I’ve spent a fair amount of my life explaining myself.

The name, appearance, accent and relationship with the places I try to call home rarely line up in a way people expect them to. And while I’ve learnt to appreciate a lot of what that upbringing has given me, the labour involved in providing constant context as proof of any right to occupy, let alone claim a space before that conversation could lead to anybody beginning to get to know me, has been exhausting.

There is no other word for it.

Music was the one space where it felt like all parts of my life could co-exist. Not always welcome, not always without controversy, but at least co-exist, which for me was something more than I could hope for on some days.

I could study the relationships between sound, rhythm, melody, harmony, timbre, words the physics and psychology beneath it all and even bring co-creators from different spaces into one where the interplay amidst it all was representative of my inner world in ways that felt safe enough to share with the outer.

It gave me ways of making sense of things that remained difficult to explain in everyday conversation.

The time spent learning the craft had a very personal motivation underneath it. I wanted to hear what it sounded like when the worlds I inhabited could belong together.

I think I’m still finding out how much of my journey as an artist began there.

Understood well enough

Because underneath the question of where I belonged was another one, which has taken considerably longer to articulate:

what would it feel like to be understood well enough to stop having to explain?

To be able to just love. And be loved.

Without constant hypervigilance into which parts of myself that might need translating, watering down, or anxiety around the entire process of yet another explanation costing me more energy than I have on a certain day.

Seen. Heard. Held.

There is a lot of life in those three words for me.

One of our rarest luxuries

My teacher Peter Crone speaks about being seen, heard and held as the three primordial needs every human seeks. Exploring assumptions about ourselves and the way it affects our relationships: the tendency to seek external reassurance, confirmation and exposure of our own worth, without adopting specific behavioral patterns to ‘deserve’ them, often without our realisation.

In his conversation with me on my podcast (one of his most vulnerable to the best of my knowledge), Peter talks about a space where non-judgement, the very basis of any chance at healing is one of our rarest luxuries in today’s world (Note: I’m paraphrasing).

Making room for someone’s experience without imposing our own agenda on it.

Capacity.

Both Peter and me make a distinction that matters to me: understanding someone’s reality does not equate as an imposition on my freedom to disagree with it by default. What that results for me though, is open up a more demanding question:

Can I see the person in front of me when their experience complicates what I’d already decided about them, vice versa and the spaces we share?

If you’ve followed my music, writing, podcast or the work I do with fellow creatives so far, you might recognise the territory I keep returning to. The relationship between our inner lives, the things we offer society, and how much of the person behind them can remain hidden.

We artists can become exceptionally articulate through our art while still struggling to understand what we need in the rest of our lives. I find that possibility both fascinating and a little uncomfortable. Not just at an intellectual level, but a broad spectrum of lived, visceral experience.

Which probably explains why I keep digging relentlessly.

Settling an argument with myself

When I talk about understanding the psyche as part of an artistic practice, I’m interested in fairly simple, albeit intimate questions.

How much of a creative decision comes from what I actually hear, as opposed to anticipating somebody else’s response?

When does the desire to communicate become tangled up with the need to justify a note?

What happens to a song when I’m asking it to settle an argument I’ve been having with myself?

Where do I go when it triggers a fellow artist, collaborator or member of the audience who thinks it’s too irrelevant to what they signed up for?

Those questions aren’t cerebral masturbation. They have practical consequences when art is your livelihood. They can affect whether an idea gets enough time to develop, whether we can trust something as simple as a melody, whether I can hear a collaborator’s suggestion without projecting my visions on to them, or feel the need to defend the end result when audiences scrutinise it.

The ‘craft’ here is the work that makes the pathway clearer and those decisions stronger. It’s a lot more than scales, intonation, chords or production ethic (though they obviously have their place. Anyone who’s shared my workspaces will know about my perfectionist tendencies).

Knowing a little more about how little I might know myself, and how that is a premise nobody is immune to helps me understand what exactly it is that’s being asked of the material.

Cos sometimes I’m asking a lot. Too much.

