Absence
This piece was my first musical collaboration on Substack.
Earlier in the year and not long after starting Drip Fed Sun, I had a probably unrealistic, but not uncommon surge of creative optimism.
I put out the call for poets to share their work in hopes of creating some original music together.
Messy was one of the first to heed to call with their poem Absence. You can check it out here:
Shortly after I found myself swamped by other projects including session work for a friend of mine as well as trying to start my own band.
On top of this I was trying to write my own poetry and do an original artwork three times a week.. a bold decision from someone that had never written poetry and lacked any meaningful visual arts skills.
Hence, it has taken me quite a while to get this post together, mostly because I wanted to present Messy’s work as well as I could.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did working on it!
Process and Ponderings
I managed to compose and record the piece super quickly as I had melodic ideas directly from reading the poem. Not something that happens to me particularly often — I usually start with the music.
The song itself is a deeply sad one and has brought me to tears on a couple of occasions.
Although I haven’t spoken to Messy directly about their intentions, I initially interpreted it as a break-up song, but through performing and interacting with the material more deeply I now see it as a song about grief.
The words drive to the heart of what it’s like to lose someone important to you, and the pain experienced when life unceremoniously separates us from our desires or the ones we love.
Ending a relationship can leave us with that feeling — a lack of purpose and meaning in our lives.
Losing a loved one to death hits even harder as we are left with all the plans that will never come to fruition. All the moments that are no longer shared, as we need to rethink our position as an individual in the world without the mirror of a loving gaze to live up to.
“I’m fine. That’s a lie.”
This line rings in my head as I flashback to a supermarket checkout — the cashier asking me how my day was after my closest friend had died in a car accident the day before.
I often think about the facade that hides heartbreak, and Messy’s words lift a mask for just a second on that fragile part of us so many try so deeply to hide.
It also ties nicely to this GIF I made and am fairly proud of..
Production Notes
I got to make this piece in my home studio before moving so it got the full one man band production.
The words of the poem were a really great exercise in scansion for music (where to stress syllables) as the rhyming and form of the piece was quite fluid.
It was great material to work with and forced me to rethink the way I write song lyrics generally — Trying for less structure but more emotional nuance.
Singing in a soft and high way like this was new for me and was inspired by PJ Harvey’s singing voice on “White Chalk” — a sound she describes as her peasant voice.
The song was also heavily modelled around this performance of ‘Metal Heart’ by Cat Power — music that has always helped me in my darker moments:
Messy Ink Poetry has an excellent poetry page on Substack where they post their own work as well as running collaborative poems every Friday.
Subscribe and jump in their chat and you will get a prompt to be a part of it.
I’ve tried to time this release as a reminder to join in and would really like to see them get an outrageous amount of contributions as a challenge — so I will see you there!
I’m interested in doing this again so if you have a poem that might work as a song link it in the comments.
It may take a while but I will check them out and see what I can do :)
Thanks for reading and listening!