Hello, little life and art update.

Currently listening to: Ethan Gruska’s album En Garde. Favourite tracks include Enough for Now, Teenage Drug and Attacker.

Currently working on: Hurricane EP, which I have been working on for years now. Started in late 2018 when I met up with the initial producer/engineer I was working with, and have since changed songs, changed producers, changed workflow, and really started to bring the project together over COVID. Instead of just one linear path with one producer and one recording site, the songs have become a sort of patchwork of sounds from places across oceans and time. Samples from trains in London, and mandolins and rain from America. Guitar stolen from demos, new stems from friends I haven’t met in person yet. The first track is about to be sent away for mastering, which is a surreal feeling, considering I’ve been working on it for so long, and it feels like these songs have had so many lives already before even hitting other people’s ears.

Something else interesting I have decided to do is stop going on social media until I’m in the promotional phase of this project. Which I know Facebook/Instagram will probably punish me for by hiding my posts in the algorithm (they reward constant use of the app). I don’t really care at this point — I’ve seen how much I use the app and how often it takes me away from what I really should be doing. I can lose large chunks of time in one go. I’m hoping that this change will actually guide me towards more meaningful ways of connecting with people, working, and finding inspiration.

Things I have been doing instead of going on social media:

writing in this blog
sitting and just staring at nothing
researching jobs and training opportunities
listening to podcasts
listening over mixes and working on my EP

That’s still not quite everything I would like to be doing in a life sans social media. What I’d also like to be doing is:

practising music more
exercising & moving my body more
reading more (I am kind of doing this at the moment but am not enjoying the book I’m reading)
writing and drawing more

Maybe these things will come with a bit more time off the apps. I’m still settling in to checking my phone less — I keep picking it up out of habit and scrolling through to find Instagram, which isn’t there anymore.

2021 is coming and, unlike every other New Years’ Eve I’ve experienced, I don’t have any resolutions. I’ve not even had any major desire to look back over 2020 and reminisce.. Normally by this point I’d have the notebooks out and would be tallying up my highlights and achievements like a Personal Report Card from the Universe.

Standing at the threshold, at the end of what has been A Bad Year, I’m wary of Another Bad Year looming. I mean, if 2020 has taught me anything, it’s that stuff can always get worse. I know there’s that phrase that goes, “it’s always darkest before the dawn,” but I feel like this year I’m wearing sunglasses in a cave. For everyone, this year has seen our lives shuddering to a halt: we’ve been separated from our friends, partners and families; we’ve lost money, lost certainty, lost people.

We know we’ve got at another year of weirdness to come. And after this virus slows down… what’s next? What’s waiting round the corner?

At school I picked up trophies for music composition, drama and english. But I was never recognised for my one, true academic passion: worrying. God, I can worry as if my life depended on it (which I guess is what worrying is, anyway? thinking your life depends on everything). One of my major worries over this year was time. Time we’re losing, time we’ve lost. Using time well. Securing future time by making your life time-loss-proof. I’m sure there’s a better word for that.

I’m starting a project in 2021 that will explore the concept of time, particularly wasted time. This might mean time that’s genuinely been taken away from us (by illness, death or, oh I don’t know… a pandemic?), or time we conceive as wasted (the wrong relationship, the wrong body/gender, years of chasing a defunct dream or years of indecision). And through a climate'-charged lens: have we, as humans, wasted our time on earth?

It’s heavy-hitting stuff! I mean, as I’m reading over this whole post I’m like, “Jesus Olivia, that’s a one-way ticket to Downtown. As in, the town where you feel down all the time.” But the main point of me doing this is to try and answer the question — can we make this a good thing? Is wasted time a good thing? And if it’s not a good thing, then how can we make it good, or better for the people experiencing it? How can we re-frame it?

Ultimately what I want to do is then present these questions and answers in a format which might be a podcast, or a concept album, or a stage show, even. My first port of call in the new year is to start talking to people and recording our conversations. And to keep writing here to share what I’m learning and ask questions.

Another question I have at the moment is, “How does any of this relate to what I do as an artist?” My current projects are writing 100 Tiny Songs and a few songs which may either be released as an EP or as singles next year. I already have some connections to make with both of those projects to the idea of wasted time. I’ll write about them here.

Anyway, hang tight, happy new year and don’t worry too much,

Olivia.