Interim note: this fearfully long tome compiled for musicians featured on this site and the many women still to make an appearance in coming months and years is a draft text.
My idea of a log-linked internet radio station is a proposal put at the end, along with first mention of one made to me in my paid job at the Factory. This offer could be a great idea, for singer-songwriters and me alike as someone passionate about their work.
I wrote "compiled" because the entry puts together in one place the themes and notions of how this site will best serve its purpose that have come to me in the past six months, but were scattered around in light of developments and feedback.
Of course, I wouldn't dream of sending so long a mail to busy musicians, while this needs subbing. In the meantime, brief ones are being written and sent as I can. A thumbs down to the radio idea would surprise me, but I'd prefer to consult people whose copyrights are concerned without having to go through legal hoops!
French law is open to such things, but I like to ask, though this is a "labour of love" rather than professional work on music of the kind I did in the first years of my journalist's career.

Dear musician,

You have a gift, a very great gift.

You sound out your soul. There you find the notes and the words -- sometimes fronting bands, more often under no name but your own -- to give me and anybody else who cares really to listen the songs of your heart, your dreams, your life, your experience and even your innocence!
In doing this, you have given meaning to your life.
This is a thank you letter for what you have given me, among many others, and it's also a musical proposal.

It's a proposal made because I too have a gift, not a solitary one but rarer than I'd imagined until people told me it's back. If I go on sharing mine, I feel with you I can help make for a world many find in their dreams, only too infrequently in their lives.
My gift is simply to use words well and with understanding about yours. As some singer-songwriters know, but many don't, for six months now this is what I've been doing, developing that gift and focussing my creativity on deepening my insight into your worlds.
You're already a part of what I'm doing on this site dedicated to you -- or you will be because by both my intent and growing reader request, this place is around to stay, a long-term project where you come first.

I write here at length, asking for your patience, because you are very good at what you do, while I know from feedback I'm getting -- rarely on the log itself, but in an unexpected number of mails -- I've recovered a skill that some find "special".
I know how to write about you and about music in a way that's fairly rare, with a combination of serious, hard work and a lightness of touch that brings people to you, people who often had never heard of you.
Nothing can give me as much pleasure in reviving this onetime professional and paid practice than a note from a stranger saying, "Thanks, Nick. I've just bought her album. I love it."
That's what I'm there for, that's why I do it.
You've turned me on. I'll share that as best I can.

What the log isn't is a "fan site".
What it isn't is a place where yet another self-styled "journalist reviewer" gives you stars like most do. Some of those who "rate you" and give you stars I admire when they do it for the right reasons, but it's simply not my style.
What it isn't is an adventure online where saying "thank you" is an excuse to get between you and your audiences as a pundit. I see my "job" as playing a part in helping others discover and appreciate what you do.
Your music is a part of my very lifeblood, no less, and I believe in donating blood to help save other lives!

Sometimes I'm presumptuous enough to write what may help you too, the musician, in your life and your art, because of what my ears and your sounds and words inform me where you're at. On the rare occasions I'm sure of this, as a gut knowing what may not have come to you as an opening to explore, I'll put it in my write-up.
My aim is always constructive and based on training and experience. You don't, of course, need to lend an ear to whatever I may suggest! It's only that, a suggestion. But you never know and later on in this, I'll tell you why I stake a claim to be able to make such suggestions.
For now, I'll just say nobody has exactly the same musical background; mine happens to be very extensive. Just sometimes, I could plant a seed in you the musician, simply saying, "It sounds to me that if you tried this now, what you could do with it would really be something."
An example lies in differences between what you do in the recording studio and what you do in live performances. Occasionally, with very attentive listening, I feel you're ready for an adventure, with just a wee bit of encouragement. For instance, you've just made a fine, richly layered and complex album.
On stage, you pare it down. Less "rich", perhaps, in your ears. But fabulous in my own. Next time round, in the studio, you might want to try the same, risking a little more "rawness" and going for simplicity. It's not always that easy to tell, in a busy life without the time and distance you need, when you're ready just to be yourself: acoustic.
But such choices, of course, should never be pressured or anybody else's but your own. My paid job, like the music industry, is one where the pressure is always very high. It took me years to learn to pace the work my way, not those imposed on me, which in the long run were no good for anyone!

