The best songwriting advice I ever received didn’t come from a music class. It came during a creative non-fiction writing course I took in university. The professor said: “Just because it’s good doesn’t mean it’s right for this story.” It is not a new idea. You may have heard it as, "kill your darlings" or "murder your darlings", and it is from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's book, On the Art of Writing (1916), where he counselled we should not hold onto something we like at the e

Where I’ve been since Build Again: a season of questioning, quiet, and returning to music through slower, more meaningful connections.

Shortly after Christmas 2024, I took a step back from social media, and I haven’t really looked back. As a musician, I have always felt the pressure to stay “visible” online, but the growing disconnect between what these platforms claimed to offer and what they actually delivered became too great for me to ignore. From an ever-increasing flood of promoted posts and suggested content that had little to do with the people I care about, to the public positions and practices of c