When You Return to Songwriting After Years of Having Put it Down

From a young age, I really took to music. It’s partly my dad’s fault, really. He loved his music—Pink Floyd, Genesis, Fleetwood Mac, Paul Simon. These were the names that stuck with me, and I grew up loving them, too.

I would often sit in front of my dad’s hi-fi just listening. David Gilmour from Pink Floyd’s guitar was especially inspiring, as well as Richard Wright’s extensive synth work. I was actually fascinated by both of these instruments. My dad was always after high-fidelity, clear sound. He had an extensive vinyl collection (still does) and tons of cassettes. I remember he would tape his vinyl onto special, expensive cassettes, which promised to be of high-quality. He wanted the best sound quality he could get, even in his car.

The quest for the ultimate sonic landscape somehow gripped me, and I was very much interested in the whole experience. For me, songs were not just things to sing along with, but world’s you could get lost in. I think from an early age I saw songs and albums as pieces of art, not as bubblegum pop. Music wasn’t just about dancing or having a good time (although my dad was a DJ when he was younger) but it was a complete sonic journey.

Later on, I realized how music brings comfort and hope, which is what I want to achieve with my art.

I began writing music from about twelve years old, about a year after I became a Christian. These two events are actually linked in my mind, as I think there was some spiritual calling in it. I started in what I think is a rather unusual space, which was using tracker software on a DOS computer.

Only geeks from that time would remember trackers, and I will one day write a whole article about them, because they were instrumental in making music on computers and don’t actually get the credit they deserve. (Did you catch my pun?) Trackers were first invented for the Commodore Amiga and then various versions were ported to PC. I started on “Noisetracker”, a port of the original Amiga Soundtracker. A Tracker was (and is) a different approach to making music. It has a unique ‘top-down’ interface where you punch in notes like a spreadsheet, or like a paper roll used by a self-playing piano. It was entirely sample-based, and you originally only had four tracks to make music on. You had to learn to have channels share ‘instruments’ (samples). Here’s the kind of thing you could make in those early days:

This made me get into techno / EDM, which was the kind of thing you can make on it. (I was a big 2Unlimited fan when they came out, which my friends obviously ripped me off about later.) As computers got more sophisticated, trackers like FastTracker 2 and ScreamTracker 3 would allow for more tracks and bigger samples. I was eventually sampling off the radio and sampling my own singing and rapping, which I would record onto a mix tape and pass around to my friends. I did not get any fans. I sent my demo tapes off to record companies. I did not break through and wasn’t a wunderkid, much to my disappointment.

But I was learning how to make music.

At about 17 I wanted to start playing rock music and my parents bought me my first guitar for Christmas. I was so excited! And now I began to do songwriting in a whole different way. Trackers were a bit limiting for what I needed now, but I couldn’t afford a proper digital audio workstation (DAW) like Cakewalk—all very expensive in those days, and you needed special soundcards etc. It was about this time, however, I met my good friends Kirsten Pearse (who played the drums) and John Stone (who played the bass). We formed a band that didn’t last long, with my short supply of three songs that were not very good. Soon, both John and Kirsten went to play for other bands, but I continued to write music.

Eventually I played in a band called Jonno’s Cure with Kirsten and my (now) brother-in-law. We got a top twenty hit in South Africa and that was fantastic! We only did one or two of my songs, but I was learning. But, as bands go, it did not last. I joined my other friend, John Stone’s band, along with another friend of mine, Jason Townsend on drums. We called ourselves Gutterflower, inspired by a Goo-Goo dolls album, and played together for a few years and did a lot of gigs. John and I shared songwriting responsibilities. But this, too, did not last forever.

Bands are strange things. I love them, but they can be hard to manage. It requires a great deal of investment. Now in my mid to late twenties, it was difficult following the dream of ‘one day’ becoming a rock star. I had followed it for years and only enjoyed mild success. I eventually came to the conclusion that I was never going to get married and have a life if I was always married to a band, so I reluctantly quit. I took up writing books instead, and also moved into church ministry, and settled for playing music in church.

This sounds like a mature decision but, in fact, there was something else going on. I actually gave up believing I was any good. And I gave up believing I was going to go anywhere with rock music in South Africa, where that kind of music is not what most of the culture likes (and now, being the mid to late 2000s, rock music was losing in popularity anyway). People did not take to my songs like they did to many of my other friends’ songs, including my brother-in-law, who writes fantastic songs and was writing wonderful worship songs. We had plenty of friends in bands that were enjoying tremendous (relative) success, and I felt I was just not good enough and did not possess the talent I really wanted to have. I was not in demand, and so I quit.

