Stuart Murdoch

How to Solve Our

Human Problems

Notes from three EPs

EP I

This is Stuart from the band here. Thank you for buying our latest record. Thank you for your
anachronistic behaviour - you beautiful believer in pop music.

I should tell you something about the title. Sometimes there’s no need to explain things.
Sometimes there is just a name, and there it is. This time, I borrowed the name from
a book, so I should give you a little context.

“How To Solve Our Human Problems” was written by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso. He is
a Buddhist monk, originally from Tibet, who came to England in 1977. His aim was to bring
Buddhism to the west, but to present it in such a way that was accessible and relevant to the
lives of people over here.

I stumbled into one of the Buddhist centres about three years ago. I kept going back.

In the early days of me going there, one of the teachers would usually say at some point,
“Let’s read from How To Solve Our Human Problems page 42...” or something like that.
I suppose the title of the book became representative to me of the whole experience
of going there - sitting there, soaking up the stories and the wisdom, getting quite
a different perspective. It’s a kind of naïve title. But what if it was true?

I suppose I went along at first to meditate. Well, really I went looking for peace, or solace, or
consolation...

But they start talking about life. It was the talking part that surprised me. I’d only ever done
the meditation part before. But I got kind of hooked on the talking part.

They talked about anger, they talked about happiness, they talked about craving, desire. They
talked about impatience, jealousy. They talked about pain.