I'd like to address you by name, rather than call you "dear musician". But I'm no cat with nine lives, so they say, like one strong-willed bundle of fur, independent mind, musical ears and insatiable appetite has!
While you're a unique individual and perhaps we've met if I've had the luck to hear and see you live, with three decades as a professional journalist under my belt you could well be somebody I knew to enjoy on stage and leave it at that, going away a happy guy. A man who has lately then taken his time to write up your show instead of rushing into a piece that doesn't come from "thinking with the heart".
I know it can be as draining as you also find it exhilarating to give so much of yourself in concert, on tour, sometimes mobbed and misunderstood. The last thing you need -- as generous, open souls but also women out to unwind when you can like anyone else -- is to have some idiot come up, before or after you've done the best you can to share, asking damn-fool questions!
So on the whole, I don't pull out the press card or harass you or your agent for an interview. When on tour, you're a professional with a lot at stake almost each night and that's enough! Some superb concerts I don't write up. Instead, I like to let what you did become a part of me, a feast to be savoured slowly.

I know you're very likely to have a web site of your own. A handful of musicians have asked: "May I use what you've written on my site."
The answer to that one, to each of you, is "Of course you can! Don't even bother to ask. If what I've written is of any use to you, feel free to take what you want, you can do what you like with it."
By nature and career, you're a sharing person. So am I, and one who has had a lifelong love affair with music in almost all its forms worldwide. In fact, it means so much to me, as it does to you, that for a tough long spell in my life, I had to switch off to it. That's a story else where on this log, about a time I needed also, bringing a far-sighted view of close love relationships to bear, to forego even sex for many years.
Why do I tell you something so intimate? Because the long-term view proved the best for all parties concerned. And as someone who can no longer perform music and wasn't really very gifted during the years I made my way up through all those "grades", as purely a listener, I have both remembered and deepened my own understanding of what you know.
What stopped me playing was first, life's circumstances with no room for it, then a very bad bout of repetitive strain injury, too close to carpal tunnel syndrome, when I might have done. I don't regret such "mishaps", that's just how it is. Now, what I share with musicians is a very deep, intuitive grasp it's hard to explain to people who aren't of the inseparable languages of music and our sexuality. Those guys in their ivory towers might try a parachute one day, come down and see some of you perform!
I don't think then that unless blind and in self-denial as well, they would have much difficulty in hearing and seeing how many musicians are pretty gifted in the very dark arts of foreplay, teasing, caressing, and even, goodness gracious, holding back an orgasm until "whoops, the earth moved"!
It was high time somebody else took a good swipe at musicologists who analyse the art-form to death and are entirely deaf to the very like nature of making good music and making love! It was also my last excuse to illustrate a log entry with naked women engaged in provocative activities who weren't, for the most part, musicians! I did have a serious point to make, though.
I wouldn't recommend delving too deep into that particular entry, all the same, unless you want to know how it feels when you get to 50 and despite having every reason in the world not to be in the least bit bothered by one more zero, you are all the same! I look back on it with a mixture of the shivers and amusement!

