Louis III
Lockdown is an equaliser.
It makes you think about what matters and it’s been the first time in years that I’ve had structure in my life. Waking up at 8am without an alarm, exercising, not having anywhere ‘to go’, being able to focus on what I want to do with my time, and asking myself why at the same time.
I’ve been learning the piano finally, a couple hours a day. When I write music I ‘topline’, so I write the melody and lyrics and the producer comes up with the chords and beat, now that I’m learning my way around an instrument it’s opened up new creativity in my process that wasn’t there before. When producers send me instrumentals to write to at home now, the first thing I do is learn the chords on piano and sing over them, just me and the piano. It helps ground me in the song – if a song sounds good just me and the piano, in my bedroom, then I know it’s good. This has really made me think about what it means when people say it’s good to go outside of your comfort zone – we’re all supposed to be our most comfortable at home, but who feels that comfortable right now?
When you’ve got so much time and space to think you worry – I worry about my dad who’s 73 and has diabetes, I worry about where this leaves the music industry and my next releases, I worry about the people who have lost their jobs, the people I know who are about to have or have just had babies in a time of social isolation, like my sister. We’ve all been trying to pick up the slack online; Zoom, Houseparty, Google Hangout, remote studio sessions, going live on Instagram. I think I’ve talked to my family more in the past few weeks than I did the few months before, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not all still feeling lonely.
It’s in times like this that I take solace that I chose to do something creative with my life. When you create things for a living you get used to upheaval and not knowing what’s next – it’s not the first time I’ve worried about whether I’ll still be able to do this in a year’s time – but it also provides an escape and a refuge at the same time. Creativity thrives in these weird times, just look at how creative we’ve all become during lockdown; coming up with new ways to show our family love, going to the virtual pub with our mates on a Thursday evening, people devising madder and madder stuff on TikTok, moving their cancelled gigs to the internet.
Lockdown is an equaliser, and we’re all creatives now.
Stream Louis’ New Single ‘Walk You Home’ HERE
Instagram: @LouisIII