3. Travelling without moving

In which we visit some places you don't want to go

Author

Richard Walley
May 31, 2024

I’m Not Going

Welcome back again. It’s lovely to have you here :-) This week I’m talking about the third track to be released from ‘You Could Be Happy’. It’s called ‘I’m Not Going’, and below we find out why.

A quick note on what we’re doing here in case it’s your first time

This is the third track from the debut album from The Sixteenth. The album - entitled You Could Be Happy - will be released one track at a time over the next twelve weeks or so. It’s being released like that because it tells a story, and I decided that it’d be fun to serialise the story, like Dickens, or a comic. The idea of these emails is to tell you a bit more of that story. If you’re coming to these thoughts for the first time and would like to start at the beginning, you can access old emails here.

Oslo 2011

I’m guessing the date here. I can only barely remember why I was in Oslo at all, other than it would have been a work thing. (Side note - I don’t have a glamorous musical life where I travel the world DJing cool clubs and hanging out with Keith Jarrett. I have a distinctly un-glamorous day job that occasionally affords me the privilege of going to other countries to do un-glamorous work things.)

My normal routine when in a strange city is to triangulate myself between craft beer bars and record shops, which in my experience have the best people and the best things to do. And so one afternoon I found myself the only customer in a craft beer bar near the middle of Oslo. Obviously chatting to the barman is the thing to do in these circumstances, and our conversation eventually turned to mental health and depression.

“I tend to see depression as a destination” he said. “I have a friend with a similar outlook, and every once in a while, we will go there for the weekend. We will lock ourselves in our flat with a lot of alcohol, go down into the depths, have a look around, and then come back again. Making it a conscious choice means it doesn’t control us”.

I suspect I need to make it completely clear at this point that, speaking as somebody who has suffered from depression, this is not sound medical advice, and seen in a certain light could be seen to trivialise a serious and debilitating illness. Certainly I’ve never been able to exercise any degree of choice over my depression. But it did make me wonder. If I could, would I choose to go there? Would it be somewhere I would deliberately visit every once in a while? On the promise that I could come back if I chose?

I’m not going

There is a scene in Apocalypse Now, just after the famous bit with the helicopters, in which one of them lands and Lance the surfer turns around to whoever is left in the helicopter and shouts over the noise ‘I'M NOT GOING! I‘M NOT GOING’. I think that scene stuck with me because the emotion is so familiar. There have been times when I’ve got out of bed, washed, got dressed, packed my bag, picked up my bus pass, and stopped at the door with those words ringing in my ears. And then I turned round and went back to bed. The almost physical inability to face the world; our fears; the noise, chaos, horror; the almost physical assault on ourselves. I can’t even. I just can’t.

This track is about depression; the place you end up after stress has broken you to the extent that you no longer have energy to beat the demons back. It’s also when I introduce one of the main characters of the story (you’ll remember I promised characters). Any time you hear a solo instrument (that is, an instrument playing on its own), that is the main character, our protagonist. In this case, the protagonist is a cello, but for the purposes of this album, any solo instrument counts. You might also notice that the cello has a melody, but is all over the place in terms of register; the piece itself is repetitive, but slightly random at the same time. And sounds, I hope, very deeply lonely, and sad. These are all aspects of depression, certainly as I experienced it.

The choice of a solo instrument as a signifier is to reflect loneliness, at least at this point in the album. Another aspect of depression is a deep turning in on yourself, a feedback loop of introspection. The loops and repetitions of the protagonist and the accompaniment in this piece signify some of those modes of thought. The eagle-eared amongst you will also note references to another one of my musical heroes, Ralph Vaughan-Williams. You might want to check out The Lark Ascending; a much more uplifting version of a similar type of music.

I feel as though there is a lot more to be tapped musically in some of these ideas. But this is a journey, and next week we will visit somewhere different.

What next?

Glad you asked! Firstly, thanks for reading this far. You’ve already been part of the creative journey of this album, and I very sincerely thank you for paying attention. All I’d really like is for people to listen and be part of the journey. Job done. However, if you have friends or people you think would enjoy this, please encourage them to sign up to these updates via www.thesixteenth.net. It would mean a lot. And maybe actually listen to the songs in whatever way you enjoy!