I was also convinced of something else, as a Christian. I was convinced that the best way to use my talents was to write church music. This coincides with something that happened with Christian music in the 2000s, which I wrote about in my article “The Day the Christian Music Died”. We all became convinced that “worship music” was the best way to make music as Christians—the best way to “honor the Lord” and the local church. So I tried for years and years and years to write worship music for church. But I just could never do it properly. The “rules” were just too frustrating. The song must be congregational; it must be theologically clear; it must be easy to sing and relatively easy to play. And it usually has to conform to what has become the established “worship music” sound, made popular by the likes of Hillsong—a sort-of poppish, rockish Coldplay sound done a thousand times over. And also, on top of all this, it must be authentic and from the heart. I could not put all this together because my authenticity looks different.

It’s a mistake to tell Christians that their art has to look one way, or that certain forms of art are more worshipful than another. Worship music has its place, but I think there are many, many Christians who want to make an impact in the world with their art, and their art is not valued as it should be. Part of what I’m trying to do with my Just One Beautiful Thing Substack—and a book I’m writing—is challenge the assumptions Christians have about art and what is of value.

I didn’t fit into the worship mold, and it took me too long to just accept that. I wish someone out there would have just encouraged me to be more myself, but church culture can be very strong on this. I eventually got stuck in a rut. I did not improve as a guitarist, although leading worship at church in various contexts meant I did improve as a singer and leader. But I stopped finding it fun, to be honest, and saw it all as a bit of a job. I lost my passion for it and my interest in music itself began to wane. I could see it happening, it made me very sad, but I was just so jaded that I couldn’t get out of it, and no one really seemed to notice. I interpreted this as my skill and talents and passions were just not up to scratch and not valued, and so I fell further into my funk.

I don’t really know or why what happened next happened, but around 2021 during the end of Covid, I got myself an audio interface for my birthday and was on the hunt for a DAW to record music with. I was just in the mood to experiment. I wondered if I could get the old tracker software I used to use, wondering if I could maybe make something more of it now that computers were so powerful. I found out, to my tremendous delight, that trackers were still around and had evolved, and I discovered Renoise—a modern Tracker / DAW!

I downloaded it and it was like coming home! In an instant I knew the workflow, after spending so many years as a teen in this kind of software.

And I immediately began writing again. Not worship songs; not mid-2000s rock songs that I tried to write back in the day; but just a mix of everything that I’ve ever done. I just started laying something down, experimenting with effects and production and plugins and whatever lyrics that ‘came out’, and I found it tremendously stimulating and interesting. My love for music had returned. I now didn’t care if anyone liked it; didn’t care if it was “worship music”; and didn’t care if it was radio-friendly, would get the respect of my peers, or even if it was any good. I just wanted to put ideas down.

I came back to songwriting. I came back to making music again.

The first song I actually made in this comeback phase has been sitting in my vault for a few years. I use the word ‘made’ there because this song was developed layer upon layer. It started with a Genesis-inspired Linn drum machine idea put through some gated reverb and some other effects. Then I just recorded the first guitar notes that my hands produced as soon as I picked up the guitar. I didn’t care, I was just going to make something. I started experimenting with other drum sounds, guitar effects, and light synth work. The words for the song and the melody I’ve ended up sticking with are the first that just sort-of ‘came out’. They do carry a meaning that I was feeling at the time. I just recorded them and that’s what I stuck to using. Each step was just whatever I was hearing in my mind, and the end result is a culmination, I think, of my musical process since I was a teen—a sort-of Genesis, Pink Floyd, New Wavish inspired song, made and produced using tracker software, this time with proper synths and guitar. It feels like a ‘full circle’ to me, and so a great song to release and launch on.

Since then, I have been writing, with over 200 ideas sitting around (which keeps growing), and twelve of these I’m trying to get recorded for an album, thanks to the help from my friends Kirsten and John—my original band mates. These will be released later. But I wanted to release this first song that I made that brought me back: originally called “Get Away” but now called “Stairs of Knives”, as I thought that lyric was the most interesting one. The song does not have a chorus but just a short series of verses. Here are the lyrics:

I don’t know where I’d go
Without you
I don’t know where I’d be
Without you

I’d climb stairs of knives
I’d run through the night
Get away from me

I hope you enjoy the song! And if you’re a songwriter or an artist who has given up on your art, I hope my story will inspire you to get back to it. Just enjoy the process. Who cares what anyone else thinks? Share it anyway. Because art is made to be shared. Because art is human, and these are our human stories.

If you like it, get it on Bandcamp (below)! I’ll be soon getting my songs onto streaming services too, I’m just waiting on having a few more finished.