To the heart machine!
On disarming simplicity, personal boundaries, desk-based music, the tortured artist, Nick Cave, corporate purpose, human purpose and Robot Maria.
NICK
So last time we shared a new song called I delight in you. In this case, I’ll stick my neck out and share my original for anyone who’s interested—because it’s a good illustration of how Kate takes the raw material and transforms it.
The lyric and basic shape of the melody is all there (apart from one subtle but important chord shift in the chorus). But all the dynamics, beat, pace and harmonies are new and seem kind of magical to me—like turning a black and white picture into something technicolour.
Writing-wise, it started with the chorus—this basic refrain I had looping around my head for a while. The chorus lyrics are deliberately sweet and romantic in a heightened way, so I felt like the verses needed to introduce a contrasting darkness, and that gradually led to me to this story about someone who struggles through the drudgery of the working world, but finds love and meaning at home. It was only in retrospect that I realised I’d written a song about purpose, which is my hobby horse over on Thoughts on Writing. Rather than searching for purpose through brands and corporations, it’s about the far more common experience of finding purpose outside work. But I guess we can come back to that.
For now, my question is… what did you think of the song when I sent it? And exactly how did your version take shape in your head? Do you hear what it’s going to sound like and set about creating it, or is it more messing around in Garageband and seeing what emerges?
KATE
I’m glad you mention sweetness, because that’s exactly what I noticed on first listen. Hearing that opening chorus, I felt that the singer’s sentiment towards their lover was very pure. There’s no bemoaning the difficulties of relationships, no grappling with complex feelings. Just the disarmingly simple idea: though life can be hard, you make me happy. The vocabulary you’ve chosen helps, I think—the words are straightforward and somehow clean, which gives the chorus a frankness that feels both innocent and charming.
I also thought—and I hope I’m not getting too personal here—about you and (your partner) Sue, and how nice it would be for you to present her with a finished version of the song! Which brings me to my first question: how much of yourself do you put into your songs, generally? We know that writers’ work is fuelled by their personal lives, but is there a limit to how much of ourselves we should share? Are there topics you wouldn’t touch in your poetry and songwriting? Do you think it’s easy to set boundaries, and have you ever come close to crossing yours?
(Funnily enough, the Nepalese writer Mukahang Limbu asks these questions in the latest edition of The Author. It leads to an interesting idea: while we often think of creative writing as a form of healing, can it in fact be retraumatising? Can what we see as therapy actually be, in some circumstances, an unhelpful kind of rumination?)
In terms of how the version took shape… I thought about the singer, slogging away in their slightly unfulfilling day job. And I decided: I should create the whole song at my desk, on my laptop. That meant I wasn’t allowed to record any ‘live’ instruments. There was no playing the piano, no strumming the ukulele this time. All I could use was the library of instruments within Garageband, plus my voice.
And that in turn made something else happen. To play the Garageband instruments, I used ‘musical typing’, which is where you use your computer keyboard like a piano keyboard. But this is tricky and a bit limiting (for instance, you can only see one octave at a time, and you have to press a key to move up or down the octave—NOT something you have to do on a real piano). So, although in other songs I’d actively tried to use more complex chords, here I found myself using very simple ones. And somehow this seemed to complement that purity of sentiment I’ve talked about.
NICK
I love that idea of desk-based music. I’ve always liked how we use the word ‘keyboard’ to describe the interface for both piano and writing. And you’ve tied that knot even more tightly by using the writing kind to create the music. Am I right in saying you don’t even attach a microphone to your laptop – just sing straight into it? In which case, it really is laptop music on every level.
Your questions about personal boundaries are fascinating. With all these songs, I’ve never had any personal, confessional dimension in mind—I think of it more as an apprenticeship for a trade, where I’m trying (sometimes in quite a mechanical way) to get my head round the formal challenges and just build something that works. For example, with that opening chorus, I think my honest motivation at the time was about structural questions—I liked the idea of opening a song with just a really simple, declarative statement, and then it was just playing around with these echoing aye and oo sounds in the words. That’s not to say personal stuff isn’t making its way out on some level, but it’s not the primary driver. Fortunately, I don’t think this will come as a crushing blow to Sue, who has tolerated my musical leanings for years, usually with a healthy reaction of nodding and smiling. (For the record, she was a particular fan of Been Dreaming About You Lately though—must be a ukelele thing.)
But I’m not averse to writing personal stuff in other contexts. In three and a half years of writing the daily Realtime Notes poems, I did sometimes veer into pretty personal family stuff (with Sue’s blessing whenever it happened, and keeping Asbury Jr’s name away from the algorithm.) Fortunately, throughout that time, I never really had a major personal drama to contend with—and I often wonder what would have happened if I had. I instinctively agree with the idea that sharing personal stuff isn’t always going to be cathartic and healthy—it could just dramatise and externalise things that are best left to work themselves out inwardly. And I’ve always been suspicious of the ‘tortured artist’ idea. I think the best art is about mastery of a certain craft, form or medium, and the work exists independently of the creator. (That was definitely the case in Tin Pan Alley, which had a Stock Aitken & Waterman approach to industrial-scale production of romantic songs.)
