Jim Kroft

Musings and Images from Jim Kroft

Antidotes

The recording process for the third album is over, and all being well it should be complete when I travel back to the UK later this month. After a busy year I´ve found myself at a loose end in Berlin. Apart from the show in White Trash last weekend, I´ve found myself withdrawing from life.

It´s a familiar process for me, and after 4 tours this year, the solitude is a soothing antidote to miles travelled. Tour buses are like a military corps - there is no personal space. You find yourself quickly adapting, and it´s enjoyable allowing yourself to become communalized. It´s like a corrective to this nucleated, separated Western form of life we seem to live nowadays. But you have to create in yourself what our sound man Scholli calls “your inner exile”.

Anyway, I´m finding myself spending a lot of days where i don´t actually speak to anyone. In the past I found it intensely isolating and difficult - and I documented this in the album “The Hermit and the Hedonist”. I am more used to the process now, more accepting, even grateful of the aloneness. It´s not that I don´t miss family, or friends, or crave contact. It´s more a very deep and determined belief that I am exactly where I am meant to be. That in itself is a very new experience.

Given enough solitude, the right questions are raised, and out of the challenge of answering them come songs. It´s taken a long time to develop an understanding of this space, and I´m enjoying exploring it. Understanding the process, not feeling afraid of it or threatened by it is very liberating. And it allows you to approach things anew, and with revitalized vigour.

Nietzsche wrote of ” a love of your fate” - that is that where ever you are is exactly where you are meant to be. There´s a lot of noise in modern life, and I feel that silence is undervalued. In any case this is where life is at the moment, so best accept it. 

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