NC: Boringly, my creativeness is in no way pathological. I work very hard, every day, and on some level it’s a dogged nine to five slog, and if it seems like my output is greater than your average musician or whatever it is I am, it’s because I put in more hours. It’s as simple as that.

That is not to say that on occasions I don’t enter into that... See more

In the midst of the unfolding crisis with work – a fundamentally spiritual problem – it seems to me that we desperately need new cultural metaphors to describe labour. What, actually, is this thing called “work”? Why do we do it? What does it afford us? What can’t it afford us?

For now, I find solace in the metaphor of work as trace. In a world... See more

Even in the whorl of our own personal tragedies, when the cosmos appears at its most chaotic and impartial, I have come to see the world, in its complexity, rearranging itself toward meaning.

It may sound like I’m taking all this a little too personally, but I’m a songwriter who is engaged, at this very moment, in the process of songwriting. It’s a blood and guts business, here at my desk, that requires something of me to initiate the new and fresh idea. It requires my humanness. What that new idea is, I don’t know, but it is out there

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