stress Archives - thegoodwills.com

Deadline-stress-winton — Tambo Dam, which has nothing to do with this week’s FOMM, which I drafted a week before setting off on a road trip to Winton).

An old friend emailed me to say that when he saw a book review in the Sydney Morning Herald, he immediately assumed it was (a) my memoirs or (b) The Best of FOMM.

As he found out when reading the review, Friday on My Mind is a book by music writer Jeff Apter about the life of George Young. The late founder of the Easybeats wrote ‘Friday on My Mind’, a major hit around the world in 1966, with his songwriting partner Harry Vanda.

Friday on My Mind (the song), after which this weekly missive takes its name, is everything a pop hit should be. It starts with an irresistible ‘hook’ – the rapid-fire guitar intro that immediately cements the tune in your brain. It’s a circular song, starting with Monday morning (feels so bad), then names every week day through to Friday and back again.

This alone distinguishes FOMM from other songs about days of the week, which usually focus only on the day in question.

I was researching songs which name days of the week, finding yet again that if you have what seems to be an original idea, it has usually been done. Songs about a day of the week, or which mention a day of the week, for example.

Since the uncertainty and mass anxiety of COVID-19 set in around mid-March, I have been writing new songs. I’m not just writing, but using digital recording technology to flesh out the works in progress. Thus far, I have a seven songs which are at the point where I’d be happy to perform them in public, if I had a public to whom I could perform.

I had started toying with a song about deadline stress and how it always relates to a day of the week (if you have a weekly deadline). This new song is more likely to be about blogging and why millions of people around the world think other people will be interested in what’s on their minds. Some develop huge audiences and make some money, (like Nomadic Matt, which now has 1.5m followers).

Bloggers usually start with an ambitious bang and many vanish without trace within a year or two. The stayers stay by setting themselves deadlines.

A few years ago, I was writing about extreme weather in February; here and in the Northern hemisphere. This gave me a chance to reference the only song I know about February, a poignant Dar Williams tune. Along the way, I discovered a list compiled by Chuck Smeeton, who started the Cavan Project, with the aim of writing and posting a new original song once a month.

Apart from having an interest in lists, Chuck’s aim was to entertain people with an interest in music, but also to freshen up his songwriting by setting himself a deadline. Now, after writing a new song every month since 2012, he is packing it in. Sigh. I know how he feels after six and some years of writing 1,200 words a week.

Brisbane folk singer and performer John Thompson would also know how that feels. In 2011 he set himself quite a task – to research and record an Australian folk song every day for a year.

He achieved this goal, along the way uncovering old Australian folk music that might otherwise have sat undisturbed inside somebody’s piano stool. John wrote a few songs of his own on this ambitious journey, but in the main covered each song in his inimitable style. John finished the project, as befits his deft sense of humour, with Aeroplane Jelly, an advertising jingle which has blended into the culture, just like an old folk song.

I was chatting online to Brett Debritz, who was a sub editor at Brisbane’s the Daily Sun when it was a morning paper and later when it switched to afternoons. I asked if he could recall how many editions we produced. After conferring with a colleague, he said it was at least three, Monday to Friday at 7.30am, 10.30am and 2.30pm. We broke some good business stories in that final edition, which beat our rival The Courier-Mail simply by publishing before they did. Imagine that kind of deadline stress on a daily basis, next time you’re fretting about the article you’re writing for your monthly community newsletter.

I’ve never written songs to a deadline (which probably explains why my output has been so sporadic). I know songwriters who keep writing by exposing their new work to a collective. Some of these groups set challenges (a new song each day/week/month), and often written to a topic specified by the convenor. Some songwriters write songs together. I have always been a bit crap at collaborating (but I get 100% of the royalties).

Nevertheless, I support the notion of a group of creative people meeting to discuss what they do in the privacy of their own home studios.

So, I had this song idea which roughly started “Thursday I’ve got Friday on My Mind’. While true, this was never going to sit well with the publishers of the original song. Plan B, then. The idea was to somehow describe the creative tension which never goes away when promising people something new on a particular day of the week.

If you have a thing about lists, check out Chuck Smeeton’s months of the year and days of the week songs lists (including 16 Songs about August). Among other list blogs are ‘20 musicians who own wineries’ and my favourite, ‘28 songs in unusual time signatures’.

The latter, of course, includes (Dave Brubeck’s Take Five and Jethro Tull’s Living in the Past, both in 5/4), Money (Pink Floyd, 7/4), Happiness is a Warm Gun (The Beatles, various time measures) and Peter Gabriel’s Solsbury Hill (7/8).

In the spirit of ‘it’s been done, but never done my way’, here’s a playlist I put together on Spotify; two songs for every day of the week. Most of them are sourced from the music of my youth (1964-1974), but there are examples from the new crop of songwriters (who latch on to the topic as though it was a new thing).

The standout track in my opinion is banjo player Ian Simpson’s ‘Friday on My Mind’, drawn from a mixed collection of instrumentals by Simpson and guitarist John Kane.

As I so often think, when arriving at this point in my Friday essay (1,150 words), as the lyric of work-in-progress goes, “Will anyone see this post and does it really matter, only to my readers, near and far and widely scattered.”

Jimmy Webb would tell you that is not a true rhyme, to which I could say…By the time I get to Winton…

FOMM back pages

We’re on the road for a few weeks. This is something we prepared earlier.

