Category Archives: Music

When I was sixteen, I stepped into the music world believing I was ready for it. I wasn’t. I wanted the dream so badly that I didn’t see how exposed I really was. That age is all hunger and imagination. You think you’re invincible because nothing bad has happened yet. You think a yes will change everything, and a no will never come. At sixteen, I genuinely believed I could be chosen and lifted into a life that looked golden from the outside.

It was the age of glossy boybands, rehearsed charm, rigid styling, and perfect harmonies. I found myself auditioning for one of them. Each round I passed felt like confirmation that fate was involved. I didn’t understand the machinery beneath it all, the way decisions had nothing to do with who could sing and everything to do with what could be sold.

We had sessions with Shirley Bassey’s singing teacher. She was fierce, perceptive, the kind of woman who could hear your entire emotional landscape in a single note. Before the final decision, she pulled me aside and said something I wasn’t old enough to fully process. “Andrew, if you don’t get chosen, it won’t be because of your voice. Out of all of them, you’re the best singer. It’s about the look they’re going for.”

Those words hit with a strange duality. They were both a reassurance and a judgment. I heard the compliment, but I didn’t yet understand the truth sitting inside it. I wasn’t being evaluated as a human being with a voice. I was being measured as a product. My voice was irrelevant. My face was the deal-breaker. At sixteen, that realisation sinks into the bones like cold water.

A few hours later, the no arrived.

It didn’t matter that the boyband barely made an impact. It didn’t matter that another group exploded at the same time and dominated the charts (a clue: The Irish came from the west). What mattered was that the dream I had pinned to my self-worth snapped in half. Something inside me folded. I didn’t rant or fall apart. I just went silent. Quiet silence is a different kind of pain. It’s the kind you carry for decades because you never gave yourself permission to feel it.

Without even naming it, I stopped singing. I walked away from something I loved because I assumed it didn’t want me back. I didn’t revisit that part of myself for almost thirty years.

People think dreams die loudly. They don’t. They submerge. They find a shadowed corner inside you and wait for your life to make room for them again.

Decades went by. I became an adult with responsibilities, bills, heartbreaks, jobs, survival. I built a life with no space for the boy who wanted to sing. But he never left. He just waited for a crack in the armour.

Then, one day, something small shifted. Not a dramatic moment. Not an epiphany. Just a quiet tug in the chest. A feeling that I had abandoned a part of myself I wasn’t supposed to abandon forever. I opened a music app, pressed a key, and sang a line. It felt like tapping a stone buried under the earth and hearing something alive beneath it.

My voice was older now. Deeper, steadier, carrying more truth than it ever did at sixteen. It didn’t sound like the voice of a boy chasing fame. It sounded like someone who had lived.

This time, though, I wasn’t stepping into the industry blind. I knew exactly what it was. The music industry is not a fair system. It’s not even a system. It’s a creature.

A lion.

Magnificent, powerful, hypnotic. It draws people in with the promise of safety, approval, elevation. But beneath that golden exterior live teeth and hunger. And the ones most vulnerable to the lion’s appetite are the ones who want its attention the most.

I was the lamb. I had always been the lamb. Soft, open-hearted, full of yearning. Yearning is dangerous. It makes you walk toward the very thing that can consume you.

This time, when labels began showing interest, I felt the old pull. The warmth. The sense of being seen. Words like potential and fresh sound. At sixteen, these words would have been oxygen. Now they felt familiar in a way that was both comforting and unsettling.

But adulthood gives you the one thing a teenager never has: pattern recognition.

The tone shifted. Compliments turned into expectations. Interest turned into extraction. Labels wanted me to fund everything myself: the production, the marketing, the promotion. They wanted my time, my energy, my money, my effort. What they offered in return wasn’t safety, structure, or partnership. It was intangible guidance. Wisdom. Suggestions. Knowledge presented like gold but impossible to hold.

And that’s when I understood the dynamic fully. The lion doesn’t want your talent. The lion wants your devotion. It wants your hunger because hunger makes you compliant. Hunger makes you easy to shape. Hunger makes you a useful meal.

I stepped back before the jaws could close.

And then something unexpected happened. Instead of shrinking, I expanded. I began creating music for myself. I wrote and released song after song. Narcissist. True Love Is Inside You. Capsized Heart. About Love. Ghost. Scrolling for Love. Running Away. Each one felt like stitching together a wound that had been open since I was sixteen.

But even then, the journey wasn’t smooth. I pushed too hard. Burned myself out promoting everything. Chased numbers. Refreshed stats. Wanted proof that I wasn’t delusional. On the worst days, the old sixteen-year-old voice whispered, maybe they were right about you.

