The most unexpected thing about earning a living as an utterly unknown, but working, musician is how time changes. When I worked an office job, time was immeasurably different. I spent it harshly. Every free minute had to be crammed with every cultural or pleasure-orientated pursuit possible, or, I felt, it was wasted. Fresh from a Masters in philosophy, my head swirled in a myriad of stolen ideas, and academic positions. A burgeoning ‘theory of emotion’ occupied my mind with a tethering idea of applying for a doctorate. How, I thought, have humans come so far, and know so little? “No one’s even figured Emotion out.” That’s the sentiment that came to me, having listened to a breakdown of the last thousand years of thought on the subject. Emotions. Nothing new. They couldn’t even agree whether some should be considered as feeling bad or good.

How is it we can know a quark from a quasar, and yet have absolutely no clue about what we all intuitively feel inside, daily – more than anything else? What we feel. Isn’t that what governs our lives – why we marry, why we fall in love, why we remember – why we do anything? But, after a while of employment, the job nestles into your life, and you forgo ideas for hedonism. I put my theory of emotion to rest in the wake of Berlin nightlife, eating almost exclusively Thai food from a local imbiss. Time quickened. It fled.

In the days, pretending to work, I wrote children’s stories in an email thread to myself – one sentence at a time, listening to Coltrane’s ‘Lush Life’, and Miles Davis’s ‘Cooking’ and ‘Working’ and my favourite, ‘Sketches of Spain’. I tried to buy a ticket to Iran. It didn’t go through, I breathed a sigh of relief – that’s a five year’s ban from entering the United States, ya know, I didn’t re-enter my credit card’s details, feeling saved from my impulsivity. You can’t be anything else trying to live on borrowed time. Your energy is spent in the day, working, or pretending to, in my case, for something utterly at odds with your temperament. I just couldn’t see the point, working for a chauffeur app. The only difference between a chauffeur and a taxi, is you occasionally receive a bottle of water, your seats are usually leather, and you will be asked whether you’d prefer the radio on or off – and you pay triple.

On one jaunt with one of our chauffeurs, my boss asked how I liked the journey. I said I didn’t notice the difference. My boss subsequently came to believe I may be ill-equiped for the automobile industry. “Ever think you’re maybe a musician or something?” he said to me as we drank a beer in a London pub after a day of meetings. “How did he know that?” I thought. I’d be writing in secret for years. My friends knew. That’s about it. Drogheda people are not a dream following crowd. That was more a “posh wanker” thing to do. But, I left my hometown at 18, and so, had no excuse anymore, eventually I’d have to try, or risk hernia, ignoring my gut for so long. Time ran quicker, my natural aversion to authority manifested in a strange blend of having now to assure the business world, I was in fact, no manner of musician, and instead a titan of industry. This blatant charade led to a bout of depression, that became close to insurmountable. Litres of coffee supplanted blood in my veins, and I ploughed on.

One day an olive branch was presented to me. “Conor, you seemed happier when you weren’t head of the UK & Irish market, we’d like you to work on one of up-in-coming markets instead.” The night before this meeting, my housemate said if I didn’t quit now, and follow the musician dream, I’d succumb to the gathering storm cloud hanging over me. “Rather than do a new market, I’ll just leave”, I said without a second of thought, like I’d been gasping for the words and they finally came like a burst of air, into drowning lungs. The next day I was gone. I woke up laughing, an continued on so for no less than six months. Time blossomed.

When time is truly yours to spend, you have to befriend your thoughts, or they’ll come for you. Every artist has a duty to know the news, to know their history, to know their predecessor’s work, in an effort to add, not take away from any craft they’re partaking in, and thereby in part representing. Every artist fails. But, trying is all that’s asked of you. I know little of anything. But, that time in between gigs, that vast ocean that is a morning without “general” or “all hands meetings”, is not something I take lightly. The laughter of relief has been usurped by an anxiousness to be doing, to be getting on, to not waste it. But, now, seven years on, I’ve come to suspect there is no such thing as wasted time. This world has lost its respect for idleness. As Tom Waits says “today, there’s a deficit of wonder”. There’s a reason why the most interesting people you know are daydreamers. The imagination is more mysterious than any God. The more you delve into it, the more you begin to see the distinction as immaterial, as inconsequential.

Trying to think about where creativity comes from, is like trying to remember a colour you’ve never seen. There’s simply an impasse. Yet, that’s what every artist who every achieved something good has had to do – create blindly, following feeling, emotion and compulsion. All topics either ignored or sparsely neglected in academia. There’s no book to help. As such, the process can appear akin to madness, with artists often being thought of as aloof, or “a bit bonkers”. But, in reality, creating is just like thinking. You can send yourself into a flurry of reckless rabbit holes, or you can give in and get to the point quicker. When you try and try to consider something, anything, any problem or obstacle in life, for example, “should I marry Cindy?” or “should I move to Cadiz?” – it’s only when you give up on trying to figure it out, that you’ll wake up knowing – preferably with waves sounding out your bedroom window, smelling coffee brewing and hearing Cindy whistling a flamenco tune.

All good art is vomit. It just comes out. Most things you see and hear are craft. Craft is what you fall back on, working your fingers to the bone, getting nowhere and showing it off as you haven’t got anything else. But, when art comes, it’s like waking up knowing exactly what to do. And the only way to get there is through idleness, through sitting and drifting. So, if you’re reading this, and you make art, or want to. Hone the craft. And do as much of nothing as you can get away with. Sit. Drift. Listen to your body. Feel whatever’s in there, don’t try to erase emotion, or overcome it. Sit in it. Breathe it out, before completely letting it go – capturing it on paper, on canvas or in song.

Thousands of years of thought, and no one thought to look in a gallery, or listen to the busker, whirled within the midst of it, expressing the obvious, “the unknown”. You are, in the act of being affected by art, in that moment no longer a lone Self, but, experiencing Each-Otherness. Any distinguishing between forms – purely superficial. There is nothing new under the sun, and all came out of one just like ours. They say all living organisms are the nuclear waste of the same stars. It’s only fitting we should feel as one, intuiting through inferences, gestures and glances – deeper truths of what lies beneath words and beyond actions. Symbols show inner expression, through art that affects – leaving an impression, a feeling. The most affective and realistic representations of us being hugs, smiles, and laughter. Failing that, storm clouds, the art in the skies. Only after that do we need to resort to the Mona Lisa, and Beethoven. You know you’ve managed it – created or witnessed something great, something beyond craft – when, for a moment, time slows to stop, and you forget to think, caught up in it – what it is, exactly, that we get caught up in, outside of time, we’re still to describe. Still, we go on attempting, until time starts up once more.

22/Nov/23

Berlin