I’ve been reflecting a lot about music’s place in my life as of late.

Music-making for me, to me, operates as part of this big venn diagram between Vocation and Vacation.

I don’t want to lose you too early here on pretension but I’m an etymology nerd and I think those two words are interesting to pick apart.

Vocation comes from the Latin vocationem, which itself comes from vox, voice. It’s use often has an air of careeriness about it, the thing you were meant to do is linked in that sense to ‘the thing you have to do’, to make money and all that. To me that original meaning of ‘Calling’, a figurative voice, a sort of force toward something is more important here.

Vacation comes from the Latin vacationem, again, there’s a work-associated link you make immediately. That latin phrase means leisure, freedom from responsibilities.

The trouble here, and why I bring it up at all is that these are similar words, set in opposition to each other in modern context. To dip into a cliché ‘Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life’.

If the people around me are any indication this phrase is horse shit, I don’t know anyone working harder than the people doing what they love. Be that my nurse mother or my band mates, the first two that spring to mind.

There’s something to this idea that it isn’t work really if you love it. It’s effort no doubt, but work is fairly unambiguously something you must do, not choose to do.

There’s a phrase we use often in At Last, the other project me, Daan and Emmett share together outside Spouse: “No one made us do this.”

That phrase first came out of my mouth standing in the crowd at Fiddlehead’s Sydney concert in 2023. Spouse were lucky enough to get to play that gig.

At the time Spouse was not a massively travelled band, we’d played interstate but it was (to me especially), a fairly new thing for us to be on the road.

It struck me standing in that room that at no point had someone pointed a finger at me and said ‘You have to get into Daan’s station wagon, drive to another city and play in front of everyone’. There was no broader order given out. So standing there, utterly immersed and still floating on the cloud of love generated by that kind of room, I had the thought, ‘If no one made me do this, why am I doing it?’

It was a sense of autonomy, a distillation of luck, which at the age of 21 struck me like a tailwind.

I remember in the early days of performing I found it extremely difficult to ‘perform’. My tendency was to stand on stage very still, and play the notes very carefully, and to be all around pretty uncomfortable.

Carry this over to writing as well. I knew the sounds I enjoyed; I did not know the emotions they made me feel, not as clearly as when they had come from outside. That’s a beautiful thing of course, to have the thought ‘where did that come from?’

This levy broke for me when I started to perform to my bandmates instead. Afterall I was writing the music for them. The conversation I was having was with them. There was something inimitable and magic to a chord or line that meant something to Em instead of one that meant something to me. If felt better to find a rhythm which made Daan’s hands heavier or lighter in response, it felt better to see the effect of how I moved on how Josh moved, and to pay attention to the inverse, what were they all doing and what was it doing to me?

Suddenly I could move, I could think less, feel more. And this is because the people with me were doing 90% of the ‘Work’ for me.

Back to Vocation vs Vacation. If vocation is a calling and vacation is freedom, music is the meeting point. No longer something I have to do, but something I have to do.

The reason being (and I have no fear of coming across trite in this), friendship. I met nearly everyone I know not blood related to me, through music.

I steal here a passage of Joyce from the poem Lean out of the window, (also stolen in part from Fiddlehead again, who have used it as stage backing):

I have left my book,
I have left my room,
For I heard you singing
Through the gloom.

This is an expression of love. One I find very closely linked to the musical experience. It’s absolute efficiency as a loneliness killer, as something to get you out of the room.

And boy do you have to get out of the room.

The biproduct of making music was making friends, the biproduct of making friends was making music, and on and on and on. No decision is easier made than one put to this committee, no problem made simpler by anything else than by that equation.

There are songs I only ever heard played live by bands which no longer exist, which pop into my head constantly, written by friends I may not see that often, that are even in that head-form elusive by the fact that they changed every time I heard them. Music made by developing people, songs which either changed to fit them or were left behind as they developed past them.

These relationships are sustaining and motivating in ways little else can match. Those memories grounding and reassuring. What a gift to have received.

– Ezra