Mary Rose Cook

What about this? The music starts and, after a little while, you hear static and then the click of the radio being switched off. Someone begins speaking to someone else in the room and, thus, a play begins, only to be interrupted by one of the characters opening a window and the music resuming from a car parked outside. Or this? Past loves are characters who have left Neighbours: “I just bumped into Karl Kennedy and he said that Sophie had rung from Brisbane and she’s going out with a drug dealer” etc.

I play guitar all the time, but some weeks, even some months, I just can’t write music. But then, out of nowhere, my fingers are in some configuration, and I pick some pattern and it sounds good. I record it into Ableton Live and start messing around. Maybe I try to sing sad (always sad) melodies over what I have recorded, or maybe I tinker with my keyboard or doss around making crazy effects to add to the guitar. And things get easier after that because one riff suggests another.

So, after that, I usually end up with a few consecutive sections of song. This is the first draft. I might then send an mp3 to my Dad to get his opinion, or just start adding sections or layers that sound good. I might keep the original vocal melodies or rip them out and try again. I might start doing some drums, one of the few musical things I can do when I’m not feeling inspired.

Once the song is finished, I write out the nonsensical ramblings that I sang when working out the vocal melodies, take my meter and syllable counts from there and then write some real lyrics.

By this point, the original idea is usually lost. If I’ve kept it in the song, it is by sheer chance because the music is so hard to find that the idea must be discarded at the first sign of its incompatibility with the song. So, the lyrical idea doesn’t so much drape over as balance on top of the music.

Or, to put it another way, the wine never shapes the glass.

On Sunday morning, I took the tube from Brixton to Leicester Square, walked down Charing Cross Road and sat on the steps of Trafalgar Square. As I smoked a cigarette, someone went past with a cup of coffee and so I got up, walked to Pret and got myself a cup and then resumed my position.

I sat in perfect contentment, the misleadingly named Destroyer playing on my iPhone, the sun in my eyes and the coffee warm between my hands. I thought about how happy I was.

Twelve-thirty came and I walked up the steps of the National Gallery to meet my Dad. We looked at some Van Dyke paintings and then headed off to see some Rembrants.

My phone rang. It was work and something was broken and I had to go in.

Jesus fucking Christ I have a fucking Google PageRank of 5! The site has only been up a few weeks. How is this possible? I don’t think anyone links to me.

Update: Ah, panic over: it’s actually 3.

The website will be down for about two hours while I switch over to Capistrano deployment. In the meantime, all five of you who read this, go and check out the Macworld keynote announcements.

Two hours later, almost to the minute, I have read the Mac Rumours live update, fought off the urge to order a MacBook Air this second, listened to a Dragbody album and a Jeremy Warmsley album and switched the maryrosecook.com deployment system from a change-the-files-in-the-app-directory-by-hand approach to a fully awesome and automatic Capistrano-powered kind of thing. If you want to capify your site and you host with TextDrive, there is a good tutorial here.

I used to hope that love was like that moment in The Snowman where you’re staring at the ground and then someone grabs you by the hand and says Look over here and pulls you up into the air.

Last night, I leaned on the window-sill in my room and smoked a final cigarette before bed. I looked out onto my quiet street and saw a woman walking in circles in the middle of the road. She wore a sleek black coat and a black pencil skirt and black, witchy boots.

She looked at each car that came along the street, and then we would both watch as it drove around her or forced her to step back onto the pavement.

It was freezing outside, so I stubbed out my cigarette and closed the window. I watched the woman walk away down the road, and then I had a sip of water, switched off the light, got under the covers and lay in the dark.

In Held, a track by Fakes, Billie says “This is not a piece of art. This is my life.” What’s the difference?

When John Congleton of The Paper Chase put his ex-girlfriend’s break-up answerphone message on Young Bodies Heal Quickly, You Know, was his relationship with the girl already burnt out, or was he stamping on its embers?

Sunset Rubdown’s song, The Taming Of The Hands That Came Back To Life: “She said my sails are flapping in the wind. I said, Can I use that in a song? She said, I mean the end begins. I said, I know, can I use that too?” Was her reply altered by his artistic request?

What would happen if one subjugated everything to art? What if I revealed some secret things in order to write a great article, and in the process I sacrificed relationships with people I know? Or, what if I spent all my time making the best album in the world, only to emerge and find that the things I had written about were gone?

It is quite fiddly to take photos of oneself and arm-around-shoulder buddies with the iPhone. However, some slight assistance is afforded by the clever mirrored Apple logo on the back.