I was in considerable pain at that moment, so this was interesting to me. It wasn’t so much
physical pain, but I was in a fair deal of mental pain, so suddenly I was very interested in all
this new information.
So I was sitting there in a puddle of pain, completely absorbed by what was being said. I was
suffering and they were talking about suffering. Maybe they knew something about how to
stop the suffering. They seemed to be hinting at that.
The funny thing was that I was fairly certain at the time that I was the only person there who
was in pain. I guess I thought that the other people were Grade A expert little Buddhas. They
all looked pretty peaceful sitting there. I thought they must have it all worked out.
That’s probably a common misconception though. Do you ever get that feeling when you look
around you? At people at work, at people in the pub or on trains – at your neighbours, or your
sister or something - that some people, most people even, have it totally sussed? It’s unlikely.
But even us, even us, from time to time, and from year to year, suspect that we have it totally
worked out. We’re on a roll, on a high, things going good, feeling great... then something
happens. A lost job, an illness, a break up, a betrayal, a death. And it all falls apart. The floor
disappears, and we are falling.
Toronto
A couple of days ago I arrived in Toronto with the band. It was a long trip, through
London... immigration... we hit rush hour on the way in from the airport. I figured I might
just be able to make a class (they have the same Buddhist centres in lots of big cities).
So I got out of the van, dumped my bags in the hotel, leapt into an uber, and got to the temple
at 7:01pm. Pretty good going I thought.
It was a largely suburban area of Toronto, a quiet street. The temple looked a little incongruous,
but there it was. I came up the steps - looked pretty closed. There was a woman sitting on the
steps. She told me it was closed, that they had all gone away. I tried the door anyway – it was
locked, then I sat down beside her.
It turns out all the guys (all the monks and nuns that is) had gone to England! Every year
they have a big festival at the mother ship in the Lake District - the Glasgow centre was shut
too - but I never suspected it would affect the Canadian chapter.
So we sat for a bit, and I asked her if she had been before, and it was her first time. So I felt
I should at least encourage her to come back. And we chatted a while about stuff, and why she
was here, and what she thought it was about. And I tried to fill her in a little.
She was from Newfoundland, and she’d come down here to act but she was waiting tables.
Well, we can all dig that because we all came to act, and we all ended up waiting tables. And
there she was sat, a little disconsolate, on the steps of a Buddhist temple, and all the Buddhists
had gone on holiday.
I feel like I should have stepped up a little more. I feel like I could have made more of an
effort to tell her what it was about. I left pretty soon after, and wandered back downtown, but
I should have at least said, ‘ You should come back. This is bigger than acting, it’s bigger than Toronto:
the fact that you’re here is bigger than the fact that some boy has let you down, or that someone died, or
that you’re disappointed with life. This is going to take all these things and try and make sense of them,
this is going to show you that the bad stuff is as important as the good, and it’s not what happens to
you, but how you react to what happens that is the real decider in the long run. If you want to think
in those terms. The long run. Eternity. A very long run.’
I could have said those things. I’ve sat through enough classes. It feels a little strange, and
I’m wary of even telling you. It’s not like I ever want to twist your arm. I just want to pass on
something I find interesting. I mean, we’re all adults here. You can decide for yourself. But it
feels ok to talk about it, because at some point, something of what one has heard and read
becomes one’s own thoughts, and it’s only in telling that you discover what you really think
anyway...
So What Do I Think?
When I was in my twenties, I had gotten through the major crises of my early life, come
out the other side, and I thought I was pretty wise. I didn’t have much, no status, no money,
no career, not many friends, but I thought that in the stillness, at least I might have learned
something about life.
If anyone would ask me ‘how can I be happy?’ (and even if they didn’t ask me) I would say, “ You
can change three things about yourself. Where you live, what you do, and who you are with. If you’re
not happy, then change one of those things.”
Of course I was speaking about my own experience. It seemed to me that my own inability to
flow with life and embrace change had been partly to blame for the previous decade’s eventual
downfall.
So my own little pocket rule was, you can move, split or quit. Town, girlfriend, job.
I didn’t have a job at the time, so my choice would have been even simpler. In fact, for huge
swathes of my teens and 20s I didn’t have a girlfriend either, so basically, I was a bad person
to ask for life advice!
But I still gave it out when I thought it was appropriate. And I think it’s ok advice. It’s pretty
good, worldly, 20-something novice advice: don’t get stuck, don’t get turgid, don’t get too much
inertia too young. I had, in fact, started to flow a bit more by my mid 20s and it started to help...
So let’s call this Newtonian advice. This is the law of the obvious, of what you can see, the
accepted rules for the straightforward motion of a free particle, i.e. the single 20-something
person.
But life doesn’t stay like that. In fact, for many of you, life was probably already way more
complicated than that. What happens when you feel yourself locked into a career path pretty
young, or an academia path? Something that perhaps you committed so much time and money
to doing? And it’s tough and it’s a drag sometimes, and you don’t like the people most of the
time, but you know, it’s the life you chose, and it still feels right for you, and in your heart, you
don’t want to give up? You don’t want to quit.
Or what if you meet someone and have a kid when you’re younger. The atom bomb, children.
There’s no easy exit from that one, no matter how difficult things may get.
I’m not saying that kids are intrinsically difficult of course – this may be a joyful path for many –
but just saying, what if it gets tough, and you have doubts whether you want to be with the partner
you ended up with, and there’s money issues, and trust issues, and just issues of going out of your
mind with fear and exhaustion and frustration? But you can’t just split.
And the house thing. Back when I was single, in my 20s, they still had housing benefit for
students. They used to give you money to pay your rent when you were studying/pissing about!
Things aren’t that easy now. There’s a property ladder up there somewhere, but in the meantime,
finding something affordable and decent isn’t so easy, especially if you have dependents.
So my Newtonian rules aren’t looking so clever. My Newtonian rules are for idealised single
free-floaty solvent young types. What about the rest?
You’re going to need an Einstein.
May I suggest that you might just need a mind like the mind of Buddha? May I suggest that
Buddha was to spirituality and personal improvement what Einstein was to particles and
planetary movement?
In my classes, they are always emphasising another kind of change. A bigger change, certainly
a more fundamental change. You can change yourself.
It’s a funny one, because I think in our culture, a lot of the time if you suggested a person
should or could change themselves, the involuntary response might be, “Why should I change?
It’s them that’s the wankers!”
It’s a radical approach, this changing yourself, but not a bad one. It’s an approach that may
involve a degree of humility. But I would attest that it’s an approach that could soon arm you
with powerful defences against some of the worst stuff that the world can throw up.
And in the process, you could take back control of the only thing that you had control over in
