<\/p>\n
Considered Silence<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n An artist\u2019s journey is one from noise to silence. In the beginning they need and want to be heard yet, at some point, silence will be required to stay sharp. They should never choose the sound of their own voice over the work. Staying quiet is not what artists are very good at but it is what needs to be done sometimes. Silence doesn\u2019t have to last forever and invariably there will come a time when a fork in the road is reached: one way \u2018stop talking\u2019, the other \u2018continue speaking\u2019. The artist will feel in their bones when this fateful day arrives.<\/p>\n When I was younger I felt a lot more confident in my inner voice. I used to think of my subconscious as a shield against outside forces that might bring me down and also, as a key into a world behind the veil \u2013 where truth could be spoken without thinking too much. Songs felt like magical opportunities, a chance to present the best of myself to the world, and receive the wonders of it in return. A typical writing session would consist of me sitting, zoning out, letting a thought or idea come. And when a worthwhile thing came along I would attempt to fashion it \u2013 using the craftsman side of my brain \u2013 into something resembling a piece of art I could stand behind, and release.<\/p>\n I was conscious of looking for something that could be intimate and personal and also universal in a way. The first line that came to me when I wrote \u2018Graveyard\u2019 (2008) was \u2018I kissed you in the graveyard\u2019. This deceptively simple line was the exact kind that could open up a whole banana-bunch of possibilities. I was thinking about T.S. Eliot\u2019s poem The Waste Land<\/em> (1922) and imagining the idea of a kiss in a world of death as a good old two-fingered salute to the grim reaper \u2013 the idea of two lovers sharing a brief, graveside moment, a microcosm of their whole lives. And the ambiguity of a line like, \u2018it\u2019s a short, short distance from the nipple to the soil\u2019 appealed to me.<\/p>\n