James Bell Central

I feel music more intensely now I’m not able to make it

At the beginning of the year, I had a plan. I knew I didn’t have the free time to make any new music, however much I might want to, but I might have the time to finish off and polish up some very very old music I’ve made. And if I was organised and efficient, I might even be able to get an album ready to put on my website for the March edition of the newsletter – which would be the newsletter’s 12th anniversary.

That plan… did not work out.

Not only have I not had enough time to make new music, I haven’t even had the time to complete old music that was maybe 80% finished. I just haven’t had any time at all for creative stuff.

The early part of this year was taken up with various child illnesses, much like last year, but that’s not really the problem. The fundamental problem is that I’ve been stuck in precarious temporary jobs that don’t pay that much but end up taking more than their allotted hours.

So, to remedy this, time that would have been spent on creative projects has actually been spent on a new creative project of sorts: moving to going freelance on the kind of work I’ve been doing for the University of Oxford.

I’ve come to realise that the challenges of promoting traditional folk music are actually strangely similar to the challenges researchers face promoting their work and their careers.

In fact, if you are a researcher, it might even be something you’re interested in! Here is my very basic new website, as my alter-alter-ego: oxcommunicate.com. Recommend it to a friend. 😎

If I can make this work, I’m hoping I can bring some music and some social life back into my routine, as well as probably doing the childcare a bit better.

In the meantime, this newsletter is still the only creative outlet I have – as ever, promising new music at some point but unable to deliver now.

What I have instead this month is a bunch of recommendations based on not things but people. In March I noticed there is a particular type of science (or science-adjacent) communicator who seems to do very well on social media. They’re funny, they’re easy to understand, and they tend to write fiction on the side – which I think is not a coincidence. (Damn you Hannah Fry for being the exception that proves the rule.)

But let’s get this month’s doom-scrolling observations out of the way first…

The Quiet Part Loud

IRAN, BLUESKY & KAT ABUGHAZALEH

Quite a lot going on.

Recommended

ADA PALMER

If you have any interest in history, and particularly the history of the Renaissance, I highly recommend this video and it’s interviewee.

The interviewer, Dwarkesh Patel, strikes me as an AI-pilled tech bro with a knack for finding really good guests, and this is far and away the best guest I’ve seen. This is Ada Palmer, author of Inventing the Renaissance (which I’ve just started).

I thought I broadly understood the Renaissance and its key characters, but Palmer’s encyclopaedic knowledge in this video makes it clear I absolutely did not! She explains the intellectual journey of the Renaissance, with all its twists and turns, in a funny and highly engaging way.

By the end, I had a completely different opinion on Leonardo da Vinci, Cosimo de’ Medici, and especially Niccolò Machiavelli.

Hope the book is this good.

(Update: it’s really good.)

Recommended

HANNAH FRY

I’ve been rediscovering what a good science communicator Hannah Fry is.

Shocking as it may sound, I actually went off her for a while. There’s this phenomenon that used to be much more prevalent in podcasts where one of the duo would get weirdly competitive and sort of passive-aggressive with their co-host. John Green would have it with his brother Hank. Mark Kermode would have it with Simon Mayo. There are probably others I forget. But Hannah Fry had it with Adam Rutherford. I actually don’t notice anyone doing this anymore. Podcasts have become one of the dominant media in recent years, and I think everyone’s just better at it.

Anyway this video, in which Fry plugs her new BBC series on AI, demonstrates what an engaging presence she is. This YouTube video is from the New Scientist – who I’ve always thought of as a magazine but perhaps they’ve moved digital now? They do seem to be a lot less polished than average (which I quite like from scientists!) If anything, this makes Fry’s star power all the more evident.

I remember when BBC presenters would have a little bit of expertise but were mostly avatars for the unknowing-but-curious audience. Fry really seems to know her stuff on the computer science behind AI, and has insights and opinions I hadn’t heard elsewhere – which is rare in the saturated world of AI online commentary.

Recommended

CORY DOCTOROW

This is an interview from a while ago from Doctorow’s book tour for his big ‘Enshittification’ book.

I have a feeling I’ve plugged not just him but this book before, although I can’t seem to find a record – but, if the name Cory Doctorow isn’t familiar, he was the person who came up with the term ‘enshittification’ (a term which even my autocorrect now recognises!)

I thought I’d add him because, like Ada Palmer, he is also an author of science fiction who is also very good at communicating misunderstood real-world systems and histories.

Doctorow gave a lot of interviews but I remember this one being particularly good, although you might want to skip over Aaron Bastani’s slightly waffly intro.

When I’ve talked about him in conversation, people tend to quote a line from this interview: “Why did the tech companies do this? Well, why does a dog lick its balls? Because it can. They did it because we let them.”

Recommended

PROJECT HAIL MARY

I have not had a chance to see this film yet! But every review of it has been ecstatic. A frequent statement from reviewers and online posters has been that this is the best film they’ve seen in years.

It’s based on a book by Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian, which I loved. (I even wrote a eulogy to it.) In an interview, Ryan Gosling, star of this new film, hit the nail on the head when he said Weir writes stories that feel like they’re escapist but are actually about how extraordinarily capable humans can be in the most desperate of times like these.

