PHILOSOPHY & LEGACY
I have spent my life chasing the mystery that sits behind melody — the invisible hand that moves a chord change, the flicker of memory that turns into a lyric. For me, songwriting has always been less about craft and more about excavation — a kind of Jungian descent into the unconscious, where fragments of childhood, love, shame, beauty and death are all waiting to be understood, rearranged and redeemed through sound. Every song I’ve written has been a small act of self-analysis, an attempt to find the pattern inside the chaos.
Music, when it’s honest, is psychological work. It’s the bridge between the shadow and the light — the reconciliation of opposites. I’ve never trusted the purely commercial impulse, the pop confection designed to distract rather than reveal. I’ve been drawn instead to the artists who risked self-revelation: Talk Talk, Cathal Coughlan, Kate Bush, John Lennon. The ones who didn’t just perform life, but interrogated it.
Through every chapter — the studios in London, New York and Los Angeles, the long nights with people like Cathy Dennis, Stephen Lipson or Dave Stewart, the quieter collaborations with lyricists like Chris Difford or Dean Johnson — I’ve learned that creation is communion. You sit at the piano, you wait, and if you’re lucky, something larger than you arrives. You touch the numinous for a moment, and then it’s gone. All art is that — the pursuit of something fleeting and eternal.
I have seen the arc of fame, the way it lifts and devours. I’ve seen good men lose themselves to applause, and others become ghosts long before their bodies give out. I’ve sat beside some of my heroes and watched the light go out of their eyes when the cameras stopped. It made me realise that what truly endures is not the illusion of importance, but the sincerity of the work. You leave behind songs like messages in bottles — little sonic testaments that say, I was here, I felt something, I tried to make sense of it.
The older I get, the more I’m drawn to stillness. The applause fades; the noise recedes. What remains is the work itself — the albums, the words, the people I’ve made them with. I feel most alive when I’m in that private, unguarded space with a piano or a friend who understands the same ache. There’s a line from Jung that has always stayed with me: “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” I think that’s the work of every artist — not to accumulate trophies, but to approach the truth of one’s own being.
I’ve come to believe that songs are the psyche made audible. They hold our secrets, our contradictions, our longing to belong and our fear of being seen. Each time I finish one, I feel like I’ve shed a layer of misunderstanding. It’s how I’ve learned to live — by listening inward and turning the sound of my confusion into something melodic, something that might console another person in their confusion.
If there’s a legacy I’d want to leave, it’s that — not fame, not fashion, but feeling. To have written music that allowed people, even for a few minutes, to glimpse the beauty and the fragility of their own inner world. To have told the truth in melody. To have walked through darkness and returned with something worth sharing.
Art, at its best, is empathy made manifest. And empathy, at its best, is love with understanding. That’s all I’ve ever really tried to do — to understand myself.