Now, I've dedicated my site to you as one of my first acts of true freedom, the freedom to be my whole self, knowing as you do when at your happiest, say, on a stage that your greatest wealth and joy comes not from what you own and earn, but what you give. People like you, me, others, but with the focus always on you: you do know, don't you, that we're reshaping the world?
Some of you are very overtly political. I was, for decades. I've packed it in, not because I regard causes as lost, dreams as idle, campaigning as wasting time. More simply, those years in me are over. I can serve the cause of making the world I'd like my daughter to inherit far better by writing about you and what you do. That -- and subversion, I'm an expert! -- are my ways now of "spreading the news".
I began blogging in February 2003, when in my "hard news" full-time journalist's job -- though my lot is being chief African affairs editor in English for one of the world's big three news agencies -- Gulf War II "got to me" as it became inevitable and in my eyes and that of very many experienced colleagues, a "chronicle of a disaster foretold." Somehow, I've managed never to become cynical, though I can assure you people that a newsroom is not a good place to be when "the shit's going down" because one way we journalists protect our hearts from being torn apart by it is with a humour that's very black indeed.
To my surprise, colleagues began saying, "Thanks for the outlet"! But I wrote hundreds of thousands of words later, often funny, expressing a range of interests. People enjoyed it, but that time was also the final, hardest phase of a life-long healing process for a mental illness that had left me a very splintered man.

That got logged as part of my story too, with an honesty and sense of the absurd I learned to pursue because it helped others who told me so. Even a mad love affair went in there! I've left most of it for those who care. During this year, the first when I know myself to be whole and integrated -- "healed" according to those who guided me through a dark decade and more to get here -- something much better happened.
I understood how much I owe of my health and happiness to you. And I know for certain that some -- even many -- of the women whom these words are for -- you -- live and sing with your courage what I've lived, "touched by fire", astride that fine line nobody can quite draw between tremendous creativity and madness.
Of all the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of musicians whose work I know or have been discovering in catching up on the years where I missed out, it simply happens that however widely varied and different as you can be one from another, women singer-songwriters have a very special place in my life.
So does J.S. Bach. So does the late Fela (Ransome-Kuti), the man who reshaped Nigeria's musical life. So does Ravi Shankar. The list, as for anyone with my tastes and curiosity for music of all times and places in the world is endless -- and I don't consider you a species apart!
You're not, you are first and foremost musicians who happen to be women. But I've talked now to enough of you to know that there's nothing sexist in giving you one of the very few web sites around where you are guaranteed the understanding, time and empathy that makes for what you want. And you tell me, like my readers, I've got that gift.

The very personal things I've disclosed to you are not irrelevant. To have confronted my own shadow and my light and accept both does -- so people tell me -- qualify me to write about you with a striking sensitivity that's good for all of us. Well, all? I'm not talking about Peaches, Bratmobile and other wild women who I enjoy as much as the poets among you!
My other mostly given reasons for turning the site over to you boil down to this. There's no point in false modesty about my growing knowledge of your lives and creativity and putting it to good use, when scouring the Net for really decent writing about you, I've been appalled at what I find on a myriad music sites when they're not your own places!
The overall standard of music writing on the Net and in many magazines is dire, particularly about you. That's not arrogance talking. I'll tell you why. It's not just a banal "women in a tough man's world" thing. Let's not overdo the "struggle" either. For the wisest of us, the "battle of the sexes" ended in my lifetime or, at least, changed so much that's no way to put it.
It's the lack of people who listen to you! I mean "listen", as opposed to "judge". For years, I've listened and learned as a writer I admire puts it, "judgement is poverty". I read what you tell journalists, sometimes unprofessional ones who have no real claim to the title and ask you silly questions as well as good ones. I listen above all to what you sing.

I know what most of you hate, because I hate it also. Let me give just four telling examples. One of you is Tori Amos, just one. But do you know, Tori, how many "clones" you've got? Or so literally hundreds of music writers would have me and others believe! My regular readers will be bored by this, but it is the one appalling, shameless comparison I find everywhere!
What then of you, the others?
You're not Tori Amos but have a unique voice, play a piano and other keyboards, and write splendid songs about yourself or others in your head and not about Tori! Yet writers with far bigger egos to nurture than ears to listen have decided she's your goddess and inspiration.

