There's a lot of nice music about.

Do you know what I mean?

There are a lot of people who’ve really got something to say.

There are also a lot of people who are making ...

Nice.

Everything in the right place.

Everything and everyone sounding like everything and everyone else, neatly presented in its DAW-assigned space in the mix, buffed by the same presets everyone else is using.

Everything adding up to the equivalence of music: not music per se, but what we've come to expect music to sound like and be for us.

The singer singing all the right notes.

The melodies going up and down in all the right places.

The lyrics saying all of the right things, ticking all the boxes we need to be ticked to validate us, our internal landscapes and the worldviews representative of our tribe.

Arrangements that enfold us in the comfort of the familiar from the first note to the last.

Ditto album sequences. Album opener, second single, third song ballad ...

From the second-generation hipster vibes of the current crop middle-class white-boy guitar indie to the sub-divisions of the urban jungles; from the roots to the fruits ... it's all just an exercise in nice.

There’s nothing wrong with being nice.

After all, thousands if not tens of thousands of perfectly nice, perfectly blameless people are make a living from all of this niceness.

Tens of thousands of us are listening to it, letting it help lubricate our passage through our days and our lives.

Our favourite artists have looked to this year's festival circuit to make their mortgage payments for the year like they did in 2018, all playing their versions of the nice ...

... and those of us who can afford tickets and know someone with a superfast server and mad refresh skills will sing and sway along with the rest of the artfully distressed straw hats in the audience.

We'll share the nice ... which I was always told was the best way to live.

Everyone gets paid, everyone goes home happy. Rinse, repeat ad infinitum.

And there’s nothing wrong with that at all.

It’s just all a bit …

Well …

Nice.

©℗ A. I. Jackson

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The first Origin(al) Stories Journal was a blog launched to track the writing and recording of the Northumbria album. You can read about the thought processes behind that here.

Following the launch of The Landing Stage website, I’ve decided to continue with the Origin(al) Stories posts.

The Landing Stage showcases some of the things I do.

The Origin(al) Stories posts show some of the thoughts and processes and activities that go into those acts of doing.

Drawn from my personal diaries and journals, the posts might often seem unconnected, elliptical and fragmentary.

This is because the Origin(al) Stories blog doesn’t offer the definitive conclusions, hacks, lists or ‘how to …’ advice beloved of Youtube gurus, bro-science and self-help manuals.

This is because there’s no one road through the forest, no one route to the top of the mountain, no one path to where you want to be and what you want to do.

The Origin(al) stories only shows how I’ve found a path through to doing something.

The path always has to give you as much as the destination.

They are, as I noted in the original post about it, postcards from the journey. Snapshots of work in progress - which is what all lives and endeavours are.

If you’ve liked an Origin(al) Stories post, or it’s helped you with something you’re doing in some way, please share it to your socials, and give credit. All content on this website is copyrighted and attributable.

If you’d like to listen to Northumbria, download it here.

If you’d like to listen to Alnwyck Jameson Badger, download it here.

If you’d like to listen to Broken Oars Podcast, download it here.

Thanks for reading. Have a great day. Tell the people you love that you love them. Be a positive force.