the first place (in this chaotic and out of control world). The only thing that ultimately matters
– your own mind.
To be continued...
EP II
This record isn’t going to solve your problems...
Welcome to the second in a series of three records, all called “How To Solve Our Human Problems.”
This record isn’t going to solve your problems, you know that. I would like to think that some
day, on an unexpected morning, you might listen to one of these songs and you might find
something to divert you from your problems. But it’s not going to solve them.
Let me just check though. I wonder now if the records I listened to when I was a kid solved
any of my problems? Were they at least useful?
I guess I’ve been leaning on music as a main ally since I was six. I didn’t have headphones back
then, or a stereo. In fact I didn’t have recourse to hear any pre-recorded music of any type at
that stage. I just had to sing.
We had a swing in our back garden which was on a hill in the sloping suburbs of south
Glasgow. I took that swing for granted even though I know it was pretty fancy to have one.
For music, we had the radio, and we had one television programme called ‘Top Of The Pops’.
The chart rundown was on Sunday night, which I probably listened to with my sister, but for
the most part, the radio was stuck on BBC Radio 2.
Enough of the chart must have been played on Radio 2, because the songs wormed their way
into my brain. Any moment when I was spending quality swing time in the back garden,
I would ‘sing’ down the top ten. I would do my best anyway.
The clearest memory I have of singing on my swing, was the song “January” by Pilot. It made
number 1 on the 1st of February, 1975. It was quite together of the record company to have
released the song in January, but really, it was a no-brainer marketing campaign. And the tune
was catchy as hell. So it easily made number one in the back gardens of Clarkston.
But did it help me with my problems? Dunno. I don’t think I had any. I wasn’t aware of them
anyway. I vaguely remember power cuts and candles, but what wasn’t to like about that when
you were six? Vietnam was coming to an end, technicolour explosions and helicopters, night
after night on the news... but that was far, far away.
Kevin Rowland says...
I don’t think I had a heavy relationship with music till I was older. It was always a fun thing
though, sometimes obsessional, often a gateway to wonder.
There it was, sitting on it’s subliminal plane right next to us – on the radio, on TV, on the
paper in front of me when I sat down to play piano, up on stage with us during school shows,
in endless rehearsal scenarios with choirs and music groups, wind groups, brass and pop. If it
wasn’t a god, it had to be a currency of God, surely.
The first time that music, for good or for bad, had an affect on me that impeded on my
emotional life, the first time that it seemed to leap out at me and go beyond it’s fun and funky
remit, it was when I had just broke up with my first ‘girlfriend’. (I’m putting ‘girlfriend’ in
inverted commas because we were only 13, but we were definitely called ‘boyfriend/girlfriend’
at the time).
Life was good when I was 13. We had all moved up to the big school – it was a big mad city
full of underlying violence, and beauty too, if you cared to look. I joined every club going, did
many sports. I moved fast in that great way of youth, when you became what you did and
didn’t worry about the opinions of others. You were just in love with what you did.
Being enamoured of action and activity was apparently just enough to make a person seem
interesting, attractive even. I somehow asked out the best looking girl in the school and she
said yes. I was punching above my weight, but as long as I kept moving, maybe nobody would
notice.
So we had quite the 6 or 8 months. considering we were only 13 – that’s a pretty long time.
She eventually pointed this out.
“I don’t think that two 13 year old people should be getting so serious.”
Why not, I thought? I was serious. I had never been so serious about anything. This was a big
thing. What else could you do but be serious?
“I think that we should try not going out for a while”
… I’m trying to think if I had particularly altruistic tendencies back then. Probably not. Maybe
And that was that. The while turned into forever, and she fairly quickly moved on to going out
with older boys. Boys that in truth, didn’t look so ridiculously outsized when they had their
arms around her, like I must have done.
So what has this got to do with the music?
Her name was Eileen. She finished me in May 1982, and in June 1982, Dexy’s Midnight
Runners released the song “Come On, Eileen”.
Not only had I never heard a song with the name Eileen in it before, but I didn’t even know
any other Eileens. Never heard of anyone else called Eileen! How could it suddenly be in a hit
song? It was like a punch in the face.
There were Donnas and Peggys and Laylas. But Eileen? This was very strange. Very
coincidental. More than a coincidence. This was a message.
And the message continued to haunt me and taunt me all summer.
Now we’re all grown up...
...music still has the power to affect us, bring us to tears, stop us in our tracks, hold us to a time
and place. That’s the listening effect. What about the other side too, making the music – things
just seem to appear to the mind and we scramble to get them down!
It’s a common topic in the meditation classes I’ve been attending lately, how powerful a thing a
mind can be. Thoughts can be more powerful than words or actions, simply because they have
to be thoughts before they can become words or actions.
It all happens in our minds first, and that goes for music. I became acutely aware of that about
25 years ago when musical ideas first started coming to me. I had an illness that left me with
no energy, immobile, bereft of action and companionship.
I had an idea that it would be good to express how I felt about my predicament, and about the
world that I found myself in. So I gave into these ideas, and pretty quickly, music crept along
at the same time, and wrapped its mysterious fingers around the words. They became songs.
So out of this inaction, the mind showed itself to be awake and ready. I started getting these
ideas that would never have occurred to me before, and for me they became pretty powerful
things. I poured a lot into them, but they repaid me with interest by being markers and
statements of my existence.
Furthermore, these ideas proved portable and deliverable, easy to reproduce, easy to spread
around, on record, on radio...
it was in the background somewhere – the feeling that the words in particular might be useful
to someone just like me. A packet of words sent out there on the lonely telegram of a song.
How sneaky! How perfect.
The main thing I felt from the songs was a sense of being useful. Back then when I was doing
nothing, I became somewhat in awe of everyday people – people that managed to go to work,
people that stayed up late drinking and dancing, people that gave their lives to help others,
teachers and doctors and overseas aid workers. People that fixed pipes and laid roofs...
Me. In awe.
So I clung to my songs. I knew I was a couple of levels down from village fool. I was the idiot
brother, the jester bereft of either gaiety or pom-poms.
In time, through the group, I became a little bit useful. And isn’t that the best feeling? As soon
as you point yourself outwards and give something to the world, that’s the moment the magic
begins to work. Something clicks, something flows, opportunities arise.
that route. If you buy me a coffee we can sit one day and I’ll try to tell you about that crazy
route. I’ll try to tell you what other people have told me: I won’t do it justice, and in the end
you may be suitably confused, but at least we will have passed the morning in noble caffeine
fuelled endeavour, and that’s important – a bit of effort.
How might our purpose change as we get older, if at all?
Sarah: Our little bubble may drift further from reality. I don’t think that would be terrible though.
For that crazy route to happiness, you might refer to the book “How To Solve Our Human
Problems” by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, from which these records took their title.

