In October 2021 my band The Little Unsaid and I set out on our first tour in almost two years. Touring at the best of times is a lifestyle full of extremes and in this case that feeling was heightened by the joy of finally being able to share music with audiences again, coupled with the instability of a Covid-ravaged live scene. This period taught us a lot about what we value in our role as musicians and performers, but it also crucially reminded us that staying creative in turbulent times sometimes requires us to fall forwards into the chaos that threatens to bring us down. For us, this completely changed the way we approach songwriting and making music together.

My songwriting history tells a pretty familiar story. A reclusive, music-obsessed teenager with trousers too big for him grows up in a tiny West Yorkshire town, gets hold of an old PC and a microphone and starts making scrappy home demos in his bedroom. Layering up piano, guitars and drums to try sound like a band, eventually he manages to wrangle his quivering adolescent voice and wail over the top of it all. The results were rough and ready, and for some misguided reason I’d chosen the artist name ‘The John’ (complete with arty toilet logo printed on the homemade CD), but for me it was the most thrilling thing I’d ever discovered, this magic trick of building my own twisted, colourful worlds through songwriting.

This solitary process fed into my way of writing and recording from then on, and when The Little Unsaid evolved from solo project to four-piece band I’d still retreat into those old trusted methods of writing songs. I’d present the band with home demos that I’d beavered away on for months, they’d each then rework the arrangements and we’d rush into a studio for the few days we could afford to scurry about like mad caffeinated ferrets, each trying to record our individual parts as quickly and perfectly as possible. I’m still proud of the songs I wrote over this time and in retrospect a degree of solitude was essential to their deeply personal nature, but this way of making records had started to become too formulaic, routine, too safe. The element of risk had been squeezed out of the whole process, and that can be an instant death blow to creativity.

Fast forward to midway through our turbulent post-lockdown tour and we’re suddenly stranded in the badlands of Dorset after a gig gets cancelled due to low sales. We sat glumly in the van in a layby trying to figure out how we should pass this limbo day before the next show. It seemed important to maintain the frantic creative energy the tour had due to all the chaos in the world around us and the highly euphoric, connected performances we’d been doing. A quick Google search found us a nearby studio, Mill Farm, and we gave them a call to see if they had any availability for us to pop by and hire the space for the day. Having zero idea what the studio was like and what we might even do there, we decided to go and record some jam sessions purely for our own amusement, with no intention of anyone else ever hearing the results.

Finding Mill Farm felt like stumbling upon some sort of mythical paradise that emerged out of the fog. Alpacas and peacocks roamed the fields around the converted barn studio, which happened to be filled with a vast number of priceless vintage guitars that made me drool uncontrollably. We set our gear up in a circle in the main room, a beautiful heavy-rugged space complete with a huge wooden throne and mixing desk. I laid out a couple of my notebooks in front of me. Someone would start playing, a string loop, a beat, a bassline, and I’d rifle through the notebooks and start picking out random fragments of disjointed poems, clumsily ranting or singing odd lines. We recorded absolutely everything, no matter how directionless or unhinged it sounded, just responding to each other in the moment. There were no rules: mistakes were not only allowed but welcomed, allowing us to go places that our inhibitions would normally close off in favour of safe, fully-formed ideas. A lot of what we played was dreadful embarrassing noise, of course. But then, maybe twenty minutes in to a meandering jam, one of us would hit upon a fragment of an idea that sparked in an electrified, unconscious way and triggered a chain reaction through the band, and suddenly the song would take the reins and tell you where it wanted to go. We ended up with hours of recordings, all with tiny glimmers of unexpected ideas or shards of songs occasionally flickering amidst the long improvisations. The process felt free and enlivening and straight after the tour we returned to the studio to repeat the experiment.

Sifting through the recordings back home in London it struck me that the songs hiding in all this group experimentation had strange hooks, stream-of-consciousness lyrics and melodies that I certainly wouldn’t come up with if I were sat alone plonking away at the piano. They had an instinctive, raw quality that seemed to naturally capture both who we were as a band at that time, as well as the simmering collective anxiety we’d sensed all around us as we travelled the country on tour. After a few days of pushing and pulling the recordings around at home we were astonished to find we had the accidental skeleton of a cohesive album dancing about in front of us. We did lots of edits, moving chunks of improvisation around on screen to see where they fit best. Sometimes we combined two separate improvisations to create a song, a verse from here, a chorus from there. Other times we picked up the drum take from one improvisation and dropped it alongside a Moog bassline from a session recorded on a different day. I chopped vocal takes around randomly and threw them in odd places to create lyrics that would never have fallen on the page in such a way. And occasionally the piece stayed fully intact exactly as we’d performed it, warts and all, the sound of four people full of gratitude to be playing music together and trying to dig some magic out of the moment.

Writing together in this way felt like an act of shared trust that could only have come at this point in our story. We’ve toured every year since we came together in 2015, and we’ve grown closer as musicians and friends through all of those mythical rites of passage a band is meant to endure in early adventures; sleeping on nightclub floors after shows in Europe, vans breaking down mid-tour, cancellations, sickness, epic financial losses, even more epic hangovers, tinnitus after soundcheck catastrophes…all of the well-trodden business of carving your path as an independent band out there on the beautiful, brutal road. It sounds saccharine, but the bond you share if all those experiences don’t drive you apart is profound. Creating this record together has reminded us how rare it is to find collaborators in whose company you can be your one-hundred-percent true self with all your unique madnesses and doubts and passions and fears. And for me at least, the album captures a sort of defiant hope in the simple act of trying to create something meaningful out of disorder, and it’s awoken me to a process of writing songs that necessitates engaging with the frenzy of the big scary world, rather than running away from it.

This process might not seem particularly chaotic or dicey from the outside – jazz ensembles improvise entire albums all the time, and bigger label-funded artists retreat into pricey residential studios for months at a time to dream up whole albums on the spot. But this chaos is new territory to us, a small, independent, songwriting-focused band operating with zero room for financial gamble. For us, dedicating our time and limited funds to spontaneously making an entire record through improvisation has been the most impulsive artistic risk we’ve ever taken, at a time when the crisis facing the arts as a whole might make such risk-taking seem reckless. At the same time it’s been the most revivifying and fulfilling creative experience we’ve shared as a band. There are tough times ahead for all of us trying to sustain making music in the face of this storm of slow pandemic recovery, economic turmoil, and apparent government indifference to the arts on all levels. Our little band has no answers, but for our part the making of this album has provided a small flicker of how we might reimagine the ways we make and share our own music to adapt to a shifting landscape. Gone are the days of spending thousands on carefully crafted writing and recording processes and extensive album campaigns. Maybe just throw a few mics up in a room when the moment sparks, stand strong on the solid ground you’ve ploughed artistically up to this point, nurture your collaborative relationships and at the same time don’t be afraid to throw your entire process into the fire and rebuild around the limitations of the here and now. Maybe trying to control every artistic move we make in these times of great chaos isn’t only impractical, it’s missing an opportunity to creatively embrace the uncertainty all around us, to try make work that is as full of life and transience and disorder as the present moment.