Open Space
September has arrived with a quiet shift in the landscape.
The light is changing, the air beginning to cool, and the open spaces seem to offer a different kind of stillness.
For me, landscapes have always been a way of paying attention. They give me room to observe, to reconnect and to notice the small nuances of the natural world. The rawness of the earth, the textures beneath my feet, the changing shapes of the clouds and those sudden transformations between darkness and light.
Perhaps that is why landscape so often finds its way into my writing.
I am, in the main, first a lyricist. That remains the centre of my creative work.
What is changing is that I am beginning to explore the musical transition through new windows of learning and research. I have been reconnecting with the guitar, returning to notation, revisiting chords and beginning to bring these elements into the mix.
It is a different way of listening to my own writing.
And perhaps that is where Infinity belongs.
I first wrote the beginnings of Infinity some years ago. It was not a song in any conventional sense then. It was a few simple lines, sketched into my memory whilst walking along the Salt Marshes.
I had my mobile phone with me, and little else.
There were the elements, the landscape and that strange sense of everything moving together. The wind, the water, the earth, the changing sky. It felt as though some of the universal laws were quietly dancing around me.
The phone became my notebook.
Later, I began playing with visuals on that same phone, simply because, at that point in time, that was what I had in a material form. Alongside it were my favourite coloured pencils and one of my absolute favourite mediums, charcoal.
There was something quite natural about working that way.
No elaborate studio. No particular expectation of where the work was going.
Just observation, fragments, colour, texture, words and whatever happened to be within reach.
Perhaps creativity is sometimes like that.
There are things within us that arrive without cost and without instruction. Natural, latent gifts that can become buried beneath the circumstances of life, suppressed by responsibility, noise or simply the sheer weight of living.
Not destroyed.
Just covered over.
Perhaps they end up somewhere in the mud, beneath the raw and rugged surface, waiting for the elements to loosen them.
Then the rain comes.
The water moves across the ground.
The wind lifts what has become light enough to travel.
And something fragile is carried into another place.
I think there is something of that movement in the work I am making now.
The lyric can come first. From there, a musical direction may begin to emerge, sometimes through a chord progression, sometimes through rhythm, atmosphere or simply the way the words seem to want to move.
Visual ideas can develop alongside it.
These are not necessarily separate disciplines to me, but different ways of allowing the same idea to develop.
Modern technology has opened some of those pathways. It has given me new ways of experimenting with musical direction, sound, arrangement and visual possibilities, and of hearing or seeing an idea from another angle.
The tools are accessible in a way they were not before.
I can begin with words that may have existed for years, bring them into a musical space, experiment with their movement, return to the lyric, alter the direction, listen again and allow another possibility to emerge.
The technology becomes part of the process rather than the source of it.
The source remains the writing.
The last few months have also reminded me that creativity does not always move forwards in a straight line.
There have been periods when I have experienced that feeling of crash and burn, when the only sensible thing was to retreat, become quiet and rest.
Perhaps that retreat was necessary.
There is something about stepping away from noise that allows the internal landscape to settle again.
Walking through open spaces, watching the weather move across the sky, noticing what is immediately around me, these things can create a kind of quiet in which thoughts begin to arrange themselves.
Sometimes the world outside seems to echo something within.
The sudden changes in cloud, the movement between darkness and light, the roughness and softness of the landscape can all find their way into the way we understand our own lives and the spaces we move through.
Those observations become fragments.
Fragments become words.
Eventually, perhaps, the words find their way onto the page and into that less certain realm of imagination, whether rooted in something real, remembered or completely untamed.
That has been the movement of my work since February.
One piece seems to open a door into another.
A memory leads somewhere unexpected.
A landscape leaves an impression.
A person, a moment or a passing feeling becomes part of something that may not take shape until much later.
There is always something waiting to be translated into words.
And sometimes those words have been waiting much longer than I realised.
Infinity is one example.
What began as a few lines carried in my memory from a walk along the Salt Marshes has travelled through different forms and different ways of seeing. I have allowed it to remain open to change rather than forcing it into a finished shape simply because it existed.
That is perhaps what I am learning now.
A lyric does not necessarily arrive with its entire architecture attached.
Sometimes it arrives as an image.
Sometimes as a line.
Sometimes as a feeling that has no language yet.
The music may come later.
The visual language may come later.
The meaning itself may continue to change.
This September also brought a lovely recognition of that journey. Salt Across The Water was selected as a Finalist in the 2026 Unsigned Only Music Awards in the Lyricist category.
I am genuinely grateful for that recognition, particularly because the lyric remains at the heart of what I do.
I would also like to congratulate everyone who entered. There is courage in allowing creative work to leave the private space in which it began and be seen or heard by someone else.
Over the last couple of years, some of my work has also found recognition further afield, including Moon In The Water, which reached the Semi Finalist stage of the International Songwriting Competition.
These moments are meaningful, but they are not the journey itself.
They are simply places along the path.
I am learning to use modern tools alongside older things that I am returning to. The guitar, notation, chords, listening and research.
But the starting point remains the same.
The lyric.
The private space from which an image, a thought or a feeling begins to form.
I do not want my writing to provide every answer.
I am more interested in creating a space where something can remain open, where the listener or observer can bring their own memories, experiences and imagination into the work.
A landscape does not explain itself.
It simply exists.
The wind moves through it.
The water changes it.
Light touches it and leaves.
Something is worn away while something else is revealed.
Perhaps words can do the same.
The collection that has been developing since February is still finding its shape.
There are lyrics, musical ideas, visual pieces and fragments that have not yet decided what they want to become.
Waterfall is one of those pieces continuing to move forward, gently finding its musical form.
Infinity is another, travelling through memory, landscape, connection and time. A piece that began years ago with little more than a walk, a mobile phone and a few lines held in memory.
And now, as September begins, I can feel another collection beginning to emerge.
I do not know yet what it will become.
For now, I am learning, researching, reconnecting with the guitar, listening and allowing the words to arrive in their own time.
Perhaps that is enough.
Some things need to be written.
Some things need to be played.
Some things need to be drawn, felt or simply carried for a while.
And some things need to remain untamed for a little longer.
The journey continues.
