Open Late

I remember this session beginning in that strange part of the evening where nothing has really happened yet, but somehow you already feel like you should have made a decision about what kind of evening it is going to be.

It was early evening. Too late to pretend you were going to have a productive night and too early to admit you were probably just going to sit there wondering whether you should be doing something else.

There was that familiar pull towards going out. Not in any dramatic kind of way. Not because I needed anything specific. It was just that feeling that somewhere else, something was happening and without you. There was music somewhere. People somewhere. Movement somewhere. That feeling that life was continuing and maybe I should go and find it. FOMO (fear of missing out) was at play here, completely.

But there was also this other side of it… the quieter question underneath it all. The one that had been appearing more often since the decision was made for me that I needed to stop drinking. By this point I had been sober for around ten months after a, lets say, unexpected health update, that had quietly changed the way I looked at a lot of things.

At the time, I thought the biggest change would be removing alcohol. The obvious thing. The thing everyone understands. What I didn’t fully appreciate was everything that sat around it. The rituals. The familiarity. The little shortcuts that I had built without really noticing. The way a drink could make walking into a room easier. The way it could soften the edges of a conversation. The way it could remove that small hesitation before you decided to join in. The courage booster, the gurad dropper, all of those things.

It wasn’t that I needed it to enjoy myself, it was more that I had become used to it being there and had built a ‘way of being’ around it. And when it wasn’t there anymore, things felt more exposed.

There was no buffer. No small adjustment period between being at home and being somewhere else. No switch that made everything feel slightly easier. Everything was just as it was. Which sounds like a good thing, and it is, but it also means you have to meet yourself exactly where you are. All of the time.

Some evenings feel liberating. Other evenings at 7pm it just feels like you’re standing in your kitchen having a debate with yourself about whether you actually want to go out or whether you just like the idea of being someone who goes out.

So instead of spending the next few hours negotiating with myself like a loonatic, I went into my home studio. That decision was probably more important than I realise because there was no grand intention behind it. I wasn’t trying to create something meaningful. I wasn’t trying to prove anything to myself. I wasn’t searching for some big emotional breakthrough.

I just put some music on. How does that feel? Then another track. Then another. Somewhere along the way I stopped thinking about whether I was making the right choices and started listening to what felt right in the moment and what feeling I was revealing to myself.

There is a strange moment in creating where you realise you have stopped directing and started responding. You are no longer trying to control where something goes. You are just paying attention enough to notice where it wants to go next and whether you want to hold on to that feeling or move through it to evolve it further.

This session came from that place. It wasn’t carefully constructed or even concidered. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t built around a particular idea. It was just movement. A conversation between tracks. Connection with myself and what I was feeling in that moment.

A quick decision followed by another until eventually you look up and realise you’re no longer deciding anything at all. You’re just there enjoying the process and the journey.

That feeling has always been one of the reasons music matters so much to me. Not because it allows me to escape, but because it gives me somewhere to fully arrive.

And that night, something clicked. There was no sudden moment where everything changed. It was quieter than that. It was the realisation that the thing I thought I had lost was still there.

The music didn’t need anything added to it. I didn’t need something external, like booze, to make me more open, more present, more connected. The ability to get lost in sound, to feel energy building, to become part of something moving, was still completely intact.

The doorway had just changed. Open Late feels like that journey. It was all about connection, but not in a way that connects us to people, but in this case about connecting with myself.

The session itself starts with hesitation. There is still some resistance there. You can hear that feeling of standing on the edge of the room, deciding whether you are going to step in or stay where you are. But slowly, almost without noticing, that changes. The carefulness disappears. The choices become instinctive. The music begins to feel less like something I am selecting and more like something I am following.

The room changes. Even though the room itself hasn’t moved. Infact, its literally my home studio with just me and my studio monitors up to eleven. But close your eyes, I am in a space where this all makes sense.

There is a point where you stop being aware of yourself doing it. You stop checking whether you are enjoying it enough. You stop wondering whether this is the right track or whether you are making the right choice.

You just trust it.

And there is something quite freeing about realising how much energy we spend interrupting ourselves. Questioning. Analysing. Trying to work out whether we are allowed to enjoy something before we actually let ourselves enjoy it. Sometimes the answer is much simpler. Sometimes you just need to move.

The session carries that feeling all the way through. It doesn’t chase one huge moment. It doesn’t need to announce where it is going. It keeps moving, allowing the energy to rise and fall naturally, like a conversation that doesn’t need anyone to dominate it.

Eventually it starts to settle. Not like something ending. More like something returning. Returning to the room and yourself. I think that is why this session feels different every time I come back to it. Sometimes it catches immediately. Sometimes it takes longer. Sometimes I am ready for it. Sometimes I’m still carrying whatever thoughts I brought into the room with me and it has to wait patiently until I stop trying to solve everything.

It has a way of reminding me that connection doesn’t always arrive through another person. Sometimes it arrives through a moment where you finally stop keeping yourself at a distance.

Looking back, Open Late was never really about going out. It wasn’t really about sobriety either. Those were just the circumstances around it. The real thing underneath was discovering that I had attached too much importance to the things that came before connection.

The drink before the night. The ritual or habbit before the conversation. The permission before the feeling. I had convinced myself that those things were helping me get there. But maybe they were just the things I happened to do before I arrived. Because the truth was, the part of me that wanted to move, to feel, to connect, had never disappeared.

It was still there… waiting. The only difference was that I had to meet it without the shortcuts.

Maybe that is what this session represents?

Not replacing something I lost. Finding something that was already there. The door was never locked. I was just looking for the old entrance…

Like I said, the decision to act rather than sit and question everything was the key here.