Paul Brady ..beginner blogger

January 27, 2010

Hello all. Welcome to this, the first posting on my first ever blog. I have to say I’ve been dragged screaming to this blogging business. I’m a man who lives in and is quite content in his own head. It’s just my make up. I love the world around me, and as my friends can attest to, I have a huge lust for life. I’m forever interested in and thrilled by the beauty of what happens here, but I’ve always been unsure of how to communicate with this world outside myself except, when I grew up a little, through the songs I wrote and the music I made.

If I didn’t have a strong ego and a need for approbation, I mightn’t ever have bothered to strive for acceptance as an artist. As it is, in spite of what many people see as a successful career in the public arena, I often struggle to see the point in selling what it is that I do and can find it hard to believe that anybody could be interested in what I have to express or how I express it.  On the other hand I feel the gift, the talent I’ve been given is significant and, while I mostly feel undeserving of it, I’ve arrived at a point where I’m really afraid of no one and feel the equal of anyone at my game, anywhere in the world.…especially when I’m performing. Then it all comes together. Bit of  a conflict here, you might say. You’d be right.

I seem to have lived my life so far in permanent incertitude and I don’t presently see that changing a lot. Everything around me seems continually moving, developing, changing. I feel these currents very strongly and have an instinctive comprehension of them on an immediate level which governs the way I behave on the surface. ..like I can somehow grab hold of thoughts and feelings for long enough to capture them in a song. But to deal with the world in a more obvious and direct way…which is what I feel blogging is…is a hard leap for me to make. Everyone who puts ‘pen to paper’ seems so certain to me, so opinionated and eager to use their intellectual athleticism to defend and promote what they think. I won’t say believe. It all seems mercurial. So often I feel they don’t really believe what they say…but are just psychically jousting with their peer group in a kind of knee-jerk power game. Then I figure that maybe the energy expended in that kind of social intercourse is the only fuel that gets anything done in this world and that I am, as Jimmy McCarthy said,  just ‘the geek with the alchemist’s stone’ wherever I got it from.

Anyway, here I am. More of this stuff as I get my head round the concept. Welcome aboard!  PB