A Long Drink of Water

On the sublime and stupid hindrances to self-publishing music, and a nostalgic playlist

Some years back, I was working for a stint with a design studio using Basecamp as our hub – and for the life of me I couldn’t keep from calling it Bandcamp. Too many apps, perhap(p)s…or I was a frustrated musician, who infuriatingly couldn’t focus on getting my work out into the world.

To understand where this fly flew into the ointment, I invite you to enter the shadowy realms of my teenage memories, specifically of growing up as a Muslim in 90s Britain, where to be a girl with a guitar and a dream of writing songs was as improbable as an Islamic roller-disco, to the synthesized beats of the local imam’s khutbah.

My dad had been a professional musician in the 60s and early 70s, playing jazz, folk and prog rock in various bands, appearing on albums by British folk legends Fairport Convention, and performing as part of Mighty Baby at both editions of the Isle of Wight festival, the UK’s answer to Woodstock. (Read more about that in his book Average Whiteman.)

After most of Mighty Baby embraced Islam in the early 70s (check the beards in this album cover), and a brief swan song as the Habibiyya, he left the music industry and dedicated himself to architecture and, later, book design. Most of that career was spent working at home, decades before Covid made it a thing. So I grew up hearing stories of supporting (a deeply obnoxious) Rolling Stones on tour, seeing Coltrane play live, recording a (never-released) session with George Harrison…

Our house was always awash with an eclectic mix of music, from both my parents’ stereos in different rooms. Walking between them you’d go from Bill Evans, the Grateful Dead, Cannonball Adderley and Moroccan Andalusi music to Cheikh Lô, Nancy Griffiths, The Band, Rickie Lee Jones and crackly dhikr tapes from God only knew where.

In my room (once I’d mercifully left behind an appalling phase of Wet Wet Wet – curse you, Four Weddings and a Funeral) it was Björk, Sade, Lisa Loeb, TLC and De La Soul. (Let’s brush over the Oasis moment. Shudder.) By 6th form I’d moved on to Beastie Boys, A Tribe Called Quest, Mos Def and Talib Kweli, The Pharcyde, Lauryn Hill, No Doubt, and Foo Fighters (those last two tracks I covered at high school performances). Jungle might have been massive but I was more of a trip hop fan, so Massive Attack made an appearance, and for a long while Moloko stood at No. 1 in my personal Tops of the Pops chart.

But there’s nothing as enlivening as live music, even if it’s the idle plunking of keys or a guitar, a hummed refrain or a nobody’s-listening-to-me melisma. There was always a guitar in the sitting room, so I picked up the basic chords, and then, in true tween/teen angst mode, spent a LOT of time on my own, experimenting with voicings and open chords.

Leaving 6th form I discovered Brazilian music, and nothing else existed for a while. Samba and Capoeira rocked, but Bossa nova fulfilled that need for yearning, searching, dissonant and resolving harmonies, with syncopated rhythms keep things interesting and easygoing female vocals to soothe the nervous system to a sense of belonging again.

My stereo was invaded by Gilberto Gil, Joyce and Tania Maria, and I taught myself to play songs like The Girl from Ipanema, Agua de Beber and Chega de Saudade. I still love the challenge of the fast-paced finger gymnastics of chord changes while keeping up with lyrics in Portuguese. I’m gradually adding bossa nova songs to my repertoire, such as Gema by Caetano Veloso and Meu Mundo é Hoje by Paulinho da Viola.

By now I’d started composing my own songs, forming a short-lived band with some friends and performing a few tracks at school variety shows. Singing something you’ve written yourself is not the same as performing a cover; literally, you’re hiding behind it. There’s a dimension of acting about it. When they’re your own feelings and poetry, the risk of falling flat is doubled. It’s not only teenagers who dread that.

But I also thrived on the buzz of when it went down well. Talk about validation! Not only did you have musical skills – people liked your original composition. To a fragile, inchoate ego, it’s like crack.

Once at university, I threw myself into my songs with a new fervour. Was my degree a procrastination from my love of making music, or was the music a procrastination from studying? Who cared?

Singing to myself one day with my guitar in a music room at SOAS, I heard a knock on the window: a girl I’d never met was standing on the ledge of the 2nd floor. I opened and it turned out she’d heard me playing and wanted to accompany me with her flute! So began a musical collaboration with the incredibly talented Nobuko Miyazaki, leading us to perform my compositions at various places around London.

I’d entered a new phase of self-discovery, and documenting it through songs was like nothing else. Instantly shareable, viscerally connecting the vibration of my own lungs to the tiny bones inside the heads of my listeners. As much as I’d loved writing since childhood, singing took me out of the box of a notepad and into a whole new realm of human connectivity.

There was something draining, however, about trying to ‘make it’ as a musician in a city full of similar hopefuls.