But growth rarely arrives as a dramatic transformation. It comes in small, honest moments. Mine came while listening to a new mix of Ghost 2.0. For the first time, I heard myself clearly. My voice wasn’t the voice of a hopeful amateur anymore. It was a voice with weight. Professional. Emotional. True. And I realised something profound: I had become the artist I once needed someone else to believe I could be.

I had become him without anyone choosing me.

That was the turning point. I stopped craving the lion’s gaze. I stopped feeding the fantasy that someone else needed to lift me. Sobriety sharpened everything. It cut through the illusions I’d held since sixteen. I no longer wanted fame. I wanted truth. I wanted a creative life built on intention, not desperation. I wanted to grow at a pace that didn’t break me.

And in that quiet, everything started growing naturally. Listeners have found me slowly. The right ones. The honest ones. Not masses. Not noise. Just genuine connection.

Now I understand the real story I’ve been living. It was never about becoming a lion myself. It was never about defeating the lion. It wasn’t even about escaping the lion.

The real power is this:

The lamb doesn’t survive by becoming stronger than the lion.
The lamb survives by no longer believing the lion is a god.

I am singing again. Not to rewrite the rejection from when I was sixteen. Not to chase the fantasy of overnight success. Not to win the approval of an industry built to feed on people like me.

I am singing because the voice I abandoned didn’t abandon me. It waited, patient and quiet, until I was finally old enough, brave enough, and grounded enough to choose myself.

And now, I finally have.

The other night I watched the TV broadcast of Wicked: One Wonderful Night, a celebration filled with live performances that, on the surface, were flawless. Every singer hit their notes perfectly. The harmonies were seamless, the sound mix pristine, and the camera work captured every emotional beat. It was impressive, but the longer I watched, the more it started to feel strangely hollow. Not because the performers weren’t talented — they were incredible — but because the whole thing was so polished that it lost its sense of being alive.

It reminded me how perfection can start to feel fake when every human edge is smoothed out. Even live music, which used to be about risk and spontaneity, now often sounds like a studio recording dressed up as a live event. The vocals are tuned, the mix is cleaned, and the energy is controlled. You end up with something technically flawless but emotionally sterile. It’s like staring at a wax figure that looks exactly like the person, but doesn’t breathe.

What this kind of broadcast quietly tells the audience is that this is the new standard — that live performers are supposed to sound flawless every time, with no cracks, no fatigue, no risk. It trains people to expect superhuman precision from artists who are, in reality, just people using their voices like anyone else uses their hands. The bar looks impossibly high, but it isn’t real. It’s a studio illusion dressed up as live truth, and it leaves both performers and listeners chasing something that doesn’t actually exist. The danger is that when real live music happens — when someone misses a note or their voice trembles — the audience mistakes honesty for failure.

In music, the small imperfections are what make a performance human — a slightly cracked note, a breath that hits too hard, a moment where someone pushes their voice past comfort because they’re caught in the feeling. Those moments are alive. They connect us. We don’t remember a show because it was perfect; we remember it because it made us feel something real. But the culture of performance right now, especially in mainstream pop and televised specials, seems obsessed with producing “live perfection.” It’s marketed as authenticity, but it’s actually control disguised as truth.

I’ve felt the pull of that pressure as an artist too. The idea that every song, every mix, every vocal take has to sound “industry ready” — balanced, bright, competitive. But the more you chase that standard, the more you lose the original spark of what you were trying to say. There’s a difference between craft and control. Craft refines; control sterilises. A mix can enhance emotion, but when you start correcting emotion itself, you cross into something else entirely.

Watching Wicked that night, I found myself thinking about how much of art now is engineered to remove vulnerability. Even shows that are supposed to celebrate human emotion end up feeling like they’ve been digitally ironed until nothing creases. We call it professionalism, but sometimes it’s just fear — fear of being caught sounding too human.

As someone who grew up loving raw performances, that loss bothers me. When you hear Freddie Mercury miss a note, it’s still glorious because you hear his humanity in it. When Elton John’s voice breaks slightly on a ballad, it adds weight, not weakness. Those artists didn’t have to be perfect to be powerful. They knew that emotion isn’t tidy.

So when I watch these modern “live” spectacles, I can’t help feeling that we’re watching the life drained out of something that used to breathe. It’s a strange kind of irony: the more technology we use to sound human, the less human it becomes. Maybe that’s what authenticity is now — not about being flawless, but about daring to sound alive again.