This is ‘organizing an accident’ — a weekly newsletter where I share new song demos every Wednesday + dispatches from music life in Paris.
Listen to “Life of Love” (demo):
This song was written on January 7, 2020
For clarity: the music that I’m sharing here each week are demos and works-in-progress, not official releases. I’m now using
as a newsletter platform to write essays about creativity and other subjects as well as to connect with a broader audience interested in music, songwriting, and my project as a whole. My aim is that this is the antithesis of following me on social media: a slower, more engaging experience, centered around music and long-form expression.I hope you’ll stick around for the journey and even support as a paid subscriber — I’ve got hundreds of songs I’ll be sharing over the coming months. You can also find my official music releases on Spotify, Apple Music, or your platform of choice.
I’m writing on the first of May, or May Day, and in France that means that the streets were deader than dead this morning as I walked across town, getting in my 10,000 steps, as I do most mornings for about an hour and thirty minutes. I typically do this in silence and it’s become a cherished ritual, which, at the very least, helps me clear my mind at the start of each day, but it’s also an extended moment of calm for fleshing out creative ideas or melodies devoid of instruments and other “distractions”.
I got home well before the protests were set to begin, which is convenient because I live just off a major artery of every Parisian manifestation, Place Voltaire. I showered and made coffee, energized to sit down and write, but within a few minutes, I was overcome with fatigue and flu-like symptoms. It’s now about ten hours later, and I’m giving it another go from bed, nursing what appears to be some 24-hour virus.
At this point in my thirty-four years on Earth, or approximately 12,579 days, I’ve begun to anticipate and even sometimes welcome trauma into my life. This is, admittedly, a privileged position to take: I’ve been astoundingly lucky thus far, only ever experiencing the natural loss of elderly figures in my life, suffering no major illnesses or personal setbacks, and have enjoyed a rather self-centered, low-stakes existence based on music and songwriting.
The very concept of willing trauma into one’s life might even come across as heavy-handed. I take seriously the weight of this word that describes so resolutely the burdens carried by members of society who have experienced violence, war, poverty, and life-threatening illness, for example. The impression such trauma can leave on a person is the central focus of scientific and medical research spanning centuries, and there are endless personal accounts that have eloquently expressed the intangible change that occurs within the human condition from Viktor Frankl’s timeless Man’s Search for Meaning or more recently Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan’s Faith, Hope, and Carnage, to name a few.
Finishing that last sentence, I immediately received a pang of ineligibility to write on this topic because, for one, I’ve never lived through a genocide or experienced the loss of a teenage child, and secondly, I foresaw my work immediately carved out for me in order to assure this not be misconstrued as an appeal for or romanticizing such experiences, like some delusional art school student taking up heroin to walk in the shoes of Basquiat or Charlie Parker. In fact, I’m really talking about something else entirely, a more everyday anguish, something I’ve begun to embrace as a necessary shock to the system. If you’ve seen Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, you might see where I’m going with this.
After learning the word bouleversement years ago in some French class or another — a word meaning a profound upset or upheaval i.e the state of political or economic order or the aftermath of a natural disaster — the word settled in my mind, useful in describing the before and after of various phases of my life: those “nothing was ever the same again” moments.
Before
The simplistic life trajectory of someone who’s never lived through a global pandemic; the naivety of a young lover unscathed by heartbreak.
After
A more gracious, thoughtful existence upon witnessing life’s fragility; healthier romantic partnerships in which we know ourselves more deeply, and can love more completely.
When I envision the timeline of my life thus far, it’s a flat line with a handful of spikes that begin around puberty, the earliest stages of adulthood and individuation for most of us. Prior to that point, my life was decidedly average and uneventful, and for those lucky enough to enjoy such a childhood - with no big moves, no losses or illnesses - puberty can be that first major shock to the system, a first bump in the road along which we’d been sleepwalking.
These moments jolt us awake. For me personally, some of the most defining moments on my timeline have been heartbreak, after which, I essentially got my shit together with renewed determination. It’s safe to say that the first major upheaval of my life was getting dumped by my teenage girlfriend, sometime around the age of seventeen. It shook me to my boyish core and forced me to reckon with the fact that this first love would not be 4ever. Nope, there would be no kids, no church bells, and my world suddenly grew cold and dubious, my capacity for melancholy expanding overnight, the happy-go-lucky kid deceased inside me.
This experience, like when I’d broken my leg a few years earlier and had to stop skateboarding, sent me deeper into music and a circle of friends who were equally obsessed with it. It led to a reactionary few years in which I established myself as a musician and began an uncompromising pursuit of the band life. A few years later, I fell in love again, the relationship ended, and I was once again awoken from a complacent sleep and sent barreling towards all my dreams I’d held on the back burner.
I’m about ten years further along now, on the other side of that fence, and have since moved to New York City, fallen in love again, moved to Paris, and gotten married. What has defined this last decade has been not only the partner I’ve lived it with, but our shared commitment to each others respective dreams and to killing complacency in its many forms. I welcome these regular self-imposed jolts to the system, keeping ourselves and each other in check, understanding the existential doom that awaits if neglected. Constant reminders to take risks, flip the script, and maybe rearrange the living room every few months.
Naturally, I assume that I live a life of constant change. Hell, I write new songs every week that had never existed before. But it’s there, within our creative process, that our self-pleased tendencies can be the sneakiest and require frequent reexamination, and this may not always arrive without an unexpected kick in the gut or a blow to the ego. How else do we balance the consistency and repetitiveness necessary for creative expression without setting ourselves up to produce redundant or simply good work? I’d argue that the necessary stimulation need not come from swapping tools or moving studios, but from living a full life out in the world and letting its elements warp us like worn-out rolls of film.
I have yet to strike this balance, and I suspect it takes a lifetime. The fact is, we have to write through the mediocrity — the bad songs, the lazy and gutless lyricism — just to then look it in the eyes, love it for its utility, and reject it wholeheartedly. If I’m reluctant at all about what I’m doing on Substack, it’s because I know I’ll be publicly sharing dozens of songs that are often just good, songs that may never see an official release or find a home on an album, but that serve a greater purpose in the totality of my songwriting. I also know that sometimes we’re our own worst critics and that through sharing this material, I may learn which songs I’ve underestimated or how I can improve upon them.
Today’s demo is called “Life of Love,” a post-heartbreak song about being reluctant to let our guard down in the face of new love. It’s an undervalued bravery in society: that despite our fears of being hurt again, we trustfully close our eyes and fall backwards into the hands of someone new. It’s possibly the only way to truly affirm our belief in humanity and love itself.
If you made it this far, thanks for sticking it out with me. I’m new to this, but I’m loving the chance to go deeper into certain themes than the format of songwriting typically allows. You can always pay a visit to my previous demos and writing via the Substack archive or find my official music releases on your platform of choice. Find me across socials at @thisryanegan.
Thanks for listening,
Ryan
Check out the previous post.