Quiet Wars

Here are the new lyrics I've been working on! Enjoy. Comments and criticisms are greatly appreciated!

About the Song: It's a stalemate of silence between two lovers as their relationship transitions into young adulthood. In short, they're afraid to argue to spoil the peace created when they were teenagers - bottling up their problems until at night when under the influence of alcohol they're struggling to speak at all. It's about finding the courage to break the Quiet War and realising their stupidity: that the most painful way to mature is to be immature about it.

Quiet Wars

We're soul mates in spring getting-off on the green,
Toying with the future bound by promise rings,
We're the summer of love twisted in sixty nines,
Unaware of the world, unaware of the time

Yet when daylight falls to 3:00am, ruled by eighties synth and bubbles,
To silence, we are condemned, suddenly voiceless of our troubles

[Chorus]
Where have all the hours gone, talking with our eyes bright?
Since when have you or I won our quiet wars at midnight?
We used to laugh, we used to cry, we could put the world to right,
I wonder why they've stuck so long, our quiet wars at midnight

We're a fairy tale romance with a bottle of sin,
Star crossed lovers pressed lips against skin,
We're a poem in Paris by an addict on the Seine,
Beautifying lies I've been brought up to believe

Yet when daylight falls to 3:00am, ruled by eighties synth and bubbles,
To silence, we are condemned, suddenly voiceless of our troubles

[Chorus]
Where have all the hours gone, talking with our eyes bright?
Since when have you or I won our quiet wars at midnight?
We used to laugh, we used to cry, we could put the world to right,
I wonder why they've stuck so long, our quiet wars at midnight

[Bridge]
Watch the blossom from the river wash away,
Trodden on, forgotten, waiting for another day,
Orion's in the sky why won't you point him out for me?
At eleven, for a second, distracted by astronomy

[Chorus]
Where have all the hours gone, talking with our eyes bright?
Since when have you or I won our quiet wars at midnight?
We used to laugh, we used to cry, we could put the world to right,
I wonder why they've stuck so long, our quiet wars at midnight

Where have all the hours gone, talking with our eyes bright?
Since when have you or I won our quiet wars at midnight?
Silent stalemates in the night, rather kiss than have a fight,
I wonder why they've stuck so long, our quiet wars at midnight

Standing In Line to See the Show Tonight

Two pints in the left one!

My heels are on fire. They’re pink, sore, and blistered. My eyes are bloodshot and drooping, my hair’s got a life of its own, I’m hungry and tired, I may have caught pneumonia, and my body feels like I’ve just endured Arnie Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Olympia training routine.

BUT, all of that was worth it.

I got home, and wrote that little paragraph on Monday about seeing the Red Hot Chili Peppers live. Despite being completely drenched by torrential rain on the walk in, sitting in soaked jeans and grinning through cold shivers for three hours, our moods were brighter than the spotlights. So what if I kicked a pint of Strongbow all over my bag, or nearly bludgeoned bystanders by dancing; we had an incredible day filled with laughter and excitement.

There were a few surprises in the setlist which deserve an honourable mention:

I Like Dirt – I’m not sure if this track is played live often, but for me it was a shock considering this was a big show, and the majority of the audience seemed to have gathered for the hits (boring people, I otherwise like to call them). We air-jammed and jumped around for the entire song… Much like the Chili’s themselves!

 

If You Have To Ask – Again, another old favourite! Blood Sugar Sex Magik helped introduce me to the band’s funk genius, and it kills me that a lot of the album tracks aren’t played live. The super fans in the crowd went crazy for it.

Soul To Squeeze – It’s hard to find decent live videos of this song online, let alone be lucky enough to actually experience it being played to you. This song holds so many memories for me that I STILL can’t believe the coincidence! It’s “our song”, and us being there together made it even more special.

Overall, the entire experience was magical. Kind of wish somebody had told me how difficult it was to get a Goddamn taxi in Sunderland beforehand but y’know, I was that tired, tipsy and high on adrenaline that I can’t even remember it properly. We got free drinks out of finding one in the end so that’s all that matters!

The Future Is Autumn

Five minutes, I mused, clicking the minute button in rapid succession to microwave my six-day-past-its-use-by-date Tesco Finest lasagne; concluding that if I added an extra three clicks then maybe this microwave would nuke all of the invisible, festering bacteria.

Behind me, equally as concentrated, my boyfriend furrowed his brow while struggling to find the perfect number of custard creams to accompany his fresh pint of steaming coffee. It was cute, I thought, that he’d emptied the biscuits onto a separate saucer instead of just snaffling them out of the packet with reckless abandon; our usual method of portion measure.