Here's another. Maybe you're the equally unique Fiona Apple. There aren't dozens of you either. Of the one of you, I got an early release in France of your latest -- I don't mean the bootleg that caused such a stir, I mean the album you finally released.
As a reviewer, you've stumped me! But let me get there in my own time; I hope it won't be too far off your own mark in that I find it hard to enjoy what you've done this time without hearing more than a nod and a wink to say Kurt Weill and Bertholt Brecht, others less well-known but in that same mould of pre-war Berlin. That's a question I would want to ask!
Do I just hear it, or have you gone right back to the ironic, edgy cabaret of those crazy 1930s and had your way with it, love, to transform it completely into a music for the New York of 2005. Whatever you did, while people waited ... and waited, I wonder whether you spotted also the vilest words inflicted on one or two others by self-appointed critics.
It's not your fault! But I wouldn't have liked to be on the receiving end of lines that said, "Look, while you're waiting for Fiona Apple to deliver her third album, here's an [X for a name] who could keep you fairly happy in the meantime." If I were X, I'd put my arm in yours, go and see the feller and thump him, preferably below the belt!

Just two more. Alison Goldfrapp, you and your man Will did pretty well keeping a certain cool and even humour up against a man from one, to be fair, good French music magazine who told you two what so many others get told that you stand in nicely for them. Congratulations! Your third album was a kind of "best of", wasn't it?
The pair of you simply took your strongest points on albums one and two and made number three, putting those together. I enjoyed the put-down, where fairly gently, you suggested that in fact, you had sought to do quite the opposite. And to my ears, again yet to be reviewed in full, you did do something completely new.
How very outrageous of you both!

For a last "famous" name, lovely Liz Phair, you blew it, didn't you, in 2003? How could you have so boldly told the truth about where you were right then? It was a very tough place to be. So I wrote you up differently from most, commended you on doing it so well, wished you the very best for the next album -- you've pulled that off too. Well done!

What I'm simply telling scores of you with these examples is that, while I'm nothing special, you'll never catch me playing the "She sounds like..." game with any of you. You don't. You sound like yourselves. The "sounds like game" is the coward critic's excuse for showing off what they know at your expense. None of you are very interested in it. Neither am I.
And as a good journalist, I never write a music piece without a lot of research behind the scenes. It's your site, but some of you don't help me! Still, it doesn't bother me when you're not always very forthcoming about yourselves except in your music. I'm challenged and then know to trust my ears and intuitions.
A final last concept I've defended is one denied you, by too many others for my liking, who I also call bad writers. They seem to think that in being musicians, you are less entitled in your own frequently stringent demands on yourselves than the rest of us to what I've pompously called "your sovereign right to change"!
That being so and given the expectations that puts on you for "More of the same, please," then I'm a lucky man. I can change when I must and do. It's called growth, I think! But I can't think of any other art form where change and growth are built in by the nature of it as much as they are in music. I wouldn't ask you to surprise me every time, because changes happen, you don't force them, but you know like I do: stagnate and you're dead.

