Connection, Consistency, Community
Had I planned for this to be the Substack 'journey' post? No, and it's about lots more besides, so do read on...
Hi friends,
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Start here! Welcome to What Now? with Lindsay Johnstone
Let me start by telling you it’s been a busy old time in my postcode area.
As I write, I can hear the Hampden roar just a mile along the road as Celtic and Rangers play each other in the Scottish Cup Final. There’s the odd siren, too. The mood on the streets around Queen’s Park was febrile at 11 o’clock this morning as we made our way home from swimming. Already, the police presence was strong. On one stretch of Pollokshaws Road, we counted over half a dozen police vans ready to spring into action should anything erupt between the throngs of blue- or green-clad fans congregating well in advance of the 3pm kick-off.
Mid-afternoon, and navigating past fans on foot and through narrow gaps between double-parked coaches on residential streets, I had a sudden panic about dropping my elder daughter at her pal’s close to the city centre. The kind of visceral, stomach-lurching one that used to assault me so readily when the girls were small. I warned her not to go into town. To keep her wits about her if they decided to wander to the river to watch the skateboarders. It was like the times I wrote about in the early chapters of my memoir, mercifully striking for their rarity now.
Experience tells me the noise level in these parts will only increase. That there’ll be yet more sirens as well as the blade-slap of helicopters when the throngs make their way out of the stadium and stream past the bottom of my driveway towards the pubs of Glasgow’s southside to celebrate, commiserate (or chib one another) depending on what fate has chucked them.
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But those aren’t the three c’s I want to talk about this week, and neither do I wish to dwell on today’s busy-ness, either. Rather, the busy-ness of the week just gone. The band I’m in – Wall Sun Sun – is getting ready to launch an album called ELK and we’ve been especially hard at it making a lot of noise of our own in a flat in Mount Florida, just round the corner from Hampden, Scotland’s National Stadium.
We’ve managed two vocal rehearsals; the brass section has had their own practise; we’ve embarked upon the requisite PR offensive and we’ve shot a music video. This level of industry is unprecedented. Between us we have about a hundred children, wear multiple professional hats and are juggling all the other stuff of midlife too, which goes some way towards explaining why it’s taken us seven years to get to this stage.
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Isn’t all that a sign we should have given up long ago?
Sometimes, still, I think about all the effort. Whether it’s worth it. Particularly at teatime on the day of a practise when a wee voice wonders whether I could cry off. I’m too tired. I’m low. My throat is sore from a day’s facilitating. But I don’t. And neither do my bandmates.
Which begs the question: What does it take to sustain any creative endeavour?
Connection
Consistency
Community
I believe we are only at this point because we’ve honoured these three c’s. We understand our responsibility to one another. The fact that – though it’s hard to make regular time for the things and the people we love – it’s necessary.
And so, at around 8pm every other Thursday, we gather in Joel and Katherine’s living room while one of them finishes putting their three boys to bed. We arrange the chairs, boil the kettle and sometimes prop up mattresses and soft play pieces to dampen the sound if we’re recording. We chat, laugh and catch up before, eventually, Joel does something that tells us it’s time to get to work.
Case-in-point from mid-2019, learning Funeral:
We listen, sing, argue, laugh and sing some more, and after a few hours of intense work and play, those of us who don’t live there leave feeling lighter. It can be hard to come back down, actually, I’m that vimmy.
But it wasn’t always like this. In the throes of my anxious time, which (understandably) was also my elder daughter’s most anxious time, she wouldn’t let me leave the house when all I wanted to do was flee. And sing. After another failed bedtime, I’d be close to tears calling the others long after they’d gathered to tell them that, no, I definitely couldn’t come. Not tonight.
Maybe never again.
And then there were more babies. Those twins in the video above are two miracles. Born without complication following a really complicated pregnancy where they were diagnosed with and operated on in utero to resolve Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome (TTTS). Katherine and Joel made this audio for the charity Twins Trust and it is one of the most moving things I have ever listened to. We sang to those wee babes throughout that pregnancy. Sang to them a few nights before the surgery and cuddled them and sang to them when they came home.
COVID hit and my daughter was happier since I couldn’t go anywhere. I was happy about her feeling better but not a lot else. Not even the first half of a postcode separated the four us, yet we felt like we were singing to one another from different worlds as Joel reassured us he could do something with what we recorded on our phones. Here’s Seducer. I can still remember the deep joy I felt watching this for the first time. I felt connected to these humans in such a special way. Even though we couldn’t be in the same room, we could still make it happen.
Those were the months when we could’ve easily let things slide but Joel especially wouldn’t stand for it, and I’m thankful for that. It turns out that just keeping on keeping on really is the only thing. You need to consistently show up for one another and the thing that binds you, however it is that you do it.
COVID times passed. We recruited a double bass player and did a few gigs. They were shambolic but fun, as these things tend to be. The next challenge was to record an album. It could only be done at night after all the kids were in bed, and it’s taken us two years. This is what recording an album looks like when you can’t go to a studio. Funeral again:
But now it’s done.
And the launch gig is booked. And the single has been chosen and the press release has gone out. And listening to the various mixes Joel has shared with us this past month has been profound, actually. I don’t hear the child chaos, the tiredness, the cat. I don’t see the mattresses or the soft play or someone yawning above a pop shield as Joel demands another take. Instead, I hear something beautiful. Mournful, at times. Joyous, too. I hear a record of the past seven years of our lives. Me, Emily, Katherine, Joel, Joe and all the amazing musicians who have contributed to our sound including
who plays flute on some of our tracks. I hear our children laughing. Shouting at us to stop singing. I hear our spouses, on the final track.I hear connection. Consistency. Community.
I hear love.
I wonder if you’ll hear all that too?
Our single, Mothers, is about the anxious, irrational days of early motherhood, and the legacy of birth trauma. When we met, we were all mired in various flavours of it and discovering we could sing together helped. It was the first song Joel wrote for us, the first one we learned and the first one we performed at an open mic in early 2020. I sang it half a dozen times last night while filming my bits for our video and could see how far we’ve come, give or take an Old Firm match day wobble or two.
You can hear it now, if you like.
Oh, and while I’m talking about the three Cs…
Something exciting happened this week. My wee publication nabbed a spot in the Top 40 on the
global Parenting leader board. On Tuesday I discovered it was sitting at 41 and by yesterday – somewhat improbably having done nothing of note in between – it had made its way up two more places to 39.I celebrated the first of these charting positions by forcing my younger daughter to film me while I attempted to get to 41 spins of the hula hoop to also match my age and my (at the time) 141 paying subscribers. After some failed attempts, I got there:
I was mega chuffed with this development, as you can tell. Mostly because it still feels improbable that my Substack, which launched 18 months ago with zero subscribers, no mailing list to import and no social media following to bring across has become (by some metrics) ‘successful.’
So, this is a thank you to you all, free or paid subscribers, for connecting with me and each other, building this community and consistently supporting my work. You are making a tiny Glaswegian writer very happy.
Now, if you could just follow WALL SUN SUN on Instagram and get a ticket for our gig in Glasgow on Sunday 23rd of June, then I’ll love you forever:
Lindsay x
🪷🪷🪷 🧡🤍💛
This is such an inspiring post to hear about all of the hard work and unwavering commitment you've all had in bringing your album to life. Fitting it in around your kids and doing it because you loved it. Wishing you all the best with the album launch! 🌟