Meditations
The enforced stillness of a night off in a tour bus always somehow brings to roost certain things otherwise kept at arms length. It has a certain peculiarity - this meditation upon your path, whilst being in the midst of that same path. There´s nothing objective about it, because you´re in the heart of it. Our sound engineer Scholli calls it the need to create “an inner exile”. He can be alarmingly poetic when he´s not meaning to be! A tour bus is a bit like army barracks i guess. Except that there is no subordination to anything except the journey itself. Some say there is a certain illusoriness about the road, but life is a ritual of illusion, and the only difference is whether you chose to believe in the choices you make. Or not. I´m not sure that the world needs rock n roll, but i do know that it needs its poetry, and rock n roll is as good a vehicle as any of the forms it chooses to take. I feel there is a certain fickleness to modern culture….to the news cycle, for the need for the new, for the update. And its a paradox I find my life in the midst of. That the will to attempt to communicate something requires a total embrace of the mediums before you. But the medium is not the message. Infact the problem is that the medium is mostly bereft of message. But I find a freedom as I get older in feeling no need to apply the parametres of purpose to my life. It is enough to live it, just to be living it. I feel in the midst of grace, just to feel that after so much, I am allowing myself to live. And I feel a trust in time. I remember back in 2001 the head of EMI walking out of one of the shows I was playing after a few songs. He´s now a chef I believe. EMI has passed into another major, and the revolving cycle of the record labels continues. The concept of longetivity - of meaning - of the aspiration to build something is all but dead in the record industry. And that is because by and large the record industry has not one iota of an understanding of what rock n roll is, let alone what it means. I think rock n roll is like all of life´s grand illusions - just a masquarade, a cloak, an embodiment of the human spirit. What matters is that spirit. That knowledge that everything physical is completely and beautifully transitory. And what endures is how that spirit chooses to express itself. Not by the money you make, but by the love you choose to give. And the albums that you leave behind of course! And whether they are a forgotten or remembered legacy is completely subservient to the spirit that they attempted to embody.
