EDBROWNE

Before 2019 I had never taken much interest in jazz. Growing up I was on a healthy diet of some amazing music - The Cure, Dire Straits, Smashing Pumpkins, Bob Dylan, Duran Duran, The Pixies. It‘s sort of what you’d expect a typical Gen X playlist to look like with good music taste.
But no jazz. Fast forward to 2018 and my music taste hadn’t drastically changed. It surrounded itself more around Arctic Monkeys, The Kooks, Stone Roses and the gorgeous Radiohead (or at least I thought no jazz). At the end of that year I suddenly found myself in a student accommodation in West London, playing a god awful amount of FIFA 18 with uni mates. Wow that game was addictive. I had an older copy at aged 13 and got so addicted that I subsequently forced myself not to play older versions, like some sort of heroin addict admitting himself to rehab. Not only is FIFA a very addictive game but the soundtracks are always great. They ecapsulte the best music to come out of each year, and often showcase some amazing artists that are fairly under the radar.
In FIFA 18 there was one song that changed my life. Whenever it played, in between competitive games of rage, me and my mates would always find ourselves tapping along to its very catchy opening. The song was Never Enough by Rex Orange County.
For some strange reason it took a good 4-5 months for me to place it in my playlist. I think there must've been some solace in letting it live within FIFA.
Once I did however, oh boy. I became so addicted. A lot more than FIFA.
Songs such as Corduroy Dreams, A Song About Being Sad and Paradise blew me away. The sound was so individual and held such emotional depth. Every chord and every cadence really helped to tell the story. They were complex and intricate songs too. So, with my 5 years of guitar playing, I began to learn them.
Then my eyes saw loads and loads of major 7ths, minor 7ths, minor half diminished chords and minor 9ths. My head exploded. I’d seen some weird looking chords before now, but not this many.
It was like relearning algebra. What amazed me the most was that Rex wasn’t some guitar veteran. He’d only been playing guitar for around 2-3 years at this point with previous experience in the piano and drums. And he wasn’t very old either.
He wrote Never Enough at 17/18. This sat in his second album after a self produced 10 track album that he’d written the year before. This kid was a genius and seemed more likely alien than human.
So addicted soon turned into utterly obsessed. I love a great prodigy story.
As I listened to his music again and again, and learnt more and more of his songs, my love for this introspective indie-jazz sub genre began to grow.
Then I decided in November 2019 I was going to learn how to write music. I had to. I was in awe of how people did it. When you don’t know how to write music it looks like magic - it doesn’t seem possible. So I began learning about diatonic function and how chords work with one another. This proved to be really hard. It took me a few months of rainy Sundays and cold week nights to string something together that sounded at least the slightest bit cohesive. I began to watch hours and hours of YouTube videos and eventually found Andrew Huang who in one video was using a piano to explain music theory. Anyone will tell you that the note layout on a guitar is complicated. On a piano, well it’s just notes C all the way to B, again and again in a linear fashion.
So for my 20th birthday I asked for a keyboard. An Alesis V49. On the 13th of March 2020, as the news stories had began really jerking the country, I ventured back home to Warrington and got my hands on my Alesis V49. I couldn’t wait to use it. Once I got back to London I was hooked. I turned my desk into a mini studio and began learning chord formations off the back of my very formative knowledge form hours of YouTube. I started to actually get okay at it and began to learn to write at a much faster rate. Around the same time the whole country went into complete lockdown for the COVID-19 pandemic, I‘d written my first (albeit terrible) song on the piano using music theory. And that wasn’t even the thing I found cool. The cool thing was that at this stage in my life I was at uni doing a very practical filmmaking course. You can’t make films on zoom. So this meant I had months on end of free time to do what every inch of my body wanted to do. Make music.
So I did. For the first two weeks my flat mates barely saw me. It was as if I was self isolating.
I was spending around 10-14 hours a day either learning about music or writing music. It was all rubbish. Every now and then I’d make something at least somewhat okay, but I didn’t care. The aspect of knowing that there was a super power I was getting closer and closer to harnessing made me even more hungry to carry on. I began analysing all my favourite songs, learning more and more about music theory, finding new artists and different music and even devising my own models to figure out how to crack the seemingly never ending code.

