Everything Must Go
The Cue Sheet No.46 Barry Power | June 2026
One of the unintended consequences of moving house is that it forces you to take stock of all of your material possessions. All of the weird detritus that populates your house. This is especially true if you are a musician. Think of that little box of usb cables and power adapters that lurk in a cupboard somewhere that you think might come in handy one day and times it by ten.
This audit of stuff got me thinking about all of the other things we accumulate in life and how happily and blissfully unaware we are of them until something comes along to shine a light on them.
This hoard of stuff is a metaphor for all of the psychological clutter we let accumulate around ourselves in the hopes of one day having use for it. These past few years I had completely tried to shoehorn an identity of being a composer and specifically a film composer. In reality of course there was so much more. Musician, guitarist, husband, father, brother, middle aged man. The list of random labels one applies to oneself goes on and on and each one is really as meaningless as the last.
There are a few quotes that really resonated with me in the past couple of weeks. About how much we hold on to idealised versions of ourselves and how the world should be
It has to come out like a good hot beer shit. A good hot beer shit is glorious, man. You get up, turn around, look at it and you’re proud. The fumes, the stink of the turd, you look, you say, ‘God, I did it. I’m good.’ Then you flush it away and there is a sense of sadness when just the water is there. It’s like writing a good poem, you just do it. You-it’s a beer shit. There’s nothing to analyze, nothing to say, it’s just done. Got it?
-Charles Bukowski
“They’re just songs” - Paul Mc Cartney
“I also work in I guess film music. So, yeah, I make records, I write concert music, all kinds of things.” - Max Richter
These aren’t quotes to take away from the importance of the contribution of art, but to liberate from that sense of weight that comes from self identifying as anything in particular.
That’s the crux of things, being surrounded by a little self made armoury of home comforts and a plethora of self identities.
And now with this move I am getting a chance to really dig into all of these worn out establishments that I have been both consciously and subconsciously curating through all of these years, establishments which give the illusion of a permanence that things will always be as they are, becoming rigid to ideals, preconceptions and that every material thing has its exact place in life.
I was not expecting just how liberating it could feel to put down some of these pre-conceptions and try to come at things from a sense of essentialism. It’s like to quote Richter once more trying to cultivate a “mental ecology”,
This comes with being much more attentive to what is in my environment both internally and externally.
Some of these things I only really noticed when we were preparing the house to sell to someone else. It’s amazing the small jobs that you put off to be attended to later or when you get around to them.There is a kind of blindness that forms during the regular routines of life.
That blindness is something I need to remind myself of more often.
What about you? Are you noticing this shift in the media you’re consuming—or the work you’re making? Let’s talk about it in the comments.
The Quiet Creators Studio
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Coffee and Composing — YouTube
The morning livestreams are on a short hiatus over the next few weeks while I’m head down on some other projects. But the back catalogue is sitting there deep dives into composition, scoring, synthesis, production, and the kind of tangents that only happen when someone is on their second coffee. Worth a rummage if you haven’t already.
Substack Live is also on a short break. Archives are up if you want the chat.
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Epilogue
Thanks for being here while I figure this out in public. See you next week.
Barry
Transparency note: Parts of this post were refined and edited with the help of AI, but every idea and turn of phrase is my own.