There were three of us in the kitchen at lunchtime. Half in, half out of the main cooking area stood my friend (who for privacy purposes I’ll call Ribs), tucking in to a plate of assorted chicken thighs and wings; 9% breadcrumbs, 91% liquefied lard. He looked about as unimpressed with his purchase as a fat kid with a salad, yet was gobbling it up anyway, occasionally pausing to shade my attempts at making my lasagne look slightly more edible.

“That looks… fucking disgusting,” he laughed as I poured the extra runny grease down the sink drain before serving. It was previously swimming around the plastic container and had somehow materialised during cooking. I grimaced, but continued.

“It smells alright,” I replied. “It’s Finest.”

“It smells horrible! I can smell it from over here!” My boyfriend exclaimed. Ribs laughed again.

“Shut up, no it doesn’t.”

I had no time to react before Ribs appeared by my side, furiously sniffing my lunch. It was at this point I was reminded of a leaflet I picked up from my future university campus on Friday (I start in September), titled “Eating Well on a Budget”, and aimed at students who are living in rented accommodation. Apparently, you can have a decent, energising diet by solely surviving on meals of beans on toast, jacket potatoes, and cereal. (The leaflet wasn’t stingy enough to disallow a heavy booze allowance, either.)

With that in mind, I think the three of us have been eating pretty well these past few weekends.

The months, weeks, and days I have left to check off my calendar until autumn are absolutely crawling by. Over the past few months, since late February to be exact, I’ve found myself warping into the exact kind of person I despise. The catalyst for this transformation being my job, but I’m not going to whine grotesquely about it for reasons you’ll have to read about in Self Loathing Modesty, below. This is only the internet, after all.

But, despite this change, I feel wrong in adding a new sentence to the end of that paragraph about how this period of my life has been incomparably shit, because that would be a lie. The reason I call my job a catalyst is because without it, I have no doubt that I’d be sitting here, pattering away on my keyboard happily, with my biggest worry being whether or not there’d be bacon in the fridge for breakfast. I owe so much thanks to my parents, my friends (Ribs and co), and my boyfriend, for ripping big, gaping chasms of light into what would’ve honestly been a scarily dark time in my life. So instead, what I am going to do is not dwell on it in words, but write about the future.

In autumn, I have a lot to look forward to. I’ve been accepted into university studying English Literature with Creative Writing, which I plan to tweak into specialising in “pop fiction” (a word I coined from pop culture and fiction writing). Finally, for the first time in my life, by choosing to stay up until dawn to write while the inspiration is hot, I’ll actually do better in the course – an idea which completely awes me. My boyfriend has been scouted to work as part of a band to support an up-and-coming artist in our area, and as I’m the resident taxi, hanging around during practices has led me to have a conversation with the artist, resulting in interest being shed on my lyrics and me being asked to write for not only the band, but the artist himself.

As I posted on Twitter, is there such a thing as alternative-pop-urban-R&B-funk-reggae? If not, we’re about to create it. Watch this space! (Did that sound corny?)

Musically, autumn will be immense. It’s no secret that my two all-time greatest idols are Lady Gaga and Green Day, but I’ve also been a huge fan of The Killers since the release of Hot Fuss when everybody thought they were indie and English. They’re releasing their new album, and so is Green Day, which is a humungous deal considering Green Day’s last gap between albums was a whopping four years. I’ve got tickets to see Lady Gaga at the Born This Way Ball at Manchester in September, which to say the least, I am FUCKING ECSTATIC about. My jacket I’m designing for the show is being studded, the patches ordered, and the design finalised. We couldn’t get standing tickets but I’ll be the one exception into the Monster Pit if it kills me – I’m either clawing my way there or being allowed a wristband the correct way, it doesn’t matter.

So, what was the point in this blog post? In all honestly, this was more of an exercise for me than anything worth brandishing on the internet. If you’ve made it up until this last paragraph I thank you, and also feel that you should count yourself lucky; there was a poem I got close to posting instead, but the fact that I may have needed to write a contract wavering all responsibility from myself if a reader was 20 feet or less away from either an Adele album or a chainsaw, slightly swayed my decision. My last posts here have been quite robotic, and separated from what I’ve really been feeling lately, so count this as an update, while I’ll count this as a reminder of what I have in store; that when these thick, black clouds finally roll away, I’ll have the most beautiful view in the world of the new island I can call home. 

Self Loathing Modesty

Where did this cultural trend of self-loathing modesty crawl out from? 

And more importantly, why is this never recognised as being vainer than self-confidence? 

What I’ve never understood about society is the constant need to wear our inner most insecurities on our sleeves. Oh, listen to me, I am terrified of commitment, my parents have never showed love for me, I’m addicted to prescription drugs and my lack of confidence is making me want to rip out my insides. Would you like me to go into explicit detail about how I’m emotionally scarred while you chew your lunch? 