Now that we have your attention, perhaps you could advise us what to do about our modest portfolio of shares, the value of which, in line with the rest of the Australian share market, is down 20% from April last year. Retirees tend to be more jittery about share market gyrations than your high-earning 30-somethings who have another 30 or so years to remedy the situation.

She Who Has Been Telling Me To Sell Since April says the solution is to report the diminished value of the portfolio to Centrelink and our part-pension will part-compensate. In response, I wait for the market to bounce back. Methinks the cat is dead.
“Now is the time to buy more of the same shares cheaply and lower our unit cost average,” I opine. (“Idiot” I hear someone say from the other side of the hedge, where we are doing our own trimming due to a lack of cash to hire a robust young person).
Veteran Queensland property developer Archie Douglas gave me some unsolicited advice at my “going away party” at a Brisbane hotel, circa 2005. Friends from my place of employment and city business people who had a grudging respect for me came along for drinks. I was 56 and had opted out of the mainstream media in pursuit of a calmer life, more music and more independence. We had some drinks, there was finger food and I got up on stage and played a half-dozen songs.

Time to smell the roses
Archie, who was 60-something then, backed me into a corner and told me about the dangers of letting the R-word creep into my consciousness. He urged me to never stop working, in one form or another. If I was fed up with what I was doing, step back, have a rest, then jump back into something less stressful and more suited to my temperament.
So advised, I set up one of those consultancies, you know, Bob Wilson and Associates Who Cannot Be Named. The first two years went really well; we got more work than we actually wanted, so in the third year downsized a bit. Just in time for the Global Financial Crisis. Timing, Bob.
Archie’s been good at jumping into something else. He and his brother Gordon, who founded PRD Realty (now Colliers International), started Halcyon, a property development company which creates over-50s communities on the Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast and Brisbane’s fast-spreading northern suburbs.
Although he’s chairman, Archie doesn’t have to go into work (unless he wants to). “I have the time to do the things I want to do,” he said, while agreeing with me that the notion of retirement had changed, probably for the better.

The closet songwriter emerges

When I first ‘came out’ as a singer-songwriter at my 50th birthday, a few of my business acquaintances were perplexed.
“It must be good to have a hobby,” said one.
“There’s no money in it, is there?” asked another.
“Do you get royalties?” asked another.
Seventeen years later, I can answer all of those questions. Yes, it’s great to have a hobby and work at it as part of your day job, to wrap it inside your consulting business and make it official. Is there money in making music? A better question might be “how do you value making music?”
Blood pressure’s spot on, cholesterol not bad at all for a man who could afford to lose a few kilos, no heart problems, no diabetes, no outbursts of nuttiness as long as I take my ‘nutty pills’. Time has become my currency.
Not that the world in general needs to know, but I earned more in royalties than CD sales in 2014. That’s not to say CD sales have been that bad, I’ve been lucky to have songs included on compilation CDs with national and international distribution. A few people even cover my songs. It’s what you’d call an emotionally charged, passive investment.

Eighty is the new 65

There is a growing anti-retirement chorus, notably from former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett. Some politicians have been urging older people to ‘stay in harness’ as a means of pushing the retirement age out to 70 or beyond, thus deferring the evil day when the state lurches into unsustainable deficit.
The discussion about retirement and whether it is an irrelevant concept has a lot to say about the collective perception of work and the value of work. Whose contribution to the good of the community is more valuable − someone who earns $100k+ advising corporate clients on communicating with their public, or the busker who puts a smile on people’s faces and mows lawns when he needs to pay the rent?
I was steered into this subject via a couple of people I know who ‘pulled the pin’ after working full-time into their early 70s. My advice to older people who want/need to keep working past 65 is to negotiate a four-day week; a rest day, a weekend, and they’ll pay less tax. It should go without saying that people who are still working and earning at 70 are (a) good at their job and (b) either have obligations to their clients that go well past earning an income, or (c) want to stave off the inevitable day when they will have to go home to an empty house, or to a distant partner who has become used to a day-time routine without the other half of the relationship.
Over the past decade I have come to perceive retirement as leaving your paid employment in search of alternatives, which is what Archie was advocating. The main risks for someone leaving the job they have been doing routinely for the past 25-35 years are the loss of social networks with workmates and acquaintances, the loss of a daily routine and the risk to your primary relationship which can happen when the previously absent partner is underfoot, 24/7.

And a word from Citizen Jeff
Jeff Kennett, who visited much rapid change upon Melbourne and Victoria in just seven years, has strong opinions about retirement.
“Retirement equates to death,” he opined in the Herald Sun in 2011. “One of the great lessons of ageing and witnessing ageing is the impact that retirement has on so many people, particularly men.
It can be deathly. I shall never retire.”

Many men are not properly prepared for retirement, he wrote. “You can only fish or play golf so many times a week.”
Kennett observed that as people advanced into retirement they often became less interesting. Their interests narrow as their interaction with work colleagues lessens, along with their interest in current affairs.
Kennett, chairman of the depression initiative BeyondBlue since 2000, is right insomuch that many men, particularly those who have held senior positions in government or private enterprise, feel lost when their networks are severed. The struggle with relevancy can be acute for people who have held positions of power and/or were held in high public esteem. They become the “Paul Who?” of a sarcastic song I wrote about the cult of celebrity.
When I left the orthodox workforce, people urged me to “keep up your contacts – stay in touch”. But as the years slid by it became apparent I did not have much in common with people still locked into high-stress careers and office politics.

Archie, we have smelt the roses and they smell just fine.

Tag: stress

Deadline Stress On The Road To Winton