Last night at The Tabernacle in London, Kate Walsh played her final gig of 2010. I was in the audience and without any warning, Kate looked at me and dedicated her performance of ‘Your Song’ to me in front of a few hundred people. I didn’t know how to react in other way than stick my tongue out and look remarkably sheepish [ I have no sense of class, charm or ‘play it cool Trigg, play it cool’ in my body ...]
A few days back I blogged about the song writing process. Last night, after I got home I finally got round to reading the sleeve notes for ‘Peppermint Radio’. All this time, I’ve made an assumption that quietly somewhere else in the world, Kate had used the process of writing songs in the same way I have – to express part of herself that couldn’t / wouldn’t come out in any other form than song. The paragraph below mirrors exactly the point I’ve reached in my life after 33 years. She clearly got there earlier than I.
Sleeve Notes to Peppermint Radio:
‘I used to say I’d never record a covers album, thinking I would always have masses of material up my sleeve, endless heartache to pour my creativity into and would be able to wallow in my song writing for many years to come. But, things haven’t quite worked out that way. Happily for me, because as time goes on and life seems to get simpler and less emotionally challenging, I am finding that years of honing my craft as a writer of ‘songs for the lonely heart’ have left my well a little dry, now that I am more content with who I am and the world around me. In the past, my song writing was always my form of self-therapy. Whenever things got tough (and they frequently were as I had such a knack for blowing things out of proportion), I could turn to my song writing, needing it to express all the feelings and emotions I had inside of me, and loving the whole wallowing process of pouring my heart out, safe in the feeling that ‘nobody understood me’. Life is very different now, and through a process of different revelations I have had about my life over the last couple of years, and now that I am much happier within my self, I am finding I have to re-learn how to write songs again. I always maintained it was much harder to write a happy song so now I am faced with the new challenge of song writing for the love of it, as opposed to song writing for therapy.’
I could have written every line.
After catching up with Kate after the gig to say thank you, we exchanged a glance that said ‘It’s ok, I get you now’. It’s so hard to admire someone who makes a living from public performance without stepping desperately close to the ‘creepy’ territory and people assuming you’re weird for wanting to engage properly with the person, not just the performance. I walked away last night and into today feeling that she wouldn’t have drawn attention to another soul in public unless she felt it was a nod to something she felt happy to do.
I can safely say – after 33 years of life – the joy of coming to know Kate Walsh (without actually knowing a damn thing about her actual life) is to empathise with how she became the Kate on stage. Quietly, somewhere else, someone was feeling the same things and taking her environmental situation, growing up with music all around her like I did, to express the things she’s could see, feel but package in a way that made total sense to her.
When Kate goes back and plays those tunes, I know she’s transported in time to a version of herself now obsolete. Today, I realise that I need to take the bait and reincarnate my capacity to write and not do it through feelings of being loved less than I hoped to be and now write for the love of life itself whilst still being for me.
‘Yoda: Told you I did. Reckless is he. Now, matters are worse. Obi-Wan: That boy is our last hope. Yoda: No…….There is another…….’
