I had the great privilege of participating in a small group workshop about song writing, hosted by Simon Austin and Angie Hart prior to Frente’s Adelaide gig of their Marvin the Album 21st anniversary tour on Friday night. I’ve delayed writing this a few days, partly to eliminate the gush factor but largely to reflect of what I feel are the most important elements to me, expressed in my own words. (Additional points keep occurring to me while I’m out and about so there may be a follow-up.)

• Don’t get hung up on the term ‘musician’. What matters is that you make music and be proud to develop in your own unique style. And making music is different from working on music (the mechanical, repetitive thing that classical orchestral professionals do to achieve a technically perfect product, for example, is not your typical music making experience and should not be taken as a benchmark).
• Let...

I’m having an experience of a lifetime tomorrow. And it seems such an implausible prospect that it hasn’t quite sunk in that it’s actually going to happen. Even this blog post feels like I’m back in grade 5 English writing an essay about ‘What I’ll Do On The Weekend’. I’ve had the honour of being invited to participate in a hands-on workshop in songwriting and performance presented by Simon Austin and Angie Hart before seeing Frente perform their Adelaide gig of the Marvin the Album 21st anniversary tour.

A while ago, I posted a cover of Accidentally Kelly Street on Soundcloud as part of my Twitter music challenge group thing. I’d posted five songs in my new venture of what I guess you could call song blogging (sblogging?) and was growing a bit more comfortable with the idea of putting my very amateur singing and ukulele skills out there on the internet. It had all been Guns & Roses...

It struck me that my blogjune posts so far sound a little skewed towards the negative:

1. I don’t know what to write
2. Confessions of a reluctant blogger
3. High anxiety that I thought it’s time to to something about it. I received some lovely feedback from yesterday’s post about my experience learning to manage anxiety and in turn helping my son do the same for himself. There are so many of us out there who experience anxiety. As an oddball bit of reassurance, I often think of the construction worker from Futurama’: ‘We’re all scared. It’s the human condition. Whys do you thinks I puts on this tough-guy facade?’

The more we talk about it, the less stigma and the more support there will be. This was certainly true in my case: I don’t think I would have coped nearly so effectively had it not been for a colleague several years prior telling me about her recovery from a debilitating anxiety...

One of the biggest challenges I face as a parent is helping my son, who’s going on 9, learn to cope with and manage anxiety.

I got a call from the school today to pick him up from the sick bay. I’d assumed it was related to the mild cold and wheezy chest that kept him home yesterday, which was flared up by what seems to be a sensitivity to grass. It turned out he’d had a panic attack in class over thinking he’d fallen behind after his day’s absence. The Principal asked me into her office to get my opinion over how he’s tracking this year. I’m so grateful that he’s attending a school that’s supportive and interested in his experience. We talked about how he’s come a long way since he started in Reception (prep), when he’d get so worked up about facing new things, instructions and the perceived need to get things right that he’d freeze or hide under the table. It took a while to convince...

I’ll be honest: I didn’t really want to do blogjune. Intrigued and tempted to be involved in a community project, most definitely; but desire to blog? It’s something I’ve struggled with. That sounds ridiculous stated like that, as if I were referring to a fundamental crisis of identity. But it’s a continuation of the squirminess I felt from primary school each time I decided I should keep a diary. There always seemed something so conceited in it; suggesting an assumption that later, someone would look back on it and say, ‘ah yes, we always suspected she was touched with the divine hand of brilliance and uniqueness at an early age’. The idea of going back and reading the embarrassing evidence of my dreary humanity didn’t made sense to me; my style has always been to get my thoughts onto paper, shove it in a draw and eventually throw it away. It never occurred to me that a diary could...

Gah! This is my glorious launch of my blogjune contribution and I’m beginning fed up, with 28 minutes to spare before it’s tomorrow and an evening wasted fiddle faddling around on Wordpress. Great (adequate) post written and now the damn thing can’t remember who I am. So time to call it quits with the convoluted and time to move onto something more svbtle.

I’ve lost all those carefully constructed words I wrote. And now I don’t know what to write. But I need to write. I feel better when I’m writing my Morning Pages first thing when I wake up. I feel better when I’m sitting on the bus and a thought pops into my head, which ends up running down my arm and out onto the scrap of paper I’ve located in my bag. I feel better when I think up a lyric for a tune that’s floating around in the back of my mind, even though I’m yet to form something enough to qualify as A Song.

blogjune friends...