Fortunately, outrageously long though this is, I'm sitting up throughout Friday night towards the end of a special week trying to sub it down for you. It's clear to me and others who know me well that in not only declaring my site your place as I did a while ago, but now telling you so in some detail, that's how it's going to be for the rest of my life.
When I quit AFP, the news agency, quite some years hence, you musicians will become, I fear for the rest of the world, a book! I don't want to write a heavy and dull tome; though winter puts me in a serious mood and it may not show here, I've got very quick-fire wit and also have the gift of making difficult subjects easy and readable without over-simplifying.
As I log, I make notes all along for the one-day book. On the log, where the aim is very simply to win each of you a wider and more appreciative public -- and for all our sakes, don't scream "Me first"; I tease, but I've bought albums by many scores of you -- I'm leaving out much that will be in the book.
If you check out Susheela Raman, you'll see one of the entries where I do bring in elements of a lifetime's scholarship I don't brag about because I've enjoyed every minute of it. In 1974, I was going to be an ethnomusicologist, so I tucked sociology and anthropology under my belt! In 1980, a French girl put paid to that! I left an England I didn't then much care for Paris and all that's happened since.
My academic side, however, I prefer to wear very lightly. In writing about you, of course I'll put you in your social context -- but that must never come between your music and somebody else's ears. And because, simply asking around, I know that some of you who are very renowned with huge followings, you don't have fans all over.
Most of you know who Aimee Mann is. The night a hard day's work with London bomb attacks keeping everybody very busy got me thinking, "Shit, I'll never make her concert," I went round the agency trying to give away my ticket. First question: "Who's Aimee Mann?", second one, with distrust: "Why are you giving it away?"
So I write on the premise that each one of you is completely new to somebody. I also don't assume people know anything about how music's put together. When it's vital to explain, I do, briefly and with analogies anybody can follow. But I grew up in a time when music teachers -- the ones I knew -- did their best to crush a love of music in kids by making its language, or its building blocks, an obstacle to their enjoyment. In that stupidly class-conscious Britain of the 1960s, the "arts" were decidedly not for the people.
That lesson in learning to despise snobbery and elitism about music is one I began to implement as soon as I started writing about it. When a friend recently said, "I'd come to the concert, but it'll be above my head, so it's wasted on me," I replied: "Just bring your ears. Open them. That's all you need." It's in the book, not on the log, that I'll fully explore your roles in changing society and attitudes. For now, it's enough to write about you and what you sing about and how.

My other "trick of the trade" is an easy journalist's one. Many of you I don't know until I listen to your albums. Thus the log is a place where people discover you with me. And I listen, most usually, without first reading what others say of you. I'd rather find out directly from you. I cheat a little, since if I like what I've sampled on iTunes and you've made 119 records, then I would rather know before I buy one or two of them, what you and people at Amazon regard as your best.
It's guidance only. I don't know how I do it and I don't care, but some "whispering angel" usually sits on my shoulder. "Maybe this one!" And then it turns out, that inner voice was "right", it was indeed an album where you felt you had really achieved something special.
The journalist in me puts a nose in my ears, if you'll forgive the revolting self-portrait, that always knows to "go to source". There's only 100 percent reliable source about you. It's you, of course. So between the often multiple listening and then the write-up I give you, I do a lot of research behind the scenes.
There aren't any deadlines, I take my time. You did when you made the album -- usually. I took my time, too, preparing this open letter, but I look at the hundreds of still unsaid words in draft shape and think: "You poor devils. It's your place, that's about enough of me. And so it is, nearly. If you're being patient enough to read this, first you're on the log, so you can judge for yourselves anyway -- and secondly, you have the patience of a saint!
There is a little bit. I promised I'd say a little more about what qualifies me to make suggestions, give you little nudges and encouragement sometimes in return for the big wallops you give me! That background of mine. Now I'm at it again, for the joy of sharing my love of your music, I look back on the work of 25 years ago. I'm astounded. I can scarcely credit how smart and far-sighted I was then.
A smug bastard I must have been! Actually, I wasn't, it was all far too much fun -- those five years at the Beeb were a good time. Since then, I've simply built on those foundations of scholarship worn lightly. The upshot is just knowing a whole lot about almost every kind of music there must be.
Whether it's what the Chinese called "people's opera", how a gamelan in Indonesia functions, the way Indian ragas are structured, why atonality and serial music could be as emotionally arduous and intolerable as they're intellectually fascinating, how Webern or John Cage mastered the arts of silence, the complex origins of the blues, why Harry Partsch built his own extraordinary instruments, how African drummers do it, what South American Indians put into Peru's ... and never mind, but it's all there!
I just forgot I had it. What that does isn't to enable me to show off. It helps me jump around an 60 GB iPod crammed full of people like you with all those other musics and think, "My goodness, now if she were to meet her or him, that would sound fantastic!" These are dreams really. But we live in times where they're possible. When I was at the BBC, we spliced tapes with razor blades! More seriously, we all have our downers, our bum times when we get a bit lost.
I know that only too well in my writing. You know it in your music. Generally, when you know it, so do I. I won't slam you for a "dud". I'll let the intuition come to me, the way I best like my mind working, rather than always thinking, and if by any chance, I hear your path back as well, then I'll write it so.

