Marigolds

Am I Scared of Love?

Hello,

I hope you enjoyed last week’s track- Otter Song. It seems to have resonated with many of you which makes me happy. This week we’ve been doing a little bit of remixing some aspects of it to get things ready for streaming.

Marigolds is the song I’m sharing with you this week. I wrote it a couple of years ago and I’ve been playing it regularly but this is the first recording of it. I know it’s a bit of a songwriting cliché but it was one of those songs that seemed to pre-exist my writing it. It happened very quickly and felt a bit like stenography rather than songwriting.

This song is personal in that it speaks to some of my own questions around how to be in the world. It’s a song I find difficult to introduce at shows, perhaps because it has taken me some time to understand what it’s about. For a while I’ve felt like I was grasping at its meaning. I would say something like ‘this song is about coming down to earth’ but that didn’t seem to capture it.

I feel like it’s a song full of questions. My updated understanding of it centres more around learning to be in relationship to the life around me, rather than absenting myself from it in some way or other as a defence. How do we stay connected to others and ourselves when we don’t feel connected?

It’s a song about acceptance, and the difficulty of accepting and sharing love. Sometimes it can feel unsafe to feel love or share love even in the places where we expect it should feel easy. That’s the central question of the song. If I let love in, will it destroy me? If I show my love and make myself vulnerable will I be destroyed?

I could write much more on the subject, but it’s probably best to listen to the song as I think whatever I’m trying to communicate, I do it better there. I’d also be curious about what you hear in it, or how it resonates with you.

Making music at the moment feels like a bit of a one way conversation but I’m genuinely interested in developing a dialogue here if there’s one to be had.

I hope you enjoy the song.

David

p.s. 7th November show for Cupar Arts is fast approaching. Hope to see you there.