I find this affects the way I respond to art too. I’ve never been massively interested in the biographical details of the artists I like. If someone told me Yesterday was actually a song about a Paul McCartney break-up, it wouldn’t really make the song any better or worse for me. But then it is interesting knowing that Blood on the Tracks was Dylan’s break-up album. It’s just that it’s a lot more than that too—they’re beautifully crafted songs.
Let me bounce the same question back to you. How important is that personal dimension to your own writing, or to the art you like?
KATE
Yeah, I just sing straight into the laptop. Outrageous, really, but production has always been pretty homespun over here on Songwritings.
And yes, I suppose the ‘tortured artist’ idea is what I’m getting at—that sense that good art comes from something deeply personal, often painful. In his Red Hand Files, Nick Cave criticises the idea of the artist-addict and their ‘holy suffering’. But he isn’t saying that suffering is meaningless to art—he’s saying that drink and drugs create a numbed, ‘flattened’ kind of suffering, when the exposure to all the sensation of life, both happiness and suffering, is what can potentially nourish creativity. He even talks about ‘meaningful suffering’ (which, perhaps dangerously, is leading me to think back to some of our conversations about Catholicism…)
There’s the variously-attributed quote about writing being easy: ‘you just open a vein and bleed’. I’d love to have a clever challenge to this, but I found it to be kinda true when I was writing my novel. I don’t find it easy to get into the ‘flow state’ some writers describe, but whenever it happened I was usually tapping into very personal, emotional experiences. And I had plenty of those to draw on, as I put a lot of myself into the book—my protagonist is a Northerner studying Music at Cambridge University in the early 2000s, which is exactly what I was twenty years ago. The writing definitely felt different when I was digging into those old anxieties, joys, hopes.
And, to return to that idea of rumination, it did sometimes feel uncomfortable to go over and over those feelings. Especially because it began to blur real life and fiction. My protagonist’s time at university is the most magical time of his life, and so he replays his memories obsessively—so, in revisiting my own experiences, I not only reanimated my teenage neuroses but started to feel a bit like my own tragic hero. So, all a bit meta.
NICK
Yeah I can certainly imagine it helps to draw on direct experience if you’re writing something as deep and sustained as a novel—and that must be a weird kind of self-therapy on some level. I remember you saying you were known as Northern Kate in Cambridge, which is simultaneously endearing and kind of ‘problematic’. (For any readers who don’t know, Kate’s debut novel is officially forthcoming and officially exciting.)
I’ve no idea what would happen if I tried to write anything directly based on my university years—not that anything terrible happened, but it would probably be traumatising for me and boring / embarrassing for everyone else. (As a side note, I’ve always have a bad memory and have never understood how people write their memoirs. What with having no inner monologue, not much inner vision and a self-clearing memory, I’m not sure exactly what does take place in my head—I may not actually be conscious.)
By the way, I think of I delight in you (and I guess all of our songs) as having a ‘protagonist’ too—in the sense that it’s some notional person who (unlike me) has a job that involves commuting. But then there is some overlap—‘try not to unravel as I travel through each daily compromise’ is often how work can feel. I should come back to how that relates to the video in a bit.
But it’s funny you brought up Nick Cave as I was just about to do it myself. I think he has a very wise and humane attitude to questions about art vs artist, or art vs politics. And it’s haunting and heartbreaking that his Skeleton Tree album reads like such a direct lament for his son, when most of the album was completed beforehand—like art is about processing things that haven’t even happened yet. I love his Red Hand Files and see it as a new form of art—the ‘artist as agony aunt to the planet’. It’s such an interesting way to connect with people. And he’s always hovering around questions of the divine and transcendence and even… purpose.
There are lots of questions I could ask you at this point—how did you feel about being called Northern Kate? Do you think northernness creeps into your singing voice in any way—is that something you had to think consciously about? And how do you relate to the protagonist in our song—do you recognise that kind of attitude to work and finding purpose somewhere outside it?
KATE
I love the idea of art being about ‘processing things that haven’t even happened yet’.
On the university question, I must say that I’m deeply suspicious of memory. Especially when I’m remembering times so long ago. One of my favourite books is Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, which deals beautifully with the unreliability of memory. The narrator asks: ‘How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life.’
BUT I think I had mixed feelings at being Northern Kate. On the one hand I was dismayed, because I thought my Northernness was possibly the least interesting thing about me. But I also leaned into the label—honestly, I probably preferred to be known for something rather than go unnoticed.
