The words ‘I’ and ‘me’ appear 21 times in this song. There are only 104 words in total, and 11 of those are ‘oh’. I am currently writing about myself singing a song written by me, which constantly references myself. I guess it’s not so unusual, people continually focus on themselves when talking about most things, and I probably wouldn’t have noticed it if it weren’t for those lines in the 2nd verse:

‘Oh, I tried to see what I could learn easily,
And what else there could be, apart from me.’

Well, I didn’t try hard enough. The song presents itself as incredibly self-obsessed, although I know that the lyrics had no meaning in terms of my real life, beyond the fact that I am a top-class worrier. Mainly, I was clearly just struggling with the ‘ee’ rhymes. The temptation when you can’t think of a theme is to think in and of the 1st person. If that doesn’t work, you talk about having nothing to say (look to the bottom of this post for a song that does this, very effectively). Sometimes trying to come up with anything is like looking into a hall of mirrors. You see your own blank face reflected endlessly around you in various states of distortion. I was definitely trapped there when writing this song.

On the subject of self-reflection, listening to this song I had a sudden vision of myself leaving school in summer, walking to the first road crossing where the lollypop lady would be waiting, as she had done every day for thousands of years, taking out my headphones, a specific kind of on-ear job that wrapped around the back of your head, rather than the top, thereby making you look like a loser (‘yeah, but, I’m not a loser, so I don’t care’ I suppose I would tell myself) and selecting one of my own songs to listen to. This song, probably. I know that I liked listening to this one a lot. I also know, because I still do, that I liked listening to my own music in general a lot. Depending on my mood, this activity would provoke different emotions. On this particular occasion, with the sun beating down on my stuffy black uniform, and my rucksack forming strap-shaped sweat patches on my shoulders that were uncomfortable but also kind of comforting, you know? I would probably have been feeling overwhelmingly positive. School is over, it’s sunny, I can produce songs all on my own, I’ve got a new guitar (did you hear that the guitar suddenly sounds nicer in this recording?), I’m good at music. At other times, I would look out the rain-streaked window of the bus, dark outside, and think about the homework I had to do when I got home, and hear every single mistake immortalised in the song, not least the fact that I cannot hit those top notes in the chorus at all, and I would denounce all my work so far in one fell swoop. It’s all shit.

Most of the time though, the feeling would be somewhat colder – a sort of steely determination that one day, I’ll be better, and people will know. They’ll know who I am because I will be too good to not know. Standard egotistical fantasy fare really, except that I would obsess over these old songs to an unreasonable degree. I knew it was unreasonable, because if anyone glanced at my iPod, I would subtly but rapidly tilt the screen away from them so they wouldn’t know I had been listening to myself, even if the stranger on the bus couldn’t be realistically expected to link the name with my face. I would feel ashamed that I kept putting on my own music, but it was a strong compulsion. I know every mistake in every song I’ve made by heart. I know it’s coming when I’m 30 seconds away from it, and I clench my teeth in anticipation. And I know every bit that makes me glow secretly with pride. And I listen to those bits more.

I still do all of this. But now my listening is more useful. A mistake I hear in an old recording will not reappear in a new song. Ok, fine, maybe it will. But I’ll go back and fix the mistake when I hear it. Sometimes.