The masks we wear
Thoughts about the masks we wear while playing roles and dreaming of fulfilling childhood's promise
My new album is out this week – a collection of songs I spent the past year or so writing and recording, then editing and tweaking until I hated each song and never wanted to hear them again. But ignore me, and go listen to it!
Choosing a name for something is hard, as I’ve written before. A child, a pet, a song, or a record: these names will stick around for a long time. In this instance, nobody really cares except me, but I wanted to choose something that symbolised the collection of ideas and feelings I was expressing, without sounding trite.
I settled on “Masks”, which also ended up being the name of the closing song on the album. A lesser writer would insert the dictionary definition of the word “Masks” at this point, but come on: this is Man Feelings. Let’s talk about emotions instead!
Fame is a mask that eats into the face
We’re all performing, at one time or another. Maybe it’s at work, where people are frequently code-shifting to better integrate with others, at the expense of their personal language preferences. Maybe it’s the introvert/extrovert dynamic, where we briefly dip into our non-favoured personality style in order to facilitate something or blend into the background where required. Indeed, we could be “masking” – a strategy employed by autistic people to try to camouflage themselves in social situations (with negative impact on the individual as they suppress their true self).
In my case, I was thinking more about the dressing-up aspects of masks: putting on a role; taking on a character; temporarily occupying someone else’s persona. In terms of my music, I couldn’t force myself to try to write a consistent set of songs with the same “vibes” and genres.
This isn’t meant to be a humblebrag about how eclectic and wide-ranging my musical tastes and abilities are: it’s more of a confession that I enjoy the process of dressing up as my favourite artists and trying to emulate their sounds too much. Each song is the sound of me putting on a different “mask” as I try to be Fleet Foxes, Conor Oberst, Radiohead, Ted Leo or the Flaming Lips. At first I worried that the album would be too inconsistent, but then I realised that it didn’t matter, nobody would care, and the only reason I was doing this was for my own enjoyment and pleasure.
The other aspect of “masks” is my own acceptance of my life, my creative work, and my legacy here on Earth. Without wanting to sound too highbrow—these are 11 amateur-recorded songs, let’s be clear—I wanted to think about my place in the world and my hopes and dreams.
Who will read the books we write
When I was a child, I wanted to be an author. I’d make tiny “books” of folded paper and write proudly “Written and illustrated by Matthew Andrews” on the front. I won every writing and poetry contest going when I was at school, and dutifully wrote my first “novel” as a teenager doing NaNoWriMo.
Today, approaching 40, I’m a middle-manager in a software team and have yet to realise that dream of authorship: to coin a phrase, it’s a fiction. But some part of me still harbours the improbable hope/confidence that this will still happen for me, one day: some of my favourite authors didn’t publish anything until they were approaching 50. And yet…
Similarly with music: in my teens I played in multiple bands with smart, talented friends: if we’d pushed just a little harder, committed to the music just a little more, could we have been a struggling band on the cusp of making it? Almost certainly not, but perhaps those years were our only realistic chance of success, now that we’re all too old (and busy with kids) to be globe-touring rock stars.
Part of growing up is coming to terms with your youthful dreams and accepting that they were never very realistic in the first place, or perhaps even that you don’t really want them to come true any more (I don’t think I’d sleep very well on a tour bus anyway). Again, this is what I mean by “masks”: releasing these songs is a way for me to play dress-up and pretend to be a professional songwriter releasing records and making music. I don’t have to do all of the hard work of touring and promotion, and don’t have to face the grim reality of limited success and underwhelming responses.
(to be clear, my music isn’t exactly setting the world on fire – I just mean that my livelihood doesn’t depend on the meagre payouts from Spotify)
I’ll leave the last word to, er, myself. This is the final verse of “Masks”, the final song on my album of the same name:
Why is history meant to judge us?
Why is time not on our side?
Why can’t living be our legacy?
Why do we care when we die?
I mean it – and they’re questions to myself. Why am I worrying about the “legacy” I’ll leave behind; the great works of artistic value that I somehow think I should be producing? Who even cares? I want to focus less about what happens after I’m dead and in the ground, and more about making living my legacy: being with my family and loved ones, making things I want to make just for the sheer joy of having made them, and making the most of whatever I have right now, today.
Mini-feels this week
You can (finally) ring my bell
I’ve had to install one of those video camera doorbells after avoiding it for the longest time. I work from my garden shed, which means that I frequently miss deliveries to the main house because I can’t hear the doorbell.
For a while this was solved by using one of those plug-in chimes, paired with the front doorbell on the house. But then I got a new uPVC door for the shed, which—it turns out—do a great job blocking the signal and my bell no longer rang.
So now I have an unwanted surveillance camera on the front door of my house, plus an unwanted Alexa device in my shed to connect to it, just so I can hear when someone’s at the front of the house and go and sign for whatever thing we’ve decided we need to buy. Globalisation has a lot to answer for.