10^th May, 2025
The Lungomare, Chiaia, Naples

24 hours before my holiday ends, I am itching to get back to my life of making and doing.

Naples is loud, exciting, busy, delicious, rammed full of people, effervescent with traffic. It’s intense, colourful, gritty, a blast. I’ve had a great time experiencing it.

It’s just…I love my life, my home, my quiet garden. My colourful attic studio where I make music and videos. My friendly neighbourhood on the edge of the city. I love my dream job and how I get to spend my days.

Two years ago today I was miserable in Bristol, raw nerves assaulted by a daily soundtrack of a dual carriageway and noisy neighbours, fading away in a dark house that sapped my spirit. Unable to think, unable to be creative, unable to write the album I knew I wanted – and needed – to write.

Everything in my life has changed for the better since then.

This is a strange moment, though. I know I want to get back, but I don’t have a clear picture of what I’ll do when I get there. My new album came out three weeks ago. The fanfare immediately died down.

What do I do now?

I sit at the long, dark dining table, sun filtering through the soft curtains, coffee close at hand. I am perplexed.

What more do I have to give?

It’s not enough to spend years writing, producing and releasing an album: I have to find ways to continually introduce the music to new people while creating fun experiences for my existing audience.

It’s not enough to create a long form video for YouTube: I have to cut clips out and remove the left and right hand side of the frame to entertain people on different platforms.

It’s not enough to write a blog post: I have to cut out the highlights to share in Notes / tweets / threads to give my piece the best chance of being read by people who already follow me.

I’ve written before about “have to” versus “get to”. Replace “have to” with “get to” for an immediate bump of enthusiasm for the thing you’re privileged to “get to” do, while also knowing that, to have any chance to paying for recording and manufacturing costs, you really do “have to”…

If I don’t do these things, I have to accept that my success will always be limited by my efforts, or lack of efforts. To flip the name of this blog: if I do nothing, nothing will happen.

It’s frustrating to expend so much energy on something and then so quickly feel like the tennis ball I’ve thrust so hopefully out into the universe has not fallen onto tarmac, but morphed into a small beanbag and got stuck in a sandpit.

It didn’t even bounce once.

I used to get excited right before an album release, thinking about all the fun ways it could change my life. This time next year I could be booked for festivals! Maybe a brilliant independent label will want to release the next album! I could have money in the bank! Other artists might want me to sing/play/produce their songs! A sync agent could track me down and give me incredible opportunities!

I don’t entertain those thoughts any more, and maybe that’s a bit sad, but it’s not because I’m jaded or bitter. I just know, seven albums in, that gradual, sustainable growth is better for my career and for my nervous system. The more times I do this bonkers thing the more I see it’s about keeping going, not about having a big win that supposedly changes everything.

I don’t want to change everything. I love my life, my relationship, my home, the ways I get to spend my days. It took a long time to get here. I built this myself, over many years. 

However, I truly believe “House Of Stories” is my best, most heartfelt and accomplished album yet. I feel so much responsibility to try and get that bloody ball to bounce that it can only be my fault when it doesn’t.

It’s overwhelming, and the second-guessing stops me in my tracks. I can’t be the only one who wants to try, who wants to plan their way out of this feeling, but ends up doing nothing instead. I am paralysed by indecision, and I hate it.

I ponder the whole ridiculous enterprise. Is everything online just there to advertise something else? Are we all just making more and more things, then cutting smaller things out of the big things so we can point fingers at our other things, at ourselves? Am I just a big pointing finger pointing indirectly at my album? Am I supposed to be wearing a sandwich board at all times?

No thanks.

This is not about algorithms or supposed shadow bans. I’m fully sold on the potentially infinite rewards of the internet, not just because I have made my full time living from it for the past six years but because I got my first email address in 1997, started blogging in 2004, joined Twitter and YouTube in 2007 and have never stopped seeing The Internet as an exciting new frontier. A Superhighway, if you will.

And so I do blame myself when nothing much happens after a full year of posting 1-2 videos per week on YouTube. I must have done it wrong.

I can see the huge potential of TikTok for music discovery, but can’t figure out what captions to put at the start of my clips, so I post them anyway and nothing happens. I must have done that wrong too.

How can I get it right? How can I get this fucking ball to bounce?

At lunch with some experienced music industry folk in Naples, the topic turns to TikTok. I am asked whether I feel pressure to make videos for TikTok, whether I feel like I can’t keep up. I talk about how excited I am to have access to these tools and all the others. I’ve always felt that way. That doesn’t mean I have the time to do all the things I want, but I believe in what I make and I believe there are ways to get those things to people in a way that works for both parties. I don’t known what they are, but I know I want to keep trying.

I just don’t know what to do next. Since “House Of Stories” came out I have become the beanbag stuck in the sandpit.

---

10th June
Penfriend Ink, Nottingham, UK

Back home, I make lists of the same old things and find myself unable to do anything about ticking those boxes. I create a new ideal weekly schedule: time out aside each day for sharing my existing work and making new things.

I ignore that too.

Life happens. My Gran dies in her sleep aged 95, six days after my last visit.

I become obsessed with tasks that have a clear visual start and end. I clear up my overgrown garden. I attach the willow screening I bought an entire year ago to the broken fence. I disassemble piles of things in every room, order nine Kallax units of various configurations to finally give me the storage I need across two workspaces and the spare (merch) room. I finally find a space for my teen cassette collection.

Is this burnout, bereavement or both?

Finally, I feel ready to think about music again. Renewing my workspace has brought new energy. It finally feels like the right time to delve into the nerdy world of synthesis, to make the very most of the strange, beautiful instruments I started collecting during the pandemic. I’m ready to experiment again. I’m ready to start looking ahead.

Maybe I’ve just been trying to play the wrong ball game. Maybe, instead of bouncing a tennis ball away from me, hoping it will gather momentum, I just need to keep the ball in the air.

Andy J Pizza’s excellent podcast “Creative Pep Talk” has been a constant guide and friendly companion since I discovered it in 2019, and in a recent episode Andy addressed exactly this issue:

“It’s easy to play the game of being creative like it’s something to win, but in my experience that will only get you so far. Creativity is less like a game to win, and much more like a game of “Keepy Uppy”.

This game can be played alone or with friends, and the point is to keep a balloon from touching the ground, by gently hitting it up into the air.

Unlike most games, the point of Keepy Uppy isn’t to win, the point of the game is to keep playing. The point is to play in such a way, that you keep the game going for as long as possible.”

Thank you, Andy. So wise, always.

This week’s attempt to keep the ball in the air looks like this:

What ball/s are you trying to keep in the air? See you in the comments.

Love,
Laura xxx

---