“Truth be told, I really don’t like what you write… I mean, what on earth gives you the right?
Now, get up on that stage, lose your fears, every single fright that might just have kept you up late last night… and bring it. Sing it!
That’s just the thing, you say that you’re a storyteller, but all we have seen so far is an acne-riddled teenager, no more, no less than a forlorn fella…
However much you might like to think that you are the star of your own show, to these people you’ll forever be a stranger cloaked in danger…
Why not lose the mask, dip a toe where it never dreamt to go before…
Fair play if you can manage to surprise me, point things out, earmark what is important, what is completely stellar…
And I mean truly, put plain and simply that’s your job in the first place, your God-given duty…
You say that you’ve wanted this right from the beginning, that you spent all of your time up in your room honing a ‘craft’ that others couldn’t but consider boring…
While friends both near and far were only ever really interested in playing the guitar and singing…
A few lines to go about turning this from a war with words into what all of these people out here in front of you will only ever deem the opposite of absurd…
Make them like, no, love your words…
It isn’t easy, it’s not supposed to be, all of these critics, they the ones who pose the real question…
Pen in hand, ever ready to suggest to the masses just how crap you might be…
Capsize your steady boat, pin-prick one by one the few heady dream that do still appear to float…
Stay with me… and smile hard goddamnit.”