This issue of Huck is the Power of Words issue – what’s the most impactful or inspiring piece of text you’ve ever read?
“We are disturbed not by things, but by the views which we take of them,” from the Enchiridion of Epictetus. It’s a book from the second century that collated the lectures of Epictetus, who was a stoic philosopher from the first century. Epictetus had a way of framing the experience of existing that I find echoed in a lot of modern psychotherapeutic positions. “I can’t control what happens to me in my life, but I have control over how I react to it,” is something I work on daily. I bring that statement into my awareness as much as possible. It helps me to find great meaning in the suffering of being alive.
Your listeners truly love your podcast. Is there some sort of meta therapy occurring where you’re giving people mind relief, and by doing the podcast it is helping you too?
I trained to be a psychotherapist for a few years. I didn’t finish my qualification though, because my music career took off, so I went with that instead. So I’d never present myself as a mental health professional, I’m just an artist who incorporates psychotherapeutic theory into my practice. But there’s this approach within psychotherapy called “appropriate self disclosure”, where the therapist will disclose their own experiences and vulnerabilities, to create a feeling of safety with their client. Sometimes, I feel I do a bit of that with my podcast. I only ever speak about my lived experience when I discuss mental health. I speak about my anxiety, my pain as a form of self journalling. I try to be as honest and vulnerable as possible, to speak openly about my fears and my insecurities, to be raw with my emotions. I fucking love doing that, it feels like throwing my soul into the shower and washing it like a muddy Labrador. But I do find that when I’m comfortably vulnerable with my emotions, the listener feels comfortable and safe to reflect on their emotions, too. In their own space at their own pace.
How tightly scripted are the episodes or do you just go off and see where it takes you?
I’ve reflected on this a lot. A student at Trinity College over here in Ireland did their master’s degree this year on my podcast. They argued that my podcast should be viewed as literature. I’ve been saying for ages that my podcast is a never-ending, process-based novel. I’m aware how much that sounds insane. But I write with my mouth for people to read with their ears. An hour of audio takes about three days to record, because the podcasts are written rather than riffed. But what I’ve come to realise recently, is that I use recording software like a word processor. I edit sentences and words as audio, with the same effort and detail that I would if I was physically writing with my fingers on Microsoft Word. And this process is relatively new, it’s maybe a decade or so old. I couldn’t do this podcast back in 2010 for instance, because the PC I’d have been able to afford would have crashed with all the edits. In the past, spoken word was written out on a screen or page first, and then recorded. Because editing meant slicing up tape with razor blades. You had to edit on the page first. This had setbacks too. I can tell when spoken word is written on paper first. Lots of audiobooks are clunky as fuck, because they aren’t written with an audio medium in mind. I write with listening in mind, an oral medium. With audio editing software, processing power, and big hard drives, I can literally write with my mouth. One sentence might contain multiple takes of audio, but I can edit that quickly and seamlessly so that you’d never know. The same way a sentence in a book contains lots of deletes, keystrokes, rewrites. You can’t trace the writer’s fingertips on the page like you can with a painting. You just have a finished sentence. My podcast is like that. It’s very heavily written and edited over multiple days, but the craft is then to make it all flow like a seamless riff. I don’t want anyone noticing the edits, no one wants to see the hand going up Kermit the Frog’s arse.
What’s worth mentioning too, is that I come from a musical background, and I write and record my podcast to a piano track. I was writing music on the same software I make the podcast on. I’ve been doing that since I was 17. There’s a musicality to how I write and record the podcast, the piano informs my pace and tone. So while I’m definitely not calling my podcast music, my process is closer to songwriting, than writing out spoken word on a page with the intention of reading it aloud after. A songwriter explores the feel of the music and lets that inform how the words emerge from their mouth. Consonants are like drums and vowels are like violins. There’s a song called ‘Shore Leave’ by Tom Waits, which I’ve probably listened to tens of thousands of times in my life. I hear so much of that song in my podcasts sometimes. I’m aware that a load of this shit sounds pretentious as fuck. But I’m genuinely curious about the boundaries of artistic mediums. I adore exploring a podcast as a novel that is informed by a songwriting process. It’s exciting and fun, it feels more like playing than working. I’d rather do that, than not do it because I’m scared of it failing.
