Music and Words

Why I'm here (on Substack. But also, maybe, on the planet)

It feels appropriate that my first ever post here on Substack should be on this topic. As a musician, singer and songwriter, this musing on the importance of the written word and the link for me between music and words is very close to my heart. I’ve been wanting to post on Substack  ever since I found out about its existence through the writers and thinkers I admire who also share their work on here. And though I kept telling myself that these people are “proper” writers, with experience and qualifications, who get paid to write, and I am not, the idea of sharing something on here had cemented itself in my brain and so here I am.

To anyone that reads this - I hope you enjoy my first ever post here. Please be kind, I’m new!

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Today is the date (it is thought) of the printing of the first ever mass-produced book, the Gutenberg Bible. I discovered this while flicking through a poetry anthology I purchased at a charity shop for five pounds a few days ago, “A Poem for Every Day of the Year”, edited by Allie Esiri. The poems are organised so that a particular poem is allocated to each day, and today’s, Emily Dickinson’s “There Is No Frigate Like A Book”, a celebration of the written word and its ability to transport all of us to far off lands, is introduced by the editor with this fact.

Books. Words. Language. Music. Thinking about it, these things have always been present in my life. They have always given me comfort when I’ve needed it, when I’ve been lost and alone. I love the written word, partly because so much gets in the way when we are speaking in person. Have you ever had an argument with someone, and become completely tongue-tied, only to the think of the perfect response after the fact? Maybe you write it down in your journal. The written word has always been the saviour of the socially anxious person.

I loved poetry as a child. I remember the collections of poems for children that my mum used to read to me at bedtime. I still remember some of my favourites off by heart. In fact, as I scanned the contents of “A Poem for Every Day of the Year”, amongst the few titles I recognised (and many I didn’t), I found one of those poems from my childhood, “Buckingham Palace” by A.A. Milne. I read a bit aloud to my boyfriend, in the singsong way my mum used to read it (no idea if this particular poem had a melody or if my mum, also being a singer, just decided it needed one).

My grandpa also used to recite poems aloud, and would often come out with little poetic phrases. For example, instead of saying he was full he would announce that he had “had an elegant sufficiency”, a phrase we still often use in my family to this day. I vaguely remember him reciting William Brighty Rands’ “The Pedlar’s Caravan” in full, and there is some old footage of me aged about two, sitting with a stack of magazines that I couldn’t yet read, my mum encouraging me to recite poems like this one, as well as sing songs.

As I got older, in the car on the way to my Saturday morning ballet classes, I would write little songs for me and my dad to sing, sometimes stealing the melody from a famous song like “Yellow Submarine” and changing the lyrics to something appropriate to our journey or a subject we had just been talking about. I had no idea that not everybody did this, that not everyone’s dad could sing along with them in perfect harmony on command. It was just what we did.

I would listen to CDs (yes this was a long time ago), removing the lyric booklet from the plastic casing and singing along with the artist, sometimes in harmony if the singer was male and the key was too low for me. I loved to learn the lyrics off by heart, to try and work out what the song was about, if it was personal or more observational. Did Tracy Chapman really grow up with an alcoholic father and escape to live with someone who eventually ended up disappointing her too? I still don’t know.

I guess music and words have always been linked somehow for me. The way poetry, when combined with a pleasing or catchy melody, seems to hold even more meaning. Aside from songs about traffic in the car on the way to ballet with my dad, I wrote my first “proper” songs aged fourteen, having fallen for a boy my friend was going out with, and finding some comfort in creating something out of that situation. But it was discovering the work of Joni Mitchell at university that first made me really want to be a songwriter. There was something different about her writing. It was deeper, more personal but also more poetic than anything I’d heard before, and what she wrote about spoke to me in ways other songs hadn’t. I’ve been writing songs, on and off, ever since.

Back to the anthology. Glancing at the contents, I also found the Shakespeare Sonnet that I quoted in one of my own songs, “About You”. We studied Sonnet 116, amongst other works of Shakespeare at school. The line I remembered described love as “an ever-fixèd mark”, which for whatever reason stuck in my brain and came out in this song. Funnily enough, I don’t remember finding any of the poetry we studied at school particularly inspiring. Maybe you’re supposed to discover this stuff later on your own. I remember when I wrote the first lines of that song, “Love is a battle/It is an ever-fixed mark/It is a holy thing”, I didn’t know that the song would end up being about falling in love with my now boyfriend, who at the time was still just a friend. That is one of the things I love about writing, the way sometimes the words come first, before the meaning.

I opened the front cover to find a scribbled message in pencil that read “for our lovely Alice on your 40th birthday” from “M + D xx”. Something about that, and rediscovering these poems from my childhood and adolescence, made me realise I had to give this book a new home.