The weather’s been pretty awful in January with some bitterly cold days in rural France, and after the triumph of our social media campaign that was the December Advent Calendar with A Tout Coeur, my local brocante and gift shop, I’ve been turning my attention to a different strand of the Bluebird business: words.
January’s a great month for cosying up with a book, and alongside novels I’ve been reading and enjoying autobiographies of musicians. In The Pleasure Groove: Love, Death and Duran Duran by John Taylor was an interesting delve into his early life and how his outlook was shaped by childhood and adolescent experiences. It was a fascinating insight into how to use archives as a resource for memoirs, filled with grainy photographs of him as a child and teenager as well as gig posters. I felt it relied rather too much on material from his parents’ attic, which led to an over-emphasis on childhood and left me wanting to know a lot more about his perspective of actually dealing with fame and fortune later in life. He didn’t even keep his own wedding photos, so there’s quite a lot that’s a bit skipped over.
I’ve moved on to Dave Grohl’s autobiography, which is quite a different and highly engaging read. Plenty of zipping forwards and backwards in terms of connecting parts of his life, and I’m very much enjoying getting to know more about the man who used to be the nicest man in rock and roll. His unashamed self-taught musical career is interesting to me professionally in terms of understanding how musicians achieve success, and as I also recently joined a drumming group it’s resonating on lots of levels.
I’ve also been working with some great clients on their own writing work. All hush-hush for now but more to come on this shortly. It’s great to work with people who are so passionate about their own ideas, and I’ve come to realise the benefits of working with clients in different time zones: it’s not always easy to schedule meetings, but it’s highly effective in terms of maximising effort. I put in the work during my working day, and the client is able to respond during theirs, ready for me to go again the next morning.
Finally, I’ve been working on some writing of my own. This includes finishing up and now polishing chapters for the third edition of the Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology on choosing music in everyday life and on music preferences, both topics close to my research heart; writing narrative non-fiction pieces for journals that has led me to a deep dive into my personal archive of photos, diaries, and other memorabilia; and writing about decluttering, including a guest blog for Louise Muratori, a decluttering expert.
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