I might be addicted to checking my email. I’ll check it at any time, any place. Middle of the night. Out to dinner with friends. I check it over and over again, knowing there’s nothing there. Is it this feeling of nothing I’m looking for? [email protected]. Go on, email me, I dare you. While the messages and the likes are piling up over at Meta, I’m checking my email account for phishing scams and ads for my latest searches and thought crimes. I just bought flights to Melbourne, so no, I don’t need to buy more flights to Melbourne right now. I delete them like I’m playing an arcade game; Tetris or Space Invaders. I line ‘em up and shoot ‘em down, defending my inbox empire at all costs. New message from Bandcamp – “You just made $1.67”. Fantastic. Am I simply the compounding detritus of my spam folder? The story of my life in html. I need to buy more space. Surely, I can delete old messages from 2008? No, I can’t bring myself to do it. This is the fabric of me, this poorly designed, corporate layout filled with invoices, updates from Australia Post and free advertisements for life Insurance.

If I’m addicted to checking my email, how do I bring myself to write a song? Writing songs has been my job, my income and identity for 20 years, but alas, there are no songs in my inbox. There are also no songs on Instagram. Or any social media for that fact. There are no songs online. It’s a wasteland. You might think there are songs on your music streaming service, but they’re just the shadows of songs. I’ve been looking for years and I’ve never found one there. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places, scanning articles, a great one in Vanity Fair about Cormac Mcarthy’s secret lover. I thought for a moment, is there a song here? But as soon as you think there’s a song, there isn’t one. Mirages. That’s all I see. Mirages and fairies. I move towards them and they dissolve into the blue light. A song you have to earn, or be gifted, and there is no hard work or generosity inside the matrix.

“Music is the by-product of the song, it is the sound you hear, the echo. There is no shortage of music – we actually have way too much of it. The song is the point of conception. The inspired moment.”

I feel lucky to have known a time before all this. I finished school in the year Y2K and got myself my first email address. I was late to the game and had very little interest in going online. It took years for it to sink its claws in and become the facehugger it is today. I used to send emails like I was writing a letter. Long chains of correspondence with friends while traveling. Sometimes even a postcard or two. What a magical time sitting on the computer in the hotel lobby letting everyone know that the Guggenheim is as cool as it looks and when you order a whisky in New York they free-pour your glass to the brim. I started writing songs in this time. A time when I could walk around freely without a tracking device wedged in my claw and my car wouldn’t tell me to not forget said device when getting out of it. Don’t forget your toothbrush. That was all I had to remember. I sound old and feeble, but I am not so old and my health is, you know, fine. I am a forty-year-old man but I am also 25. Still living hand-to-mouth, looking for songs. So where have they gone?

I need to be more specific when I talk about songs. I’m not talking about music. Music is the by-product of the song, it is the sound you hear, the echo. There is no shortage of music – we actually have way too much of it. The song is the point of conception. The inspired moment. This happens before the music comes into play because it is the reason for making the music. It is the call to action. Director, what’s this character’s motivation? Music without a backstory is always stillborn and lifeless, and everything online has already been done and is the rotting digital flesh of inspiration. It is a junk yard. Not even. A junk yard is inspiring, you can take bits of rubbish and put them together again in new and exciting ways. A screen grab is a dead cockroach in the corner of the kitchen. Please, don’t go making art out of dead roaches.

With all this noise, this infestation of psychic insects crawling out of the LCD screen, how are you going to pull yourself together to make anything worthwhile? You can turn it off. But you can never really turn it off. You have to learn to partition your mind. You can make more room in there, meditate, delete old files, but the mind is not a computer. Particularly the mind in search of the song. It’s irrational and dreamy and aimless; a dog off the leash, sniffing at every tree and lamp post. That’s a good way to find a song. Sniff around. Go walking into some unknown part of the city, hell, just go off your usual track and stroll down a street in your local area that you’ve never been down. This could blow your tiny mind. Talk to someone at the bus stop, If they’re not looking at their screen, they might be having similar thoughts to you. Try not to come off predatory and weird, don’t lose your cool. We’re not coming on, just looking for the song.

“You have to learn to partition your mind. You can make more room in there, meditate, delete old files, but the mind is not a computer. Particularly the mind in search of the song. It’s irrational and dreamy and aimless; a dog off the leash, sniffing at every tree and lamp post.”

When you’re looking for the song, you find all sorts of other things too. The song leads to the music and to make the music you need people. (Well, you used to, and you still do if you know what’s good for you!) If you write the right kind of song, you can find the right kind of people too. You can’t pretend to write the song for the audience you want. You just write the truest song and the audience will find you. Writing somebody else’s song is a shameful act and only ever leads to ruin. Once you’ve found your people you’re really in a great zone because the people make it all worthwhile and they ask you into their homes and will occasionally feed you a meal of spaghetti bolognese and let you sleep in their spare room for the night. All of a sudden, the songwriter, existentially alone in the universe, has friends and supporters that show an interest in their life and work. This applies to all art forms and cross pollinates through different media (though it tends to be the songwriter that needs a place to sleep). The main thing is that you have to be looking for the source and going beyond the screen. It’s still out there. Tom Waits says to catch a song you have to learn to think like one. If I were a song, where would I hide? You can see now why I’m saying it’s not online, that’s like a cigarette for the eyes.

The song can build worlds and communities, bringing disparate people together. Look at all the different genres and subcultures created via a shared love of music over the last century. Flappers, Rockers, Rudeboys, Mods, Metalheads, Hippies, Goths, Punks, and Juggalos. While in the 21st Century these communities have been usurped by the worship of one individual in the guise of Swifties or Beliebers, of which I can’t possibly condone. The song as a unifying chant for peace like John and Yoko. The song as a fit of rage, howling at the corrupt institutions that keep us divided. Personally, I struggle with the overtly political song, the unifying socialist anthem. It’s not my song to write or sing but I have been tolling away, following my nose to write my own song. A song to listen to in your darkest hour, a driving alone song, or sing at the wedding or the funeral kind of song. Looking for the comedy in universal truths – not original because a song doesn’t have to be original. Being original is not the most important part of a song. Being true is the most important part for a song to connect and build community and resonate through space and time.