Surely if we were that preoccupied with our insecurities, we wouldn’t be so ready to reveal them to other people. My head simply cannot compute why as a society, the fear of appearing arrogant is so much greater than expressing any amount of honest self-confidence. We’ve forced ourselves into an unneeded pit of misery which in fact, we’re digging deeper with every confession. 

My idols and my own experiences have taught me to believe that if you consistently lie positively about yourself, you trick your mind into actually turning it into the truth. Unfortunately, the same goes for constantly adding a hateful disclaimer to everything you do. I have no doubt that these surprisingly confident revelations of private matters are honest, but because they have been tricked into to being so through repetition, not because they were born attached to us. 

If anything, it is vainer to obsess so much about your “modest” appearance that you drive yourself into self-loathing, than it is to be happy about who you are. Isn’t it more arrogant to confess your inner and most personal fears to an acquaintance in order to attract the right kind of humble attention that it is to feel good about who you are, and not care what anybody else thinks of you? There are far too many people who I feel are suspiciously secure about their insecurities for me to believe that they didn’t want to seek anything other than an unpredictably deep conversation. 

I hate this depressing culture. Breathe some life into your personalities and start to speak highly of yourself. Who knows, even if it starts out as a lie it might just turn into the truth.

Moral Values

It’s a beautiful thing, a belief. It fascinates me how we can become entirely consumed by a thing which physically, doesn’t even exist. It’s not concrete, you can’t touch it, and yet it absolutely becomes us.

Take love, for example. It’s completely and undeniably the biggest force in the history of human nature; it transforms our entire psyche, blinds us to our bad decisions, and in other ways, is the inspiration behind some of the most beautiful natural creations in the entire world. Yet despite love’s power it will only ever exist as merely a thought. It’s funny. 

I’ve never been a religious person – well, that’s a lie. When I was a little girl I was taught as a Christian, which even today after coming to terms with religion through my own natural self-discovery I hold no grudges against. (A lot of that is because at the time I was happy, and happiness means far more to me than logic, but that’s a post for another day.) Now I suppose I identify myself as agnostic, being infinitely interested in the cultures of different religious beliefs in the same way as I’m interested in the culture of love and romance. As far as actually following a religion myself I have to say with respect that I don’t completely.

As a writer I find too many flaws in the plot. 

What I don’t find beautiful in a belief however, is the sense of pomposity certain believers seem to it take upon themselves to flash around like a 50 year-old man in an overcoat on a park bench. It’s this self-assurance factor a relationship with anything provides; you feel confident in the fact that you’re no longer alone and instead as though you’re part of a secret little organisation; safer, stimulating, and more comforting than the world outside. Turing certain individuals into arrogant cock-ends, as I otherwise like to put it. 

Two weeks ago at work, our organisation was hosting a session in a new venue. It was a church no less than 30 years-old, in the style I find particularly corny and overwhelming. An expensive stereo system whispered Christian soft rock into the already stuffy room (I mean, if you’re going to play it quietly, then why buy such an impressive stereo?), while we sat in creaky mustard coloured chairs and spoke to the clients. Afterwards, the man in charge of the venue took a colleague of mine to meet in private. She came back fifteen minutes later beaming as though she’d just set eyes upon her first baby, and clutching a modern-looking paperback bible in her hands proudly. 

During the car journey home, she gushed about her conversation with the vicar. Apparently a week previous to this session she mentioned that she was interested in a couple of the quotes printed on the various posters around the room, then got into a deep discussion with him about re-discovering the bible. Kindly, the vicar had taken her to one side after this session had finished and offered her a free bible which he’d marked with the pages he felt were the most relevant to their conversation and which she’d find the most enlightening. Sweet of him, I thought. 

I wondered which pages she wanted to read about as she talked more of her recent dive head-first into Christianity. The way she spoke so affectionately about her new discovery felt as though she was already absolutely committed (even after admitting that she’d never read a page of the bible in her life), so I was curious to find out why she’d experienced this sudden change of heart. She sounded so happy and proud of herself as she made a plan out-loud of which passage she’d start on first, and then turned the conversation to the session leader and I. 

“Are you religious, Cathy?” She asked, warmly. 

“Well, not particularly,” I admitted, treading carefully so not to upset her. “No.” 

“Oh,” my colleague replied, unusually flustered considering that my response was nothing short of polite, as I was genuinely interested in her revelations for the reason I’ve just explained. I like to learn about people’s beliefs, and wasn’t about to be rude about her recent discovery after she’d spoken so lovingly about it, was I? 

“Well you know,” she began, quickly changing her tone to one of almost… disgust. “I just think that these days at least some people should have a sense of good, solid, moral values.” 

Hang on. 

What was that supposed to mean? 

I sat back in my seat, in silence, trying to digest her comment. So, just because I don’t necessarily agree with a belief she’s been holding so close to her heart for a grand total of seven days this apparently means that I don’t have any sense of “good, solid, moral values”?

