This song wasn't called Between the Dream and Me when I wrote it.
It was called Mediocrity.
Which probably tells you something about my mood at the time.
I'd recently finished I Still Choose You, a song I'd been avoiding for years because I wasn't entirely sure what would happen if I actually wrote it.
Writing it turned out to be enormously freeing.
It was as though something that had been blocking the staircase had finally moved, and suddenly I could look around the basement again.
There were ideas everywhere.
And almost immediately another familiar voice turned up.
What's the point?
You're not really that good.
You're certainly not a great guitarist. Your voice has its limitations. There are vastly better songwriters.
You're really, when all is said and done, fairly mediocre.
So I wrote about that.
I know you
Unlike I Still Choose You, I don't remember struggling with this song.
Quite the opposite.
It pretty much poured itself onto the page in one sitting.
And that was strange, because I hadn't been walking around thinking:
One day I really must write a song about my lifelong sense of artistic inadequacy.
I didn't even know the song was there.
Until I wrote it.
Then I looked at it and thought:
Oh. I know you.
This wasn't a new idea.
It was something I'd apparently been carrying around for most of my life.
The first person I sent the song to was Mom.
Mom has always been my first reference point with these things. She has also spent most of my life displaying a touching and completely irrational confidence in my musical abilities.
Her response was immediate:
“You're not mediocre.”
Yeah, right.
Thanks, Mom.
The problem with mediocrity
The trouble is, Mom and I can have that argument forever.
Because mediocre requires a reference.
Compared with somebody who doesn't play guitar at all, I'm probably doing reasonably well.
Compared with a really good guitarist?
Less impressive.
Compared with Eric Clapton?
Excellent. Mediocrity successfully restored.
I've subsequently realised that I'm remarkably good at moving the reference point whenever the evidence becomes inconvenient.
And that makes mediocrity a fairly useless measurement.
The more I excavated the old songs, photographs, notebooks, recordings and assorted debris of forty years of making music, the less interested I became in proving whether I was any good at it.
A different phrase from the song started making more sense.
Between the dream and me.
Eventually it became the title.
I kept Mediocrity too, because that's where the song started.
The dream
The nice thing about a dream is that it doesn't have a measuring stick.
I'm not even entirely sure what mine is.
To play brilliantly?
Write one genuinely great song?
Have thousands of people listen?
Absolutely.
I'm not going to pretend I'd be devastated by any of those things.
But perhaps it's also something much smaller.
To take something I can feel very clearly inside myself and somehow get it into a song without losing too much along the way.
And then, perhaps, have somebody hear it.
Sometimes I get closer.
This Empty Street got pretty close.
The original Paula fell considerably shorter.
Ironically, Mediocrity got closer.
Firelight Family came very close indeed.
But the dream never quite disappears into the song.
There's always some distance left.
And apparently that's enough to make me think:
Maybe the next one.
Then there's the Fool
Of course, just when I'd developed this wonderfully serious philosophy about songwriting, Fool's Wearing the Crown came along.
It's a frivolous little half-rock number that wasn't particularly interested in emotional excavation, philosophy or dreams.
I wrote it because it was fun.
Naturally, that's the one my family wants to hear.
There may be a lesson in that.
I have chosen not to investigate it too closely.
The Fool has since become something of an alter ego.
He doesn't particularly care whether he's good enough.
He doesn't need a song to justify its existence.
He doesn't care about the dream.
He just turns up, plugs in and plays.
I rather less reluctantly than I let on quite like him.
Look what I found
Somewhere in all this excavation, I've started thinking about a four-year-old who finds a slimy bug in the garden.
He runs inside, covered in mud, holding it out:
“Look, Mom! Look what I found!”
He doesn't stop at the door and wonder whether it's an objectively impressive bug.
He doesn't compare it with somebody else's bug.
He doesn't wonder whether his mother is sufficiently qualified to judge bugs.
He found something.
He thinks it's wonderful.
And he wants to show somebody.
I think there was once much more of that in the way I made things.
Then I learnt enough to become considerably better at explaining why the things I made weren't good enough.
AI hasn't suddenly made me a better songwriter.
It has given the tinkerer in me a fascinating new set of tools.
I discovered I could use it to produce songs that had lived for decades as a voice and a guitar.
Then I discovered I could use it to code.
If I could code, perhaps I could build a website.
So I did.
One thing led to another.
I started opening boxes.
Then folders.
Then suitcases.
I found songs I'd forgotten.
I remembered people.
I remembered why some of the songs existed.
And, rather unexpectedly, I started writing new ones.
There is plenty of psychology I could attach to all of that.
I've done quite a lot of it.
Trust me.
But perhaps the explanation is simpler.
I like making things.
I like figuring out how things work.
I like writing songs.
And, yes, I like it when somebody listens.
The dream is still out there somewhere.
I don't know that I'll ever reach it.
I'm not even sure what reaching it would mean.
But every now and then I make something, hold it up and think:
Look what I found.
And these days, that's enough reason to show you.