On the work/purpose question… I find the song’s attitude to work very refreshing. And important! I’m extremely fortunate that I love my work, and to anyone who finds meaning in their own careers: awesome. But, to me, the idea that we should all find purpose in our work is… deeply weird. For a start, it’s simply impractical and potentially classist—for instance, what if the jobs available in your local area are fine but don’t set your heart alight? Does that make your life purposeless? What if the thing that brings you most joy isn’t the same skill that makes you money? More than one friend of mine has spent time feeling strangely dissatisfied by their (perfectly successful) careers before realising: you know, it’s okay if my career isn’t the most important thing in my life.
And, at its worst, I think the idea of finding purpose in work is kind of sinister. It invites us to give more of ourselves to employers than we potentially ought (a bit like the way we expect NHS workers to go above and beyond because they’re ‘heroes’). If we can convince ourselves that our work is what gives our life meaning, we can justify giving away evenings and weekends to our bosses when we could easily be spending that time actually having boundaries and doing the many other things that make life meaningful. Like I say, if you do find your purpose in your work, that’s great! Good for you! But to suggest that everyone else should do the same seems to be setting a target that isn’t possible for us to meet. (Feels like this is an interesting time to be having this conversation, what with the emergence of ideas like quiet quitting, which turns out to mean ‘doing your actual job instead of constantly doing extra work for no extra reward’.)
NICK
Yes, as you know I’ve written a LOT about purpose in recent years. And I’ve found that, the more sceptical I get about the idea of corporate/brand purpose, the more interested I am in the idea of human purpose, and even cosmic purpose. I think a lot of people can and do find a personal sense of purpose through their work—but it’s a very different thing to some shared, top-down corporate purpose. Equally, many people have a healthy attitude to work as a means to an end—a productive way to spend the 9 to 5 while funding their wider interests in family, art, travel, friendship, religion or whatever else.
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And many people actively dislike or resent their work and the drudgery of the commute, which is totally understandable (this TikTok Gen Zer was widely derided for complaining about it, but I can totally relate.)
Speaking of drudgery, I should mention the video for I delight in you. I was digging round the Internet Archive for out-of-copyright film footage and was reminded of Metropolis by Fritz Lang—considered one of the great early sci-fi films. It’s set in a world where the workers slave away in a subterranean city, while the elite enjoys a life of creative and spiritual fulfilment above the surface. There’s a complicated plot in which Maria rallies the workers to revolt, and at some point is replaced by a fake, Robot Maria who tricks the workers into following her instead. It’s hard to untangle the entire plot and its symbolism, but I like to think Robot Maria could stand for corporate purpose—this beguiling idea that poses as revolutionary but actually just puts a seductive face on the status quo.
I stitched together a few scenes in iMovie and matched it to the music, and I like to think it works pretty well. I especially like the cry of ‘To the heart machine!’ at the end. It’s a cry of revolt, but I also just like the resonance of the phrase. Apparently Fritz Lang was inspired to make Metropolis on first seeing the New York skyline in the 1920s. This is my own flight of fancy, but I like to think of Tin Pan Alley in its heyday, somewhere among those skyscrapers. And the songwriting industry at the time could be thought of as a kind of ‘heart machine’—a production line for these intimate, romantic songs that mapped out every possible state of the human heart in 32 bars, and yet was also resolutely commercial and down-to-earth. I think To the heart machine! would be a good album name if we ever do one.
We’ve covered a lot here, haven’t we?
KATE
Ha, yes we have. And I’m pretty sure I’m repeating your own ideas about purpose back to you. I probably got half of them from Thoughts on Writing in the first place.
I’m glad you mention the video. One of my favourite moments is at 1:50, where we have the lyric ‘I rise’. In the song itself, we simply seem to be talking about our protagonist getting up in the morning. But alongside your scenes from Metropolis, the line becomes a call for a true uprising: a rallying cry for every ordinary worker (part of me sees them as all the Northern Kates and Northern Nicks, throwing off the idea that they’re obliged share the ‘values’ of the profit-driven entity that pays their wages).
But—while railing against the capitalist machine—it’s intriguing to think of Tin Pan Alley as a production line, with writers who trudged to work and maybe, now and again, just dialled it in. Makes you think about where exactly in a production line the ‘heart’ can exist. Perhaps some songs came from their writers’ deepest suffering; perhaps others didn’t exactly come from the heart but meant a huge deal to the listeners who loved them.
Anyway. To the heart machine—wherever and whatever it means to you.
Thanks everyone for reading / listening. For anyone new here, Songwritings is a conversation between Kate van der Borgh (copywriter, novelist, D&AD Masterclass trainer, singer, musician) and Nick Asbury (copywriter, poet, Perpetual Disappointments Diarist, with a side interest in Tin-Pan-Alley-tinged songwriting). The conversation features original songs, usually written by Nick, then reinterpreted and brought to life with Kate on all instruments and vocals.