~Sunday 22nd October 2023~
Feelin': idk, a bit anxious, a bit confused, or unsure, i s'pose
Listenin': Omoide Ni Dakare Te Ima Wa - Perfect Blue OST

I'm having a little trouble figuring out exactly how to feel about this project.

Ever since it properly started a few days ago, I've been having anxieties like "is this dishonest", "wouldn't it be better to just write as myself, write songs and music as myself", and sometimes "what if one of those 2000s era artists somehow comes across this at some point and thinks this sort of half-recreation of what they did 20 years ago is creepy".

I've been sort of joking and slightly bullying myself internally by comparing it to Perfect Blue, with myself as Rumi, trying to recapture and continue someone else's past life in the way I see fit. (Minus the complete lack of awareness of it all. And the murderousness of course.) I mean I even made a website, though Emily's my own fictional character, and has already ended up more based on my own teen self than on any of those artists, at least in how she talks.

But still. Have you ever wanted to be a specific other person so much it kind of hurts? But also known that, if by some dark miracle you did become that person, you still wouldn't be satisfied, and it'd feel two dimensional? I think this might be my being autistic: dishonesty is very uncomfortable for me. It's like, you know those people who get plastic surgery to try to look like their favourite celebrities? If I did that, it would plague my mind forever, "this is someone else and isn't me". And anyway, excepting present circumstances (living with family, financially dependent, not allowed to transition or even talk in my preferred voice most of the time), I don't think I'm a very bad person to be.

But... (and as I say at the bottom of the About Me & About This page, I don't think it'd be right for me to name any of those artists) my favourite among those 2000s era online songwriters, well, she's better than me. Part of me feels like I'd be happier being her: writing more songs and adding them to her oeuvre, completing projects she left unfinished, having her voice (which, uh, I actually already do kind of sing like her a bit, though I go louder sometimes). I would know, though, I would know I wasn't really her, and anything I'd add to her song collection would be the work of a pretender.

Boomers sometimes go on about how music was better in the 70s, and, well, I wonder if this is my version of when someone in their 60s thinks nothing has ever been as good as Close To The Edge, when literally every album by The Tangent is right there if you actually look for it. When I listen to [name]'s songs it gives me a feeling of pure... I dunno. Life, maybe. It's been, oh, 17 years (a little more than half my life), and I still can't really explain it. I honestly believe my life didn't truly start until early 2006 when I found her website, everything before was backstory. When you write a story you're supposed to start it at the point where something interesting happens, for me that's age 15, 2006, and the handful of things that mattered before that point can be brought up in flashbacks.

She still occasionally makes music, and it's still good, but it's not like it was. It used to be a little weirder, more exciting, the lyrics more poetic, sometimes more exploratory or psychological, than now. And like I said, if I tried to add to that collection, it wouldn't work, I'd know it was pretend. I think I just want to be nestled in that music, forever, rather than really continue it.

Maybe it's escapism. Or maybe I'm grieving, maybe this whole website is me mourning something that no longer exists, that I've been unable to move on from since it ended. I don't think that's ever gonna stop though, I think I'll always want more. And I suppose if it's anyone's job to create more, it's mine.

Most of the original prog heroes of the 70s stopped making prog in the 80s. I bet this happens often, in all artforms and beyond art: the inventor of a thing isn't always its most prolific or longest-lasting exponent. A lot of the best prog artists out there now have been doing it longer than 10 years. Inventing something is an incalculable achievement but by the numbers at least, Jem Godfrey has at least as much prog cred as Tony Banks.

Of course, where I say "if it's anyone's job to create more, it's mine", the truth is anyone can make any music they want. It really is anyone's job to create more of the kind of music I want more of. But I'm gonna go one step further and be silly and possessive about it, unnecessarily so: if it was only one person's job to make more, (and none of the original artists were available,) then that person would be me. But no, of course anyone can do this. I just feel like it needs to exist and that I'm the right person to do it, and I guess I feel that so strongly that I think: if there's only one "right person for the job" in the whole world, it's me.

So I think probably Emily is just a persona through which I make this type of music. I think over time it'll transform more into just my own style, since, actually, what little we heard of what [name] was working on before her hiatus was actually very prog in some ways. Prog by way of very soundtrack-influenced synth pop. She was a proper composer, and uncompromising, and definitely had some second hand prog influences through her JRPG influences (Uematsu being a big ELP fan for instance). I always wanted to write like her and, musically at least, some of the style I've ended up with is somewhere she could have gone next.

I guess I'm just scared of pretending. The whole point is to make music like hers, but I'll never be her no matter how hard I pretend. And if I pretend at all, it sort of won't really be me either. I guess I have to find a way to be honest behind a mask. Maybe you can use a mask to be honest in ways you can't without a mask. Or at least to begin with, like when people figure out they're trans by playing DnD. Maybe there's something I'm supposed to learn from this. (If, deep down, we already are everything we want to be.)

Anyway, I do intend to end the "alternate timeline self" stuff at some point at least: I've only charted up to and including 2007 (that's 2028 in "our timeline"). Maybe it'll all make sense then.