For years I told myself software replaced music.
It’s a neat story.
It just isn’t true.
Back in the mid-90s I was playing in a band. We were talking about touring the UK. The sort of conversation every young musician dreams about having.
There was only one problem.
I’d just bought a house with my girlfriend.
Mortgages have a habit of ruining romantic ideas.
The band wasn’t really my band anyway. It belonged to the drummer. I was writing songs. Plenty of them. But I wasn’t steering the ship.
So when reality arrived carrying bills, responsibilities and a mortgage statement, I made a choice.
I left.
Not dramatically.
No arguments.
No speech about artistic integrity.
I just went looking for a better paying job.
Software happened to be the route.
What surprised me was how little it felt like a compromise.
I’d been fascinated by computers since getting a ZX Spectrum as a kid. Most people wanted to play the games. I wanted to know how they worked.
Why pressing a key did something.
Why changing one line altered everything.
Music and software looked different on the surface.
Underneath they felt remarkably similar.
You start with nothing.
Then something exists that didn’t before.
A song.
A piece of code.
An idea.
A product.
The creative itch being scratched was exactly the same.
So I threw myself into software.
And software threw plenty back.
I wrote one of the first Java SSH APIs.
Built companies.
Sold a company.
Built more companies.
Spent twenty five years solving problems that interested me.
At least that’s what I thought I was doing.
Looking back, I think there was another pattern.
I keep walking away from situations where somebody else is holding the wheel.
I left the band because it wasn’t my direction.
I’ve bootstrapped businesses because I don’t particularly enjoy being told how things should be done.
I discovered acquisitions come with an interesting catch. You sell the company… then somebody owns your calendar.
The whole point of starting a company was freedom.
Not yachts.
Not private jets.
Not motivational quotes on social media.
Just the ability to wake up and decide what I wanted to build.
That sounds wonderfully noble until you realise freedom comes with support tickets.
The SSH products became my baby.
As the CEO of the company that acquired us once observed.
And babies have a habit of demanding attention at inconvenient times.
I’ve answered support emails on holidays.
I’ve answered support emails on anniversaries.
I’ve answered support emails on beaches.
Including one rather memorable beach in the Maldives during my honeymoon.
My wife has never forgotten this.
Nor should she.
The funny thing is that music never really disappeared during any of this.
I told myself it had.
I told myself software had replaced it.
What actually happened was much less dramatic.
Music got put on a shelf.
A very long shelf.
Every now and then I’d pick up a guitar.
Play an old song.
Put it down again.
Carry on.
Then a few years ago something changed.
I started trying to record some of those old songs.
It was a disaster.
The voice I’d left behind in my twenties had apparently decided not to make the journey into my fifties.
I couldn’t sing them properly.
Not even close.
So I did what engineers do.
I treated it like a problem.
I found a vocal coach.
Two years later I had my voice back.
Maybe not the same voice.
A better one.
At some point during that process something happened that mattered far more than vocal training.
A new song arrived.
Then another.
Then another.
That was the moment.
Not the equipment.
Not the recordings.
Not the releases.
The new songs.
Old songs are memories.
New songs are evidence.
Evidence that the songwriter wasn’t gone.
He’d just been busy.
Last year I released a recording that had been sitting on a DAT tape since 1995.
I always thought it was a good song.
Still do.
It has a hook.
Energy.
A vocal that’s rough around the edges.
Definitely twenty-year-old me.
Listening back wasn’t some emotional reunion with the past.
It was more like meeting an old friend and discovering he hadn’t changed very much.
The same things that interested me then still interest me now.
People.
Love.
The state of the world.
The strange habit humanity has of learning absolutely nothing from history.
Thirty years pass.
Technology changes.
Politics changes.
Fashion changes.
People don’t.
Not really.
Which is probably why I now find myself building AI software, security products, a music platform and writing songs.
Most people see unrelated projects.
I don’t.
They’re all attempts to solve the same problem.
Agency.
Helping people spend less time fighting systems and more time doing the thing they actually care about.
Maybe that’s why so much modern software irritates me.
Too much of it exists to be sold rather than used.
The same disease has infected parts of the music industry.
Everyone seems to be teaching everyone else how to win.
Far fewer people seem interested in making something worth listening to.
Or worth using.
The work itself has somehow become secondary.
I’ve never been very interested in that game.
I like making things.
Songs.
Software.
The category has never mattered much.
I’m genre fluid.
Always have been.
I suspect I always will be.
Years ago I watched a South Bank Show documentary about George Michael.
One scene stuck with me.
He was sitting in a studio talking about songwriting.
Not like a celebrity.
Not like a pop star.
Like an engineer.
Someone obsessed with making things.
Pulling them apart.
Putting them back together.
Figuring out why they worked.
He happened to be wearing a Lakers hat.
Thirty years later I’m still wearing one.
Still making things.
For years I thought software had replaced music.
The truth is simpler.
Music never left.
I did.