'Sirens'

If you have photo-sensitive epilepsy, please avoid the video and listen to this audio version instead.

I’m not a supporter of ‘trigger warnings’ prefacing works of art for emotional sensitivity and sheltering reasons, but for actual physical conditions that can have a devastating consequences, like epilepsy, I am all for them. I will never include them to warn about ‘hurty’ words, offensive content or any other ‘safe space’, protectionist, safety-ism nonsense. In my view, Art is supposed to emotionally challenge people and their taboos as well as push the boundaries of comfort sometimes. Emotion based trigger warnings, I feel, are antithetical to that concept 

Okay, ‘Sirens’! I’m going to get some stick for this one, I can just feel it. Fuck it. Live not by lies.

Like Eminem famously said at the start of ‘Hailie's Song’, ‘I feel like singing. I’m gonna fucking sing’: and he did. And like him, I too sometimes feel compelled to venture into musical genres and styles that are atypical for me as an artist merely on a whim. Sometimes the creative urge just pushes me in a particular unorthodox and not so obvious direction. 

For this song, it was the inverse of Eminem, who ventured out from his comfort zone of rapping into singing, I went in the opposite direction, a singer trying his hand at rapping. I know, cringe!

I hadn’t planned to rap it though, as I am definitely NOT a hip-hop artist or a rapper in any sense. As I often do, I am only sharing the remnants of a demo with you in this post. The verse vocals on this track were a ‘guide vocal’ on that demo, which accompanied the written lyrics in a folder I sent to a friend of mine. 

He is a rapper, and a very talented one at that, among his many talents. In conversation I mentioned I had been struck by the muse and compelled to write a hip-hop song, complete with lyrics, called ‘Sirens’. I explained the subject matter of the song, how much it meant to me and the fact that I was in no way a good enough rapper to perform the track. I told him that I had accepted that this one would be destined to be forgotten by the annals of history and had moved on. 

But I played him the demo anyway. As my friend and a man who is always excited to collaborate in music making, he kindly offered to record my lyrics verbatim so that the journey of this song could continue. I was elated. 

I sent him the lyrics along with two versions of the demo, one with my vocals so he could get an idea of how I wanted it to flow, and one without verse lyrics to practise it along to. He said leave it with him.  

And I did. For a long time. I texted him after a few weeks and he said that he was sorry, that he had been busy, and that he’d get to it asap. I said no rush and continued to wait… for months. I saw him regularly in person throughout that time period, and he never mentioned it once.