If we could see love emanating and moving around, that’s the moment when we’d first see
it, even if it was just an unruly wisp. The moment you point yourself at the world and press
‘engage’.

What now though?

While I was thinking about this stuff I thought to ask the group a few questions around the
same topics.

Do you feel useful (as a musician)?!

Stevie: Sure! I feel useless the rest of the time, so even if I’m deluded, I need something to hold on to.
Sarah: I don’t feel useful enough.
Chris: As part of a collective yes, because I meet people for whom the music of the group
has been important. The ideas we’ve put out in the world have made a connection...

How might our purpose change as we get older, if at all?

Chris: In theory what we do as a band, if we carry on being a band, could go anywhere because we
don’t consciously limit ourselves.

Go anywhere – that’s a freeing sort of a notion. I don’t know about you, but as I get older
I have a daily sense of time running out, of a mania for wanting to be useful, wanting to be in
the right place at the right time with the right people doing the right thing.

That’s a contradiction right there. Being in that ‘right place’ is a kind of heavenly notion – we
possibly don’t have too much to do with arranging all those elements. Our heavenly journey
is as much in the hanging about as the action itself. It’s as much in the unpalatable task as the
silver and shimmering.

How might our purpose change as we get older, if at all?

Stevie: Time changes everything so it kind of takes care of itself.

I dig that. But I still fight it minute by minute, second by second. And who doesn’t? Cos we all
want to be happy, right? The route to that happiness is the thing though. It’s a hazy mystery

