the wrong time, which was a terrible thing for her when you consider the suffering she must\u2019ve endured her whole life, for the sake of a belief.<\/p>\n
People say \u2018God is Truth\u2019, but at risk of offending, God isn\u2019t necessarily fact either. Get my drift?<\/p>\n
In 2017 I visited the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg and there along the length of a vast brick wall was the complete list of every piece of legislation that was ever passed by the South African government to try and keep the regime afloat. And boy, they went hard at it. From 1948 to 1994 there were hundreds of bills passed into law to try and stop black people from simply \u2018moving around.\u2019<\/p>\n
Seeing the sheer scale of the effort listed like that, you had to wonder why the penny didn\u2019t drop sooner. You can\u2019t ignore capital forever. Black workers had to feed their children so they followed the money. Migration simply couldn\u2019t be stopped.<\/p>\n
\u2018Hey guys! Come on. This just isn\u2019t working the way it\u2019s supposed to\u2019.<\/p>\n
But see, apartheid wasn\u2019t just a practical solution. It was God\u2019s law, which meant the constraints on free thought, let alone speech, had to be that much heavier, to the point of death as it turned out.<\/p>\n
All eyes on Hong Kong.<\/p>\n
Capital and God often clash. Justice does not necessarily prevail. Democratic outcomes are often based on a lie. These are all uncomfortable truths.<\/p>\n
But truth itself always arrives in one form or another, sometimes too late.<\/p>\n
The difference between your truth and mine is the very reason to speak out though.<\/p>\n
Because silence is death.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Comments<\/p>\n
N\/A.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mark reflects on songwriting as the finishing touches are put on his upcoming album Slow Dawn. Author:\u00a0 Mark Seymour. Date: 5 December 2019. Original URL: https:\/\/markseymour.com.au\/about Article Text There was a process. Two years of thought, copious reading, South Africa, the U.S, Ireland, scribbled notes, rough recordings into the iPhone, random band sessions that more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":9456,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-10329","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P5xhjD-2GB","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/humanfrailty.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/humanfrailty.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/humanfrailty.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humanfrailty.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humanfrailty.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10329"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/humanfrailty.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10330,"href":"https:\/\/humanfrailty.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10329\/revisions\/10330"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humanfrailty.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/humanfrailty.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}