Here's where we get -- finally -- to my proposal and request.
Dawn has broken.
It's no longer Friday night, it's a Saturday morning close to the end of one of the weeks in every five or six I take a complete break from the news of the world to be able to be able to make time aplenty for my friends and for you, magicians all. And for meditation.
There's plenty of writing on the log about your magic, though this is the first time I've used that word for what it is you do for me and others in giving so generously of your souls, however you do it, that you touch the souls of others. Music is an art of alchemy.
I logged the other day words to the effect that among you all -- whether hilarious, reflective, lonely, soaring the stratosphere, heart-broken, witty, sharp, brutal, joyful, again ... whatever -- there must be scarcely an emotion, a mood, a story of all our lives, where at least one of you doesn't take the terrible sadness or the great happiness of someone listening and speak to them directly, from your own experience or imagination, with the words they need.
You've done so often for me. You go on doing it every day. And when I'm in harmony with myself and in tune with our world, the oddest things happen! My log's full of strange events, coincidences that can't be.
If you're interested in this side of me, rather than idle chicken-or-egg speculation about whether it's your beauty that gets you into music or your music that makes you such inescapably good-looking women, you'll find my spiritual qualities in what I call "the orchard".
There's certainly a pattern to my listening that's beyond me! It will take me years to write about you all, but I'm in no rush, I want to do it well. Your music, more I think than anything else apart from deep certainties I can't explain but know to be true, has made of the log a mystery story I'm writing too.
I so recently wrote more of it that here I'll just say that each morning like this one, it's mostly in your songs I find in myself a complete faith, given the patience that some time not so very distant, I'm going to meet a woman I don't know. And this time, it's going to be a real love match.
New York singer Sarah Fimm, the "Seraphim", sings "Be like water."
She's right.
But I seek also to "be music". And I know music in a woman when I see it. Here, I've reached that point where I also know my words stop and what you do takes over because I can just talk about it.
I'd like to give people more. And I've realised how I can do it! There's an addition to the part of my "roll of honour" where your own sites appear. I change it regularly -- the only way in which I can give everybody a turn, related partly to what's written of late, partly to hint who's coming up, and partly always to remind readers of how varied you are!
I'd like to broadcast, from time to time, a selection of songs by those in that always changing list. I've got the technology to stream "Taliesin's TribuTaries (VoW radio)" to anybody with a computer and iTunes, Mac or Windows. My headache was how to do this without opening a door to wholesale piracy!
Then I got it. I hope. Just like that one part of the roll is configured to show your sites at random, I can do the same with the music. If that's all right with you, I can think of no better way to take this site beyond my words to what it is you do. It's going to take me a long time to write to all of you!
But I plan, somehow to make that time. And there's one final thing. At work, my bosses started: "Nick, your site --"
"Oh no," I thought, "I've run the gamut of risks writing about 'the Factory'! Please don't protest now I'm doing this, when you never did about that.'
Paranoia is a wonderful thing! No, my dears, they'd like me to start writing about you there as well, on the international news wires. I did then, of course, put the mercenary question I usually never would when it comes to music and you.
They were clear. They won't pay me for it, but they'd give me more paid leave. I'm thinking about it.
If I do, there'd be two conditions on my side.
First, Taliesin is my real second name. I won't write about music under another any more. And last, I choose whom to write about and a sense of fairness tells me that, as a rule, it should be those starting out on lives in music.
They have a big place here, of course. But here I reach hundreds of people, many of them in Europe and in Africa, though that's changing. I've not decided yet, but a tentative "Yes" is taking shape, if not straight away.
I have a full life off the Net to live as well -- but it strikes me as quite an opportunity all the same, for me and you.
Provided, that is, that you like what I write!

Here's listening to you, kid,
Nick B.

Nov 5, 2005