Michael Brinkworth on the importance of having a Thick Skin.

My latest single, “Thick Skin” opens my upcoming album, “Wasted Wonder”, to be released on May 21 by the Berlin-based artist-run collective, The Famous Gold Watch Records, along with the help of The A&R Department.  The song sets the tone of the whole album, hitting upon the struggles of being an independent artist and the cost of blowing everything else off in the futile pursuit of trying not only to write your next best song, but also to make a sustainable career out of it.  Throughout the making of the album, I was trying to strike this balance to keep my music sacred, staying connected to that innocence I had when I first started out on this path.  I think this is something that every independent singer-songwriter faces these days, especially with the necessity of having to be savvy on social media and able to do everything a record label used to do. 

I inadvertently based myself in Berlin, using it as a half-way house between my rambling hitch-hiking busker days and not wanting to commit to ‘settling down’ whilst working as a full-time musician.  The songs that made up my debut album "Somewhere To Run From" romantically touched on the travelling troubadour’s life I had before ending up in Berlin - grappling with rootlessness, pondering on the idea of knowing a home and the bonds that bring you back. With “Wasted Wonder”, most of the songs were written after Berlin had properly become my home-base between tours. I started looking back on my formative years in the context of where I was at with trying to make a living with my music. I went through a lot to write these songs, and most of them were quite well lived-in, gigged and toured by the time we got to recording them. The album production was paid in full by my touring, gigging and busking efforts, and as a result, sessions were booked sporadically whenever I had saved enough cash, which made the recording process quite long (little did I know a pandemic would delay this album’s release even longer!).

I wrote “Thick Skin” specifically about the Berlin phenomenon and troubadour's trade that I came to rely on to get by between touring and gigging - 'bar-busking'. Berlin has always been a bohemian safehaven of a city, and thus, musicians playing short impromptu unplugged sets for hat donations inside and outside of bars and restaurants, is not an unusual and most often accepted thing.  I lived this story behind the song for a long time and the experience is all in there. “Thick Skin” started out as a little anthem to myself to keep going - I would play this song about 'bar-busking' very often in my actual 'bar-busking' sets!  Even when I’m not hard up for cash, I still enjoy bar-busking - I love the spontaneity of it, anything can happen, testing out new songs, new covers or remembering something I used to play, in a low-key setting, where there’s zero expectations.  Just like hitch-hiking, there’s so many crazy random connections, experiences and opportunities that have come my way through bar-busking. I think it’s really honed me as a performer, helping me to get in the zone and just feel the song I’m singing, regardless of the kind of room and crowd I’m playing for.  I don’t know where I’ll be with my life and music in a couple of decades time, but I know even though there were some hard times, I’ll look back on these Berlin bar-busking years fondly - perhaps I’ll still be doing it then, who knows!

The theme of “Wasted Wonder”, that I stumbled upon during the whole album recording process, could not be more pertinent to the times we are living in today when it comes to the arts. Artists have always had to struggle with justifying the importance and value of art itself to the workings of society at large and the churning cogs of a growth-obsessed economy. Pandemic restrictions have only made this more pronounced, with disproportionate government support for more traditional sectors over culture and arts leaving many artists and workers in these sectors in a dire situation. Even though I recorded the album before the pandemic swept across the globe, I didn’t know how relevant the album's themes would become. By talking about my own experiences in these songs, I hope they have resonated with fellow musicians and can shed light onto these issues affecting artists. At the end of the day, they’re just songs written from the heart, that I hope will move some folks like they moved me when I wrote them. 

“Thick Skin” seemed to be the perfect opener to tie all this collection of songs together.  Its music video was made by my brother, Alex Brinkworth and our mate, Nick Scholey, and it encapsulates these daily struggles, wherein I literally bear my 'Thick Skin' for all to see - a concept that I thought was hilarious until reality hit on the day of shooting having to prance around in my underwear!  As much as I hope the music video gives you a laugh, it is quite heartfelt too - it is a really tough time right now for independent musicians and singer-songwriters, especially in Europe after 7 months of heavy lockdown continuing into summer. Consider this next time you see independent musicians whose music you enjoy reaching out on social media and remember that whatever little thing you can do to support goes a long way to help them keep releasing new music into the world. 

I’ll leave you with the lyrics of ‘Thick Skin’ and the music video. I hope it hits a nerve, lifts your spirits or at least gives you a chuckle!  

- Michael Brinkworth