Ian Hawgood - All Your Wasted Love (2025)

The flow of music is always with me. Even when silence persists and try as I might to hide from the echoes of music it is there. But why hide from that which can be so cathartic?
Across my 47 years of life I've found sound to be something that keeps me companion through all the love and light I feel and reflect on. Those two themes come through all my music whether in inspiration, lyric or processing and the flow of that is something I am deeply thankful for.
Ultimately I've come to understand my music is a way of communicating and healing from trauma, a bit at a time sure, but healing nonetheless. I don't really understand the world nor much want to, so I'm left with few words other than to create in some organic flow I connect with through these musical passages.
I come from a childhood background of control and extreme quietude, coming to a physical point where I was hard of hearing in my youth and struggled with hearing aids, infections and going in and out of hospital. The ringing in my ears is such a strong memory and would cause me to hide and want to tear my own head off to escape myself. As things healed miraculously by the age of ten I came to find absolute joy in listening to music despite music also being deeply traumatic for me. The ying and the yang, the light and the dark tore me apart for much of my life and I could never accept their mutual existence within and beyond as I tried to heal in the purest light I could. Any hint of the other would cause deep wells of depression I have fought for so long.
It has led me to an adult life that is caught back to my childhood, where I felt extreme peace when things were clear and made sense to me, but were deeply troubling at any other time. I've come to see that across my life when there is too much control I seize up and struggle to say the words, yet when there is no control and I give in to the flow I find peace and great joy. This is felt most keenly when I create music and is the purest way for me to communicate with others with love and light when little seem to exist in the spoken world.
"All Your Wasted Love" is the most openly loving album I could make - a series of fun pieces I created with no major editing on my faithful mellotron-guitar-Cocoquantus set-up. I love the flow I feel in this set-up and the noise and randomness the Cocoquantus brings into play. It really reflects how I feel in my life and music with its acceptance of whatever comes in, no matter how much it distorts, grains, strains and bursts through the order of things. That is a great reflection on life and as I reach the later end of my forties is finally how I feel in terms of accepting myself and everything around me.
Extreme acceptance is the key that has unlocked a weathered tiredness I've carried for so long behind the smile, and made me more comfortable in my own skin as a result. In that frame, no love is wasted and no amount of giving and receiving can lead to inherent regret for it is what it is, and that is all. And so nothing is wasted, be it sadness, anger, fear, or indeed, happiness, for each is a part of love and life.