A Design For Life

August 4th 2026

Here’s the email I just sent to my record company friend. Paraphrased slightly.

< I didn’t have any sales figures for you because they weren’t worth noting at the time. They weren’t terrible, but they were not an improvement on your figures and often they were down. It’s depressing to pay to close attention to this stuff.

Which brings me to depressing…

Sometimes, all of this stuff, is just too much for me, and I feel like retreating.

I don’t think we should make a contract for an album next year until I’ve got proper recording done. I will start this week. Once I have enough, IF I GET TO THAT POINT, to know it’s an album, then I’ll send you rough mixes and you can decide if you want to make me an offer. If I fail to do this before Nov/Dec then the tour next year will be the beginning of some kind of farewell procession.

I’ve also been thinking that I hold myself to standards which are unrealistically high, and if I can relax these, and just accept that the albums I make, moving forward, are just ‘the stuff I recorded over 3 months’ in 2006 (eg), then maybe that would be more healthy. That’s what Bowie did. I makes no sense for me to be spending entire years making records which don’t support me, financially. But I’m not sure I’m there yet. >

As you all probably know - the only thing I do, these days, which feels rewarding, commensurate to the work required, is live performing. I still enjoy it, but the logistics are exhausting, and travel is increasingly unpleasant and expensive. I do wish that this page, my royalties, and my recording, were enough to support us, but they aren’t. Maybe that will change. My overheads are gradually falling slightly, as it’s mostly just the two of us, now.

So, if I’m to embark on a significant tour, there still needs to be a new release, or at least a significant re-release.

I committed to releasing an album next summer, before, what will almost certainly be, the final run of band shows. Never say never, of course. And nobody wants to become the laughing stock The Who made of themselves in this respect…

Anyhow - I have plenty of ideas, but I’ve become increasingly slow, both when it comes to taking those ideas, and making them into songs, and recording them. This needs to change.

In the late 70’s, Bowie would come to the studio with a handful of rough ideas and somehow or other, a few months later, there would be an album. I need to force myself to work like this. Maybe it’s a little more difficult for me, as I’m basically alone, without the pressure (probably useful) of assembled musicians waiting to work. I need to overcome this. And I need to accept that not all albums can be Low, or The Idiot. Some will be Lodger.

I’ve been reading quite a bit of Pessoa, recently. He’s brilliant. Some of the poems are knock you dead fantastic. Some completely fail, for me, anyway. I need to accept that failure is part of the deal.

I want to be fearless, musically, like Scott Walker seemed to be. Did he have nightmares? I want to dare to be really minimalist, like Sylvan Esso. Do they worry?

That’s where I’m at. It’s not quite Beckett’s I can’t go on. I will go on. But it feels quite close, some evenings.

I took an abstract modular idea from a year ago, this afternoon, and turned it into something that might become a song.

I’ve started work. I have August, September and November.