EP III
Ghosting The Rush Hour
Welcome to the last of the series of EPs which we have called “How To Solve Our Human
Problems”. Thanks for sticking with it. Or if this is your first one, it’s nice to have you along.
I’m sitting here on a beautiful morning in late September, and to be honest, I’m just thankful
we got to make these records at all. From a listener’s perspective, maybe you wonder why
people who have been making music for such a long time bother to still make music? Let me
assure you it’s not just because we can’t think of anything else to do... we love making records.
Stevie and I were in London this week, answering questions from the media, meeting
publishers and management, and just generally soaking up the funny, frenetic London vibe.
One thing that was noteworthy was how often the questions from the magazines and websites
were the same as the ones asked by our colleagues in the business – as if we might have gleaned
some answers to things that have been puzzling them over the years, like:
What are we doing?
Why are we doing it?
That’s ok though. Cos who really knows what’s going on? Not many of us.
When they kept asking us, “Why did you release three EPs this time instead of a record?”,
I kept imagining that they were in fact asking us something deeper. Maybe it was my way of
dealing with the mundanity, but I imagined they were using a trivial formatting question to
ask us what we really thought about the world, about music, about love, about God, about
whether there was a God, about if there was a God, did we think he or she was benevolent,
and if there was a God and heaven after, what could we do at this juncture to save ourselves
from everlasting torment? Or did we favour the non-deity reincarnation model favoured by
the Buddhists? (no cake-walk either, I assure you.)
As I sipped my fresh mint tea, my eyes glazed ever so slightly and Stevie’s suit jacket became
by fractions slightly less crumpled due to the proximity of the steam from my fresh mint tea,
we thought about these things. They couldn’t seriously just be interested in the EP question?
We fashioned a different answer for each person, for each magazine or business meeting,
according to what we thought they would like to hear, and the degree of seriousness with
which they seemed to take the world and the situation we were in.
What situation, you might ask?
I’m talking about our situation. Our condition. Our problems. Our Human Problems! Let me
expand.
Vogons
You know that bit in Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy when the Vogon ships first show up
on earth? These massive space ships hanging suspended in the sky? And suddenly everyone’s
perspective shifts: their lives are instantly put in the shadow, nothing seems important anymore
because there are aliens about to destroy the planet? Well that’s a little bit how I feel about
our human problems on a daily basis. Like they are hanging suspended in a metaphorical sky
all around us.
I don’t mean it’s all doom and gloom. And by ‘situation’ I don’t necessarily mean all the daily
news that comes in from the outside, crushing and crowding out our lives, demanding our
attention, demanding our opinion (even though our opinion doesn’t help anyone.)
I’m just talking about the here and the now. This beautiful morning in late September. The
strangeness of it all. The strangeness of life. The demand that if you, for a minute have an
inkling of how strange life is, and that if you consider there must be something bigger than
just the table, the sky and your boiled eggs – then you might have to do something about it.
There might in fact be placed on you a strong incentive to do something about it. And it might
be the way you act, or what you say. But it pulls and tugs at you, and you wish most of the time
it would go away so you get back to the papers.
It’s that strangeness that to me is like Vogon spaceships arriving out of a clear blue beautiful
September sky. There they are, hanging suspended, ridiculous, incongruous, dangerous. As life.
So I hope you aren’t going to ask us why we made three EPs this time instead of an album. I’ll
be disappointed in you, kiddo.
I’m joking, I’ll level with you.
Why did we make three EPs? We just felt like it. And that should be the way with music.
It’s all feelings. Music is, in itself, the very currency of feeling. It’s a language of feeling,
so abstract that you couldn’t even paint it on a canvas. But still, we can make you feel a death,
a disappointment, a departure, simply by striking the guitar a certain way. Well, that’s the idea anyway.
After London, our publishers said, “you guys wouldn’t want to make a ‘library’ record?” (that’s
instrumental music for the sake of it.) We write a lot of instrumental music that never gets
turned into songs, so I said that we could.

So I was looking forward to telling this to the group. In fact, when I shut my eyes, I imagined
I was back at B&S HQ, in front of the whiteboard with a pointer in my hand. I have the titles
for five short records...

Music for Mornings

Music for Evenings
Music for Movement
Music for Meditation
Music for Lamentation

You know, this might never happen, but let me have fun imagining!

The titles are prosaic, but it’s kind of enough to get me going. I like the everyday feeling of the
morning in Glasgow. I’m always walking out into it, making the most of the light as the year
draws to a close.

I love ghosting the rush hour, weaving my way around robotic office workers at Central
Station, picking my train at random, dying to get out to see a field, a suburb, a body of water,
any wide vista of sky... before the Scottish daylight quickly fades on us.

I could put that into music, I think the others could too. We could pool our ideas, sketch them
out in the practice room.

So that’s a plan, and it’s good to have a plan. And even if your plan goes tits-up, it’s good to
look ahead with a positive perspective!

Turn your travails into stories, my friends. Cherish your misadventures; you may eventually
come to love them. Dig yourself out of the torpor you’re in, because you’re better than that.
You’re a human after all, and that’s a precious thing.
These notes are extracted from the EP How to Solve Our Human Problems Parts 1–3
by Belle and Sebastian

2018