Perhaps I was still hiding something of myself behind this attempt at finding success, a need for validation that was ultimately addictive – and every addiction has its come-down. After a gig I would feel empty and low, missing the joy and the appreciation of the previous night. When I graduated and left for Spain in 2005, I didn’t feel like chasing the dream any more. It seemed like just another rat race, only with the product of a heart and soul as its currency.

Finding ourselves both living in London a few years later, Nobuko and I reunited and were joined by a multitalented percussionist, James Van Minnen. By this time I’d gotten married, and when my then-husband finished his Masters', we moved to the country; meanwhile, I discovered I was pregnant. My dreams of making an album of my songs were scuppered – temporarily, I reassured myself.

Becoming a mother changed everything. Once my first-born came along, all my creative energy went to him. I don’t regret it in any way. My previous artistic projects faded into the background, and a much more important one was sitting on my lap. The guitar we’d bought with wedding gift money gathered dust in a corner.

Another move to Spain, another baby…by now my musical ambitions had morphed into learning old nursery rhymes and funny songs for kids to soothe the noisy experience of having two kids in nappies. My brain was so fractured from the broken nights that I could hardly stand having music on at all, let alone compose it.

But every so often, when I was really broken with exhaustion, I would take out the guitar and stay up late, singing and playing. Allowing myself to dive back into the deep pleasure and satisfaction of making something that brings joy, even if only to me. When I closed the guitar back into its case I packed with it the sadness of missing this, this feeling of being completely centred and whole and myself in the most beautiful way I knew how.

I carried on writing songs from time to time, usually when I felt so stretched to breaking point that nothing else would provide the release I needed. One such was Water. I drew on the bossa nova inversions I’d adored in my youth, and made up a few of my own. The lyrics are, I suppose, an attempt at approaching the Sufi poetry I grew up on, in my own mother tongue and using the images and references of my time to bring myself back to centre.

Because of all the gifts that motherhood had brought me, one that I still treasure is the timeless feeling of being with a child who is totally present and has no thought of tomorrow. No lack of self-worth. No need for external validation. They gave me a pool to swim in, to carry around inside me and return to whenever the frantic busyness of The World gets too much.

Running, come on keep up
Carrying the world in my paper cup
I’m on the phone since the moment I’m up
Being important

I’m fully booked til mid-July
I don’t have time to wonder why
Got to keep the pace up

Oh but my boss doesn’t notice me
It’s ok, he’s in a hurry
I need approval you see
It’ll come your way, don’t worry
I can’t take it any more
Working myself into the floor
And I never seem to get rewarded
Tomorrow I’ll just work harder…

Water flows, it
Never slows, you
Don’t miss yours
Until your well runs dry
Just try to find some
Peace of mind, you
Can’t rewind
All the hours lost
And were you even there for them at...

All the time I waste 
Keeping up appearances in cyberspace
you know it feels so real

I'm just one more click away
From the tranquility I crave
To number the pain I feel

But when the screen's off I'm alone
Befriend the quiet and you'll see
I'm a stranger in my own home
Befriend yourself and you'll be free
Is the future dark or bright
Is this blindness or insight
They said that I was born to play 
But am I pawn or player in this game

Water flows, it
Never slows, you
Don’t miss yours
Until your well runs dry
Just try to find some
Peace of mind, you
Can’t rewind
All the hours lost
And were you even there for them at...

All

A divorce, a remarriage, a five year hiatus in making music, another pregnancy. This time I didn’t want to feel I’d abandoned my music again, so I dug around in my paltry savings and asked my brother Zak to film a music video – to Water. I reached out to percussionist Muhammad Dominguez to play cajón, borrowed an electro-acoustic guitar from a musician friend Mounzer Sarah, and Zak hired drummer and sound engineer Pablo Lastra to record the live set.

How we managed to pull all this together, while I was 6 months pregnant, I have no idea. The urgency of making it happen while I was still flush with progesterone and before entering walrus phase probably had something to do with it. By the position of the guitar you can’t see my bump at all.

This was filmed in 2014, and is still the only *proper* music video I ever made. Whatever imposter syndrome, fear of vulnerability, fear of success (in a notoriously life-destroying industry), annoyance at the imperfections of my live recordings, disgust at self-promotion, cultural programming deprioritising joy, or plain dumb lack of time and energy that has hindered my indie music journey, I clearly need another blog post to dissect it.

If you’ve made it this far in this history of the world (of my music), thankyou! Have some dopamine cookies in the form of this video. I hope you’ve enjoyed listening to the tracks I linked to as much as I enjoyed listing them. You can help me to make more music by buying Water here, and if you’re a paid subscriber to this newsletter, I will send you a free mp3 of this track. Yay! I appreciate you more than you can know.

I might have been overwhelmed by the idea of self-publishing my music in the past, but I am making up for lost time by putting my recordings on Bandcamp now. There’s so much more to record and share…bismillah. Ready when you are.