Beautiful Moments Are Made of Emails
are you trapped in the castle?
Hello, you!
I’m back in your inbox with a VENGEANCE. A gentle vengeance. So nice to write to you again.
If you read my last email you’d know that I took a break to move house whilst also nursing a slightly-fractured foot back to health. Happy to tell you that I am in new digs and people have stopped calling me Hopalong Rafferty, although I still hop a little.
Taking a break from writing is hard because I felt like I didn’t know what I wanted to write about for my first post back. What do I want to say?
Well, I figured it out, as I always do. You gotta just start thinking and writing and something usually turns up. Today’s email is about comparison, castles, and beautiful moments.
Thanks for reading, I appreciate you being here.
🏰 Trapped in the Castle
There is a castle in a green forest. You first see it like a mirage: white stone rippling under evergreen boughs, changing and growing as you stalk closer. When the forest opens up to a glade, the castle is revealed. It shimmers like a coral reef. A stained glass window tells the tale of pink roses and bell jars.
You have been told not to come here. It is dangerous. You can lose yourself, they say.
As the sun glows behind a cloud, somewhere it sounds like a clock is ticking down to midnight. You walk to the castle door and push it open.
You are inside.
The castle welcomes you with stillness, like a bated breath. The grand staircase curls up in two directions: East and West. Above you a chandelier sits in the eaves like a spider in its web.
You explore.
The corridors are long and dark. The portraits on the walls are… familiar. As you journey deeper into the castle you start to recognise people you know. Each painting is a gilded celebration of their finest achievements. A final handshake. A mountain summit. A sea of faces in elation. You start to study the paintings to figure out what happened before these moments, but there’s never an explanation. There’s never a story, never a parable or fable. You hunt deeper into the castle for answers but all you get is glittering and glaring examples of other people’s success. As the hallway gets darker, the picture frames glow brighter. The corridors twist and turn and you find your own shadow twisting and turning. There is a strength you didn’t know you had. It grows stronger when you look at these paintings. It is not an empowering strength, however, you find that you can hardly move because of it.
A final push down one last corridor, and you find yourself at the staircase again. The West Wing looms. You feel trepidation, a thought passes your mind like a bird overhead: it is forbidden. But a curiosity lingers and tugs at you. The stairs are hard to climb with your burden but you climb them anyway. You see a darkening hall.
At the end of a hall, there is a door.
Through the door, is a room.
In the room, is a bell jar.
The bell jar hosts a rose, which is enchanted to wither, petal by petal.
You could leave this castle, if you were kinder to yourself and others.
You could leave this castle. You could leave this castle. You could leave.
You take the bell jar off the rose. You bend down so your face is level with the wilting flower.
“What do they know that I don’t?” you whisper to nobody in particular.
To your surprise, the rose replies.
“Emails,” she says.
🔮 Alchemy and Emails
Every Sunday I would get the train to Richmond, then walk for half an hour to Boris’ house, where we’d spend an entire day on alchemy.
It was 2018. Alchemy is how we referred to the process of making songs. Because it felt like that: you took separate elements and by putting them all together in a certain way, you made something greater than the sum of its parts. Upstairs in Boris’ house, we would sit in his box room studio, the curtains closed to trap the sound in, an array of acoustic guitars sleeping in a rack, lullabied by the silent whirr and blink of preamps, compressors, reverbs and other complicated hardware capable of making a dry voice sound like a warm echo by the fire.
I had brought three songs to make into something: The Way We Were, Grace and Hurricane. We worked on them week after week. Every Sunday I would take the train to Richmond. Sometimes I would walk that half hour from station to house in the pouring rain and wind. I often forgot to eat lunch those days, coming home absolutely ravenous and energetically drained from concentrating all day. The process to make these songs took longer than it needed to. I had no idea what I was doing. It was slow and sometimes frustrating. But it was the making of a beautiful thing.
When I applied for the Geologists’ Association’s funding program to make my album in 2023, I would wake up at 7am and take the train to Charing Cross, sitting down in a cafe which had all the trappings of a YA comfort novel: the top floor of a bookshop, wooden furniture, a warm glow in the winter mornings, freshly baked scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam, a latte the size of your face… but the reality was that I was sitting at that desk wrestling with excel spreadsheets, budgets, paragraphs distilled to 100-word-perfection which detailed my desires and achievements in crystal clarity. Most days I’d come home feeling like I’d not done very much, I’d only moved the needle an inch. But I kept at it. Emails, numbers, reading, writing, nothing very beautiful or creative at all. Yet it was the making of a beautiful thing.
🪡 The Pinprick
The other day I had a ‘Beast’ moment. It jumped out at me as I went on to Instagram. I saw a picture of a perfect gig, a perfect venue, and someone having a perfect moment that was happening to them Right Now. And that someone was not me.
RAGE! SADNESS! WHY CAN’T I HAVE BEAUTIFUL MOMENTS! WHY DO I HAVE TO WRITE EMAILS INSTEAD!?
I tried to forget about it (despite checking that photograph about ten more times that day), and went back to my extremely long to-do list, which involved exciting things such as:
completing the final draft of my artist biography
researching science festivals across the UK and adding them to a database
creating a list of optimal image sizes for social media branding
deciding whether I want a CD case with four panels and no booklet, or four panels plus a booklet
All these things involve blank white documents, tables, copying and pasting email addresses, writing the same “Hello!” out again and again, and not enough cups of tea to make it even remotely thrilling.
🌹 My Own Fairytale
As I did this, I reminded myself of my beautiful moments. When I released my EP Hurricane, it was all happening for me. I had a train of beautiful moments all together: an amazing release show with a full band in an incredible venue, a slick and clever music video, a photoshoot at 6am on a beach in Kent, radio play on the BBC. I remember at the time a fellow musician, one who hadn’t released anything in a while, said that things looked amazing for me. And they did! All the boring walks and days forgetting to eat lunch and emails and emails and emails had resulted in several beautiful moments, which were hard-won.
But I could hear in the undertones of what she was saying: it wasn’t just “things look amazing for you,” it was, “you’re so lucky.” And I get it. Because I do that too. I look at people having their own hard-won moments and think the same. Perfect venue? You’re so lucky. Perfect music video? You’re so lucky. Perfect radio placement? You’re so lucky. Why can’t I be lucky? Why can’t I get all these things? All I get is a few beautiful moments after 3 years of hard work and 12,000 emails!
Back to the picture. The one picture on Instagram which sent me into the disenchanted castle of my own making. The one that made the shadows on the walls grow longer and my fangs grow larger. Someone was having a beautiful moment, hard won. And I knew, from my own experience, that this moment came from a lot of emails, a lot of hours, a lot of ‘what-ifs’ and a lot of ‘I’m not good enoughs’. It didn’t spring up like a wildflower. It didn’t ‘just happen’.
Nothing ‘just happens’. So why do I still believe that it ‘just happens’ to everyone else?
This newsletter shares my creative process but I also hope that it shows the un-creative parts of the creative process. The logistics. The spreadsheets. The planning. The general UUUUGUGUUGGHGHHHHH-ness of it all.
Because that is what makes a beautiful moment.
Beautiful! Check out some ways you can support me & my music:
buying a ‘Gneiss Guy’ tote bag on my Bandcamp
listening to my music on Spotify (or not, if you’ve read my last newsletter)
buy my music on Bandcamp and make a real difference
forwarding this newsletter to a friend!
and if you haven’t already, subscribe:
Til next time! Be good,
Olivia 🌈✨🏔🎶
