I have been working with the wonderful producer, musician and songwriter Keefe West and wow have we written some cracking songs. My first song came out last week and is striking a chord! A small video of a section of the song, was viewed over 5500 times across different accounts.
Amazon Music – One of Those Guys
I started writing a novel when I was eight years old and now I can’t stop writing about what life is like for women.
We read about women’s lives in novels and poems – their inner conflicts between what they want for themselves and the obligations they feel to their families, what it is like to be constantly assessing the risk of the dark – but those experiences don’t seem to have found their way into popular music.
Well now they have.
With Keefe’s help – I’ve stepped into the grey zone, the messy space between desire and responsibility, between the ache for independence and the love of a family, the constant negotiation between women and men at work, after work and in the dark.
Song number one…
I know about violence against women and anyone else perceived as vulnerable. The scale of it though still shocks me. In the last couple of years – the stories of institutionalised systemic violence against women, and anyone perceived as vulnerable in the Church, legal profession, the film and music industries, medicine and now the government appals but still surprises me.
spotify:track:6w1Q79IMvRYQJzTDVoMyva
It’s hard to believe. So I wrote a song about it. Inspired by Billy Eilish’s Bad Guy, I started a song I called, Bad Guys Hunt and then working with Keefe – we scaled it back to something more focussed. I’ve listened to Ronan Farrow’s podcast about Harvey Weinstein, read the testimonies of victims in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses into Child Sexual Abuse, watched the Jeffrey Epstein and Team USA documentaries on Netflix – read Cardinal by Louise Milligan about the Victorian Catholic Church and The Altar Boys by Suzanne Smith and in the end I was just so angry and fed up.
I went to a convent and I loved it. I am so grateful for all the women who taught us to be kind and empathetic. At the same time, so many men, in power in the Church used access to children, to ruin the very communities and individuals they were supposed to honour and serve.
Enough is enough!