Saturday 7 July 2012

Looking Forward Uncertainly

So, I thought it was about time I explained why I called my blog Looking Forward Uncertainly.

Before I can do that, you probably need to know (if you don't already) that I'm a musician and have been in a band called Capulets for, well, quite some time. We've been a bit off and on over the last couple of years as after our last drummer moved to Scotland, my main collaborator in the band, Pete, rather unreasonably decided to both do an MA and get married. Despite these testing circumstances, Pete and I have managed to keep things ticking over in the background on days when he wasn't reading, psychoanalysing or deciding what kind of flowers went with bridesmaid's dresses. Hopefully we're now starting to get things back on track, so watch this space, so to speak.

So, why Looking Forward Uncertainly? Well, it's the title of a song of mine, written back in 2007, on a melancholic train journey heading Northward out of London and a late night a week or so later.

The title itself actually came from an article I read in some free literary magazine I picked up in Soho (remember those?), in which it was printed in massive blue letters across a whole page for no apparent reason. I liked it so much I pinned it to my fridge and kept trying to find a use for it in things I was writing. In the end, it just seemed to fit perfectly with this song, so I stole it wholesale for the title.

As an expression though, "looking forward uncertainly" seems to encapsulate something of what I perceive as the current mood and of the both the hope and the doubt that we feel when trying imagine or understand how the future might pan out. When I started this blog, those are the ideas I wanted to explore, so it seemed like a good opportunity to steal the expression all over again.

The song Looking Forward Uncertainly, however, addresses a topic a little closer to my heart and while I don't want to give too much away (the meaning is in the eye of the beholder, after all), I will say that it's a bit of rare one for me, in that I don't often write about myself and, well, like I said, I was a bit melancholic at the time...

I've added the lyrics in down below and you can listen to the original version of the song via the soundcloud link at the bottom (recorded in one take at about 3am on the night I wrote it). Enjoy!

Looking Forward Uncertainly

Tonight I dream of the radio telescopes
Giving me hope
I imagine a Universe
A coil, spiralling upwards

I could dream of the future, but I can't find something useful
Leonard Cohen sang Hallelujah, but it don't mean anything to you

You're drifting away
You're drifing through space

Telescopes from this moment on
And if I look in the same direction
Then I can see what they can see
The future mapped out in front of me

I could dream of the future, but I can't find something useful
Leonard Cohen sang Hallelujah, but it don't mean anything to you

You're drifting away
You're drifing through space


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