Then I came across the next artist that changed my life, simply because he acted as a bridge. Cosmo Pyke (Another prodigy).
This guy was blending Jazz, Hip-Hop, Indie and Reggae into one track at age 18 like it was as easy as riding a bicycle. I began emulating his style and bringing even more jazzy chords and different approaches into my songwriting.
I was surprising myself. I was no where near a prodigy, but this stuff sounded okay. I began sharing it with family and close friends. They seemed impressed too.
One friend in particular was a big supporter. Then, on one hot, breezy night in May, I sent her my latest creation.
“This sounds a bit like King Krule” Now this really changed everything. This is what it all came down to. Playing too much FIFA in my student accommodation had drawn me along a very unusual journey towards an artist that taught me more about creativity and more about myself than anything or anyone ever. This was prodigy number 3 - The biggest prodigy of them all. His music propelled me even further into a manic episode of analysing music. (This merely scratches the surface). I learnt most of his songs and analysed them all. I learnt more and more about music theory and started writing music that was much more complex. Every lockdown in 2020 and 2021 I spent 90% of my free time on my latest addiction.
Most weeks throughout those two years I was playing everyday. King Krule’s music was my bible. If you listen to his songs, some aren’t easy to listen to, or even nice to listen to. But that was the whole point. He’s telling a story, whether that’s the beautiful chords in ‘Baby Blue’ or the harsh screams and abrasive sounds in ‘Has This Hit?’. Every technique, every sound and every combination of lyrics are all driven behind the story he was trying to tell and the emotions he was aiming to create. I learnt a lot of things from his work. I now have a greater understanding of both the technicality of music but also how to arrange my ideas and generate powerful thoughts and emotions semi-subconsciously in an audience. These were skills I could apply to any area of expression: in film, photography, language and of course songwriting. However the biggest lesson wasn‘t the fact that emotions can have textures: that they can be smooth or rough, that they can be angular or circular, that they can be heavy or light.
It wasn’t that to most effectively connect someone to a story you must allude to it and suggest it because in that way you allow your audience to fill the gaps with their own experiences and emotions.
It wasn’t that to imprint feelings that lie between general emotions was to blend concrete and abstract concepts and reach a higher meaning. Or even that creating intentional contrast has its value in gold when communicating ideas. These were all important lessons in the realm of creativity and being a storyteller. But the real lesson was to put in the hours . I’ve written over 100 songs and have spent at least a thousand hours learning to write music. I’d consider myself good, not good enough to get on a stage and share them all with the world (a lot of them are terrible), but I’m proud of a handful of them even if they are in a very demo stage. This lesson of time invested persists across each of these prodigy stories, and now that I look back at it, they aren’t really prodigies at all. Rex Orange County, Cosmo Pyke and most of all King Krule, had put an insane amount of hours into their craft before even reaching 18. King Krule started writing music at 8 and spent most of his teenage years out of school, sat in his bedroom writing songs. The fact that he was making the music he was at 15 isn’t really all that surprising. He’d probably spent way over 10,000 hours becoming an expert at it before that point.
Being talented at something isn’t a super power. It’s not some inherited gene or lucky accident. In no way am I claiming to be amongst these exceptional people in any aspect of life, but anytime I’ve looked at something I’ve done and somehow impressed myself, it’s because I put in an overwhelming amount of time and effort that led me up to that point. Whether that’s making a film I was happy with, teaching myself to write music or being ridiculously good at FIFA (I’m not as proud of the latter).
The equation is simple, and not some complicated algebra like maj7ths, mb5ths or Aug9ths. More Time Spent > Natural Talent It’s definitely a mindset I need to adopt further. No one became great at what they do on a whim. I feel in life you should think more analytically, introspectively and progressively; repeatedly put yourself outside of your comfort zone and most of all, put in the hours .
If we do that then I think our chances of becoming exceptional will greatly increase. If you’re interested in this idea further then I would massively recommend reading ‘Outliers’ by Malcom Gladwell if you haven’t already. He’s the guy that formed the notion behind the 10,000 hour rule. You won’t want to put the book down once you’ve opened it. Also, feel free to drop me a message. I’d love to hear about your ambitions and connect with people who will push me further towards my own.