the unedited life pt.1

familiar rhythms inside unfamiliar walls

My wife and I have just moved house.

We don’t have much furniture yet. A couple of accent chairs in the living room and a few essentials - 2 coasters, candles, plants, bedsheets for curtains and the upright piano of course! Enough to live, enough to get by. The bedrooms, office/studio and the kitchen are pretty much there and all the boxes are unpacked, a few corners of the home are still shapeless, but strangely, none of it feels uneasy in the way I expected.

The morning rituals are the same.

I still brew coffee the same way every morning. Still go out for a run. We found ourselves meeting at the chairs for lunch. The scaffolding of our days hasn’t changed, even though almost everything else has. Familiar rhythms inside unfamiliar walls.

There’s something beautifully chaotic about moving to a new area. You’re learning streets, sounds, timings. Nothing is optimised yet. You don’t quite know where things belong — physically or emotionally — and because of that, there’s a softness that settles in. A kindness towards your changing self.

I’ve realised how freeing that can be. When you accept that things aren’t fully assembled, you stop trying to perform competence. You engage with life as it is, rather than how it should look once everything is in place. In transition, there’s permission. You’re allowed to not have it all together and figure things out slowly. There’s enough space to notice what you really want to keep.

This feels deeply connected to how I write music.

The other day I was recording harp with my friend, Amy. We didn’t arrive with perfect ideas. There was no fully formed concept waiting to be executed. We simply hit record, and she started playing. Once the wheels are spinning, it is easier to steer. And in that act — in the commitment to begin without certainty — solid ideas emerged. Music doesn’t want to be over-edited at the outset. It reminded me that the most rewarding writing sessions rarely come from having everything planned. They come from stepping into motion and trusting that clarity will meet you there.

Speaking of new music, LP II is about to get mixed, which is genuinely exciting. It will rapidly take shape and before we know it, the next story will be ready! I have also moved into a new studio — another unfinished space, another environment still finding its voice. I’ll write more about that in the coming months. For now, check out "LP II - 50%" the incomplete version of the whole record.

For now, I’m noticing how much grace lives in incompleteness.

A half-furnished home.
A new neighbourhood still revealing itself.
Music that becomes itself only after you press record.

There’s a kindness among the chaos — towards the work, towards the process, towards ourselves. And maybe that kindness is what allows things to grow without being suffocated by perfection.

This year, I want to stay close to that feeling.
To live a little less edited.
To let things arrive.