Call it women’s intuition, but there was something about the way she suddenly turned from a gushing fountain of love into a salty bitch queen which really felt as though it was through disapproval. Disapproval of what, my politeness? My genuine interest? No, she actually had the nerve to assume that because I said I wasn’t particularly religious, it meant that I didn’t give a shit about anyone or anything, basically. 

Maybe I don’t believe in God, but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect others around me. I believe that in my heart I have good, solid, moral values, because I’ve experienced life, grown up (sort of), and care about myself and my loved ones. I actually even care about the people who I don’t know, to an extent I wish sometimes that I didn’t. My own personal, private, morals and beliefs are based on nothing but genuine love and respect for others, NOT because I feel that one day I must be judged by some kind of fictional higher being. 

I ran this thought through my head all the way home, while my colleague continued her conversation with the session leader who happened to be the one driving. She twittered on and on about which page she was to start on, and which stories she’d heard at her children’s school plays about Moses and turning water into wine. “Just don’t mention it,” I concluded, listening to her make mistakes in a recollection of The Good Samaritan, understanding that the moment had passed, and to make a point about it now would be plain obnoxious. “You wouldn’t want to offend her.”

Blondie

Finally, after four months of hard work I've managed to finish my new set of lyrics. So happy to be publishing them at last! I'm planning on updating this with a further explanation of the meaning behind "Blondie", but for now here they are. Views, links, comments and likes are all immensely appreciated, they make everything I write worthwhile.

These lyrics are about the intense exposure and brutality of an artist in pop-stardom limelight.

Blondie

Famous and dumb, at a promising age, 

Money to blow, on shoes and cocaine, 

Fishnets and wine, too drunk to drive, 

Champagne’s divine, to vomit outside 

Glitter and lights, blind her to death, 

Rayban’s to hide, a picture of health, 

Perfectly poised, high fashion in Vogue, 

Glint in her eye, the cameras don’t show 

It’s not impossible in pop to be sincere, 

She’ll sell you her soul for the price of your ear… 

[Chorus] 

“Worship the art, not the celebrity game, 

Give me your love; I don’t want your name, 

Spit on the critics, smash cameras and cry, 

It’s the beauty of fame, and j’adore the lie!” 

Peroxide blonde, with lipstick kisses, 

Signs autographs, and then dismisses, 

Drive-by smiles, in flash limousines, 

Whisky on ice; The American dream 

Lights her cigarette, with a fifty bill, 

Pens a new hit, after a bottle of pills, 

Upon mixing desks, she bleeds herself, 

For another knot, on the Grammy shelf 

She’ll eat your heart to prove you wrong, 

Yet cursed by the blind who see just number one… 

[Chorus] 

“Worship the art, not the celebrity game, 

Give me your love; I don’t want your name, 

Spit on the critics, smash cameras and cry, 

It’s the beauty of fame, and j’adore the lie!” 

Baby, take a chance on me, I’ll break the mould and set you free, 

Honey, you’re a solider too, we’re monsters born to be renewed, 

Sweetie, don’t be scared of life, take bravery from my sacrifice, 

So forget the money, fuck the charts, lend me your ear, 

And I’ll play you my heart

[Chorus] 

“Worship the art, not the celebrity game, 

Give me your love; I don’t want your name, 

Spit on the critics, smash cameras and cry, 

It’s the beauty of fame, and j’adore the lie!” 

Twix Tea

Okay so, I thought I'd share a Northern phenomenon with you. It's called "Twix Tea", and is a method of drinking good ol' fashioned English tea by using a Twix chocolate bar as a straw. (Now you can't say I've never tried to teach you how to be quaint, British, and cultured, can you?) Ahem, here we go.

(This isn't mine. I have more Twix bars.)

INGREDIENTS
1 cup of English tea (the rest are shit, I'm sorry.)
2 Twix biscuit fingers (AKA, your average shop-bought bar.)

METHOD
Firstly, wait until your tea isn't the temperature of molten lava, unless you're a badass and can drink it straight after the water's been boiled. I can't, because I'm a wimp.

Unwrap your Twix bar.

Take your first chocolate coated biscuit finger, then carefully bite one of the ends off. Don't bite too much off; the more you leave on the bar the longer your straw will last. Do the same to the other end.

Place your Twix straw into your cup, and suck the tea through it.

Revel in the warm, gooey, chocolatey, caramel infused delicousness as with the rush of hot tea, the biscuit finger will begin to slowly melt into your mouth. Proceed to groan with pleasure. Eat the biscuit before it becomes too soggy to hold as it will inevitably drop into the depths of your mug and take half an hour to fish out with a spoon. Do the same with your remaining biscuit finger, until all the Twix bars in the vicinity have been consumed!

Trust me on this, okay? It will be the greatest tea experience of your life.