Present Day, summer 2026
People ask, in various ways and with various degrees of directness, why I make music. Why not writing, why not painting, why not the other forms I have been in proximity to across five centuries of watching the best practitioners of every art form that the Western tradition has produced.
Music is the only form that operates in time the way experience operates in time. Not across time, the way a painting does. Inside it. A song exists as a duration. It has a beginning and it moves and it ends and the movement is part of what it is. You cannot step outside it while it is happening and look at it from a neutral position. You are inside it or you are not experiencing it. This matches something about what I carry that written language does not match and visual art does not match, though I love both.
And why now: because the particular tradition I am working in, the Gothic rock tradition that found its shape in the London clubs of the early 1980s, is the first musical tradition I have encountered that is attempting to describe the actual texture of what I am. The distance. The cold. The accumulation. The weight of having seen everything and remaining. The music of that tradition does not explain or console. It witnesses. That is what I have always done and what I will always do.
I am a witness with a recording contract. That is the most accurate description of what I am at this particular moment in history. I find it, on balance, sufficient.