Reason on Trial

By the time the Christmas holidays came around, I was tired.

The ordinary job had taken a lot of energy in the months leading up to it, and when things finally slowed down for a while, there wasn’t some sudden burst of creativity waiting to be released. Mostly, I was just exhausted.

But there was also something I hadn’t had much of lately.

Time.

So I started experimenting with music again. Nothing particularly organised or ambitious. Put on a pair of headphones, play around with some music, write a few lines and see where they went. Mostly to let my mind relax from work and sort through my thoughts.

Most of it happened at night.

For some reason, sleep wasn’t exactly cooperating during that period anyway, so those hours when everything around me had gone quiet became hours spent with headphones on instead.

And when you spend enough nights awake with very little around you to interrupt your thoughts, you also get a lot of time to think.

About people. About the world around you. About the things you see and hear every day but normally don’t stop long enough to question.

Something had been bothering me for a while.

It felt like facts themselves had somehow become negotiable. Common sense could almost be treated as something ugly depending on who was using it, and simply saying what you thought could sometimes feel like walking into a minefield.

Not necessarily because what you said was wrong. Sometimes it was enough that it wasn’t the right opinion. There seemed to be an increasingly narrow path of what you were supposed to think, say and believe. Step outside it and the reaction could become enormous, while the actual reasoning behind an argument almost became secondary.

I didn’t sit down that night with a plan to write a song about any of this. The words came first, as they usually do for me. Thoughts and observations turned into lines, and eventually I started putting a simple melody around them.

Somewhere in that process, the thought appeared that perhaps reason and common sense itself was standing accused.

Reason was on trial.

There it was.

The idea for the music was still rough, but there was something in it I wanted to explore further. So I shared it, and from there we started building around it. The lyrics were more or less locked in over the course of one night. What had begun as a thought during another sleepless night slowly became Reason on Trial.

Looking back, I don’t think I understood the significance of that at the time. We were still figuring out what all of this was supposed to be, or if it was supposed to become anything at all.

But something had changed.

I wasn’t just playing around with music anymore. I had started using it to make sense of the things I couldn’t stop thinking about. I hadn’t created music in quite a while, but the feeling of expressing myself again gave my mind a place to relax.

And once that door had opened, a door I thought I had welded shut, there turned out to be quite a lot on the other side left to explore.