I’ll begin with a tangent:

At university I read ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion‘, a poem by Yeats, and it had such a big effect on me that most of my lyrics since then have been influenced in some way by it. There’s a good reason for that – Yeats’ poem is one of the best examples of a piece of writing about not knowing what to write:

‘I sought a theme and sought for it in vain… What can I but enumerate old themes’?

To an aspiring young writer, whose thoughts never seem to quite manage the creation of a world famous poem, it’s comforting to read about other people’s dissatisfaction with their own mind. ‘Oh’, I’d think. ‘Yeats also fails to come up with anything occasionally. We have something in common.’ ‘But, oh’, I’d think again. ‘He seems to have turned his own dead-end thinking into yet another brilliant poem. I never seem to do that. Perhaps I should go to the shop and buy a chocolate, maybe stop in at a friend’s room on the way back to eat the chocolate, with a cup of tea, we could chat about our days so far, yes I think I should probably have a break, I’ll return a fresh person with fresh ideas.’

But the poem is about more than just not knowing what to write, obviously. The way Yeats looked back at his life and saw his whole work as just flashes of memory, images and symbols made me think a lot about the way we live life in general. Our experience is recorded in our minds as memories. And the word ‘memory’ tells us how much we lose to the past. The fact that we have a word for things we remember, and everything else that we lived through is just an indistinct blur. Which is not to say that those moments we can’t remember don’t have an effect on the way we grow or who we are or what we like, but when we are old and have finished our life’s work, whatever that might be, we will look back and see a tiny number of memories against the vast number of moments we lived through and forgot. The sum of our experience will seem to be smaller than it was.

So maybe the best thing to do in life is to create memories as often as possible. Even bad memories can become good with enough time. A terrible day when you lost your phone, got drenched in the rain, broke up with your partner, tripped when walking up some stairs, ordered some food and it arrived cold, told a joke and no-one laughed, and ended up in hospital with appendicitis – that day may with enough time be one of your best stories, may be one of the distinct memory blocks that make up your life.

 

Anyway, back to this eminently forgettable piece of music.

For All My Time was written two years before I got to university, and four years before I read that Yeats poem. But its lyrics are similar to the sort of things I would write much later. Well, some of them are. The song suffers from the inconsistency and lack of editing that we’re all used to by now in these early songs, and so what starts quite promisingly as a wistful song about ‘wasted hours’ and things that ‘disappear with time’ begins to be invaded by murmurings of a boring break-up song:

‘Just turn the other cheek,
You’ll be gone in a week’

and the very strange:

‘Hey, I think it’s very rude
For you to ask for more than shelter and food’

For All My Time is also ridiculously long for a country-ish blues-ish song of a reasonable tempo. If it was simply halved, it might have been one of my best songs from its year of composition (2008). It might also have needed some better vocal takes, although even mentioning my terrible singing seems pointless this far in.

 

At 3.57, I attempt a linear drumming fill, with poor to moderate success. Linear drumming is when you don’t hit any drums at the same time. This is, I’m certain, the only moment of linear drumming in my entire output. So soak it in. I’d had a few drum lessons on it in the weeks leading up the recording. Clearly not as many as I needed.