Jim Kroft

Musings and Images from Jim Kroft

At the Crossroads….

I´m staring at the road ahead. At the challenge of bringing a new set of songs into the world. A new faith wrestles previous dashed hopes. The rush of excitement mixes with the muscle memory in the legs of a road already long walked. Like it or not the world revolutionizes itself slowly at every turn. Stay too still and it moves on  and your surroundings change, move too fast and you can get sick with nausea - it´s hard to find a foot hold when things are in perpetual motion.

Equally we often feel a sense of stasis. Time moves too fast and too slow at the same time. But it´s easy to feel stuck. Change tends to manifest in the year rather than the day. Even history´s big game changers - the 9/11´s and so on - tend to be generational. For the most, life slowly evolves in relation to our viewpoint, slowly moulds itself in the shape of our will - whether for positive or negative, spiritual or temporal, constructive or destructive.

Stuckness. That´s something we all dam well wrestle with. Thank God for tea. My most holy companion in my daily wrestle with the myriad ways I get stuck.

And back to this new set of songs. Ultimately there is nothing for it but to be up for battle. There´s no way to get a set of songs to its audience with out tremendous will power, without hussling for every dam inch, every dam play, every new minor exposure. 

It´s the third time I´ve gone into this particular battle as a solo artist. The game has changed in that I have for the first time in my life professional support around me. But make no mistake, all the work is ahead, we haven´t made so much as a pindop in the ocean as of yet.

Why rock n roll? Rock n roll still matters a dam to me. But it has become an old drunken dinosaur. At every turn the bands that shaped our youth are reforming, rolling out the cash machines and performing like old men doing bad cover versions of themselves. 

In it´s new forms it feels many of the new bands are so hungry to safe guard a part of the corporate pie for themselves, that the music is sucked into a corporate blender and what´s left is pale imitations of other people´s imitations. 

It´s all become about the clever update. Here´s another picture of our cool band looking cool.

The world does not need any more cool. Pop music can be whatever it chooses to be. And I do think that it can still channel something more powerful, more radical, more relevant than this gradual fragmentation into entertainment. 

I believe it should still be aspirational.

Fuck it. I am proud of this new set of songs. I´ve gone to the crossroads, and I´ve felt the chill go up my spine as I met new devils, stared at the ambiguous glint in those eyes and covered my head as the most belliose of laughs splintered my ears.

  1. teleprompterforchords reblogged this from jimkroft
  2. chainedtothefates said: I think these new songs are really great and I can’t wait to hear them!
  3. jimkroft posted this