So, as I occasionally do, I’m going to confidently proclaim that I’m going to really enjoy this film. Which is tempting fate in the worst way, obviously. But the odds are looking good.

Recommended

KAGI.COM

Last minute addition here, but it occurred to me that this as an online service that I’m finally at the stage where I’m comfortable recommending it.

As you probably noticed, Google Search has been getting worse and worse. “Gradually,” as Hemingway said, “and then suddenly” (with the rise of AI Overviews). Their AI is just wildly inaccurate, and the following top 108 results are all sponsored.

I’d heard nice things about Kagi.com as an alternative search engine, but… it’s a paid subscription. Can I really justify regularly paying for online searching?

The answer is yes. I pay $5 per month for 300 searches, and I haven’t hit that limit yet. And there’s all sorts of ways you can customise it.

I should qualify that I don’t know anywhere near as much about the Kagi company as I do about Google, so maybe they’re secretly working on the Torment Nexus. But they are a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), they’re not funded by venture capital or private equity, and it is nice to have a search that works. And they say that (because you pay) each account is anonymised so they can’t track any of your search data. It does have AI answers, but you can switch them off.

And actually, weirdly, the thing I’ve been finding most useful is their ‘Kagi Assistant’ chatbot, which uses open-weight (i.e. free) alternative models to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google etc. The models are supposed to be less good (unless you pay £30 a month) but for the kinds of basic questions I often find myself asking, it’s just fine. And, best of all, my queries get deleted after 24 hours.

I don’t get any kickback for saying all this. I probably should though.

So my 50th birthday, which I was dreading so much, came and went. And it was actually pretty great!

I had wanted to avoid a repeat of my 40th, where I had arranged a weather dependent event (in March!) and of course had to scupper it at the last minute. Instead, everyone just came round ours, and I remember feeling rushed and disorganised and overwhelmed and just generally a bad host.

So I was hoping to do a better, more social event for my 50th. Even before the pandemic and parenthood, I had come to the conclusion that I don’t make enough time for my friends and extended family, and I thought this could be the starting pistol for that. I started planning in August last year, but my plans had to scale down with each month, and by last month I had basically given up on doing anything. Too little time. Too exhausted.

But I ended up having what felt like four consecutive birthday events.

First, my favourite present: H managed to organise and make a video comprised of clips from 50 friends and family. This alone felt like I was catching up with so many people.

Then there was the Bastard Session birthday special, which was a really good one, and also featured surprise visits from older brother who lives in Sweden and best friend from school, all machinated by younger brother. Everyone made fun of me for being old, including me. I had worried that the night would just feel like the same thing we do every month, but actually it was exactly what was needed.

The next day, a handful of core family and friends and partners came round to ours, in a similar way to my 40th except that it was the right number of the right people, with no pressure.

The evening after that was a chance to catch up with many of my Catweazle friends at a neighbours’ house gig. After a cathartic performance, Phoebe and Sam Twigg and I talked for about an hour about the truly extraordinary phenomenon that is the Catweazle club. How it shaped us, and how maybe we are just bit parts in its story.

This conversation, picking apart the importance of this community, its fragility and its transcendence, felt like the perfect coda to the run of birthday celebrations.

It left me with such a sense of gratitude for the communities and families I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of.

All in all, a very happy result.

For my next big birthday I’ll be 60, but let’s not even fucking think about that, shall we?

So, as I mentioned in the intro, I’ve been listening back to my library of unreleased songs, and realising that I’m suddenly happy with dusting them off and putting them online.

I had always assumed they were too amateurish, but I changed my mind. Part of that is perhaps a reaction to the slickness of AI generated music. Part of that is getting older and being more forgiving of my past self.

Part of it, however, might also be that I just feel music more intensely at the moment.

In the past, when I got the chance to make a lot of music, I would look back at these old tracks and feel like they just didn’t pack enough of an emotional punch.

Now, all music feels to me like it’s more emotional.

And this matters a lot to me, because I have been trying for years to squeeze as much emotion into a piece of music as I can. However, at the back of my mind I’ve been aware that this is perhaps missing the point – the amount of emotion a piece of music inspires is not a static thing. The same song can leave you cold one day and allow you to glimpse heaven another.

I’ve been wondering why. And recently I’ve been coming back to the idea of hedonic adaptation.

This is the theory that our happiness levels generally stabilise to a standard amount after a very good thing or a very bad thing happens.

Winning the lottery might not leave you significantly happier, after the initial shock. Losing a limb might not leave you significantly unhappier, after the initial shock.

So perhaps the thrill of making music wears off a bit when I get to do a lot of it?

There is another possible explanation. This process of hedonic adaptation can get corrupted when you introduce an addiction.

And I have found making music addictive. In so much as that it can take up all my focus and I can stop paying attention to anything else, in a way that can sometimes feel detrimental.

I tend to find the process of making music more difficult than I expect, but as I get towards the end of the creative process I feel like I get a high which does feel addictive. And I want the next song I write to produce more, and more, and more.

Anyway, whatever the underlying reason why music feels more emotional when I don’t get much time to make it, I’m trying to use this opportunity to note down as many ideas as possible while the inspiration is strong, so I have some good places to start from when I do get the time again.

Oh yeah, and if this month has taught me anything, it’s something I’m sure you already knew: the most precious resource in life is time.