To Speak it into Something

I wrote this song after listening to some incredible human conversations. The stories were haunting and beautiful, wonderful examples of the wide variety of human experience. On this particular evening the storytellers were immediately vulnerable, open and grounded. I put this down to two things. Firstly these people were prepared and ready to tell their stories, so there had to be a level of expectation and the feelings were probably already close to the surface. The second thing was the person asking the questions and that was absolutely more profound.

At uni I studied Psychology. I was pretty sure I wasn’t ever going to become a therapist, or work in psychological research, but I was absolutely fascinated with the human condition. I was convinced that studying music would pull the floor from beneath me, give me rules that I had to adhere and therefore ruin the magic of writing for me. Also apparently getting a degree was non-negotiable (note; i did not have pushy parents- I was just malleable and receptive to the narrative of the time). The content of the psychology degree itself was in some ways neither here nor there, not much of it has been retained. In fact, the most memorable and life-changing part of my degree was not part of my degree at all. It was a choir. More on that another time.

Anyway, my chosen course was reflected in the interest I had in the way we think, feel and act as human beings. Much, if not all of my songwriting had been about trying to understand exactly that. I remember a lecturer mentioning a type of psychotherapy called AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy). It wasn’t part of our course but I remember her saying that part of the aim was to read into the way somebody said something, rather than what they said. I have seen it crop up so many times over the years. In my recent project creating theatre this phenomenon is vital, there has to be as much weight in the way something is said, in order to give more information to the audience. Ironically, in the real world where we collectively try hard to deliver our words in a rehearsed and polite way, the true feeling can often get lost.

This is what I love about therapy. The tuning in to another human. The internal dialogue is slowly being turned inside out. A good therapist will know what to say and when to say the thing that will turn you inside out. Sometimes in a matter of fact accidental kind of way and sometimes in a life-altering mind-shattering kind of way. This intuitive knowing is exactly what I witnessed the night I heard these stories. The person doing the interviews, we’ll call her Polly, (because that is her name) was able to find exactly the right words at exactly the right time to pull a huge amount of emotion and narrative out of these storytellers. The questions were brief, direct and delivered in an incredibly gentle way, but the impact was monumental, emotional and profound. What a gift Polly has, she truly can make the invisible, visible.

I spent a lot of time with this idea of Speaking ‘it’ into something. It has always absolutely flawed me that the neurological energy of a thought can be turned into matter. At least into vibration as it is spoken, or sung. I am currently working on this song with my choir for a very exciting performance, more on that later, too. Lyric and poetry to me are the ways in which we process the internal and make it external. It doesn’t always have to be for the purpose of change, like therapy often is- but even unintentionally this process raises an awareness of what is going inside. Sometimes for the maker of the thing, and sometimes only for the audience. I will forever find this fascinating, making the unseen seen.

B x