Of myself.

Ryan Hurst (another teacher, who’s been my rock in the recent past), boils it down to one word.

‘Why’.

My students have been calling me the ‘why guy’ for a few years now. But someone like Ryan takes it to a different level like masters do where the word tends to unlock answers to questions I’m often not even aware were in the room in the first place.

That being said, I’ve become wary of the point at which self-examination turns into another demand to improve myself before I’m allowed to take that next step forward. There is always another layer to uncover, another pattern to recognise, and I assure you that you and me both could spend the rest of our lives explaining the reasons for a feeling without ever sitting down at the piano and allowing it to become a song.

Part of the process, for me, is accepting that the music may emerge while I’m still in the middle of understanding it. Making something gives me another way to listen. Which in turn, reminds me that the latter, was the whole point to begin with.

And the entirety of the creative process reveals layers to a world plagued with a degree of bitterness, heartbreak, hopelessness, hate and pain, and a normalisation of it all, that our knee-jerk attempts to protect ourselves from it all run the risk of just adding more to it.

Before we’ve really listened

The first song I wrote on my 8th album was during my first week studying with Peter’s 8th mastermind.

300+ people from all corners of the world wondering what a world could feel like if every single one of its inhabitants felt seen, heard and held.

Not just waking up to face another day to fight. Survive.

But to love. And be loved.

Needless to say, there is enough evidence out there pointing to the utter failure of the world doing this for us. But more pertinent is how we are failing to do it for one another.

In ways easier to recognise on some days. And not so much on others.

Especially the ones where we seem to be absolutely convinced of the righteousness of whatever our point of view happens to be.

At the very least, all of this is just a thought experiment. For me personally though, it carries a deeper even if subjective truth. Because outsourcing my feelings of belonging, identity or even safety to my external circumstances is a heavy load to bear for my circumstances.

I know it’s not that black and white. This come from someone who still fights to come to terms with the rage and fear of someone who had the worst racial attack in his life weeks back in the capital city of his ‘home’ country.

But it’s not something I can bring myself to dismiss completely either.

My songs give me time with a feeling I usually rush to explain away, including a feeling of belonging to someone whose life is very different from ours.

As artists, we have the power to make room for that encounter.

As listeners, we can allow ourselves to be affected by it.

I think that matters in a world where so much of our attention is spent deciding where to stand before we’ve really, really listened.

Feeling at home with someone

A few weeks back I revisited Re_movement, the body of work that ran roughly from 2016 to 2022. Fluidity was central to it. I was exploring movement, identity, the relationship between individual autonomy and our connection to everything around us. Growth became increasingly subtractive: an ongoing consideration of what needed to go, and what I was holding on to long after it had stopped helping me live.

There was a great deal of freedom in that exploration, alongside a volatility I couldn’t ignore. Once I began questioning the things I’d used to orient myself, the need for some kind of steadiness became very real.

Seen Heard Held, my eighth album, comes from that search for a counterbalance.

The possibility of feeling at home with someone.

Me.

Being able to say something difficult and being open to the possibility of having it received with care. Having enough trust to let another person contribute to something that matters to me.

That last part became very tangible in the making of this record.

For the first time in a thirty-year career, I made an album with an executive producer.

For most of my working life, I’ve carried the process from writing and composing, through to playing and production. I love that work, and I’m proud of the records I’ve made. But this time, I gave somebody else the final word on the production, which changed the amount of attention I could give to being the songwriter, singer and pianist inside it.

There is a very specific kind of learning involved in bringing decades of experience to a project and still allowing yourself to do it differently.

I wanted that experience.

I keep coming back to the need to love and be loved, and to the distance that can exist between wanting connection and knowing how to receive it. There are days when that distance feels insurmountable, and others when it feels like the only viable reason to live.

To me, art is our scream, our song, for help.

These songs give my voice to that longing, and to the possibility that it can be met.

Seen Heard Held releases on 16 October 2026, on Warner Chappell Music.

You can presave the release here.