8 tcf.org.uk COMPASSION | FEATURE - LOSING DYLAN That night I wrote another poem where I tell Dylan 'enough is enough, it's time to come home'. At the same time a musician friend who knew Dylan since birth picked up his guitar. We combined his musical ideas and my words to create a song. I continued trying to make sense of my feelings over the next months and years, in and out of lockdowns. Sometimes I felt very strange. It emerged that the feelings I was trying to understand matched the various 'stages of grief' that you can read about. This gave me the idea to create a collection of songs representing my experience of grief: a project I could throw myself into and in the process explore and better understand my mental turmoil. I was lucky to have a couple of great musicians who were also invested in the project - my wife Alison and my best man Al. Together we pooled ideas on how each song could sound, and I pulled together scraps of poetry and thoughts that I had noted down here and there into lyrics that fit the music. I lived with some classic symptoms of poor mental health. At the time I thought these were indicators of how poor my mental health was, but looking back now, I'm struck by the fact that I still got out of bed each morning, turned up to work, cooked meals. I called this ‘putting up my steel umbrella’, and that became the theme for one song. Another significant part of my experience of grief was a sense that things were wrong. Dylan shouldn't be gone; it's wrong to feel angry. So, I made another song about getting over losing Dylan. The premise is wrong, you never 'get over' the people you've lost. Bu the feeling of wanting to hold onto my sorrow (because relinquishing it would betray Dylan’s love) also felt wrong. So I made a song about these contradictory feelings of wrongness. Other songs are about how I felt closer to Dylan in the middle of the night, when nothing else was demanding my attention or in the confusing half-reality between dreaming and waking; and about facing up to the fact that I still have a life to lead, and that my daughters still need me to support them through their lives. The last song is my advice to them, a message that I hope they will return to throughout their lives. Although the album is called 'For Dylan, Forever Ago', it isn't really 'for Dylan'. He will never hear it. He had no musical ambitions. He couldn't play an instrument; he didn't like singing and hated being on stage. So who is the album for? Well, it's for me of course, it was therapeutic to throw myself into this project and 'bottom-out' my emotions, but I'd really like to think that it's also for the people who discover it and connect. I’d like to think I’ve created something durable that might be discovered, like a message in a bottle. I’m hoping to continue writing songs with Alison and Al and I have called our band ‘Platitudes’, because I’m not sure a song can offer anything more than that. If you would like to listen to 'For Dylan, Forever Ago' it is available on all music streaming platforms. You can find links at platitudes.co.uk
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