I've spent 25 years in the studio watching musicians with real talent not finish their music. Not because they lacked ability — because friction got in the way. The Quiet Rebel is where I share what those 25 years actually taught me. Practical frameworks, honest conversations, and the 20% of things that create 80% of finished music. No hustle. No gear obsession. Just the tools to help you make the music you actually hear in your head. — Mark
I don't remember the setlist
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Hi Reader, Had a few old friends round on Sunday. At some point we found ourselves comparing aches and pains, and personally, tinnitus, which is apparently what happens when musicians reach a certain age. Matt and Lee came down from Nottingham. Tom came up from the Cotswolds with his fiancée. We sat in the garden for most of the afternoon doing what people who've known each other a long time do, which is mostly just talk. Lee and I went to a run of shows together in the nineties and early two thousands. Mars Volta at the Melkweg in Amsterdam, which was really an excuse to visit a mate who'd moved there. Then Black Crowes, Nine Inch Nails and Tool, each one doing exactly what it did best and none of them sounding anything like the others. The mate in Amsterdam is a story in himself. I met him a few years before that trip, offering him a lift to a Bauhaus gig in Manchester. We'd never really spoken before that journey. By the time we got there we were talking like we'd known each other for years. He's in Namibia now, with his own family. We're still in touch. None of that happened because we had a plan to stay friends for thirty years. It happened because someone needed a lift to a gig, and neither of us thought twice about it. Tom I met through the studio, mutual friends, somewhere in the early two thousands. Different decade, same pattern. You end up standing next to someone often enough, and eventually they're just part of your life. Lee's still doing what he's always done, by the way. Pointing me at things. This time it was a Quebec duo called Angine de Poitrine, two people in papier mache masks playing technically unhinged math rock built around loop-driven guitars and live drums that's somehow also completely infectious. If you want a genuinely strange forty minutes, look them up. I don't remember every setlist from those years. I genuinely couldn't tell you what order Tool played in and some of the festivals and trips are just a total blur. But I do remember who I was standing next to. Take care, P.S. If there's someone from your own gig-going years you haven't spoken to in a while, this is your nudge. You don't need a reason. None of us ever did. |
The Quiet Rebel // Create more by doing less of what doesn't matter.
I've spent 25 years in the studio watching musicians with real talent not finish their music. Not because they lacked ability — because friction got in the way. The Quiet Rebel is where I share what those 25 years actually taught me. Practical frameworks, honest conversations, and the 20% of things that create 80% of finished music. No hustle. No gear obsession. Just the tools to help you make the music you actually hear in your head. — Mark
Hey Reader, For weeks I watched a number that wasn't moving. I'd built The Finish Line Challenge, a 14-day way to take one song from the hard drive to actually done, and I sent it out into the world with no real idea if anyone would come. Sign-ups trickled in slowly enough that I started rehearsing the version of this where it quietly doesn't work. Where I built a room and nobody walked in. That waiting is its own kind of friction, and nobody warns you about it. You can finish the thing...
Hey Reader, Someone left a comment a while back asking what my tinnitus actually sounds like. Not "do you have it," which people ask a lot. What it actually sounds like. I told them the truth. It's not one tone anymore. It's several, different in each ear, all going at once. A kind of chorus effect on the sound, guitarists will know what a chorus effect does to sound, a gentle phasing up and down, and that's built slowly over thirty years, getting a little worse every decade until it stopped...
Hi Reader, It finally has a date, 27th July 2026. That is when I will be bringing a whole bunch of likeminded musicians together who all want to finish one song in 14 days. It will include daily encouragement and prompts/suggestions via email, a group WhatsApp tp bring everyone together, and the promise of no gatekeeping, no divas, and nothing demanding, just a bit of fun getting back into the grrove of making music for entertainment. You don't have to release it (if you don't want to). You...