Charlbury singer-songwriter Jess Goyder lifts the lid on why she can’t stop working

If you’re tenacious enough, if you’re really dedicated and keep at it, you never know, one day you might just make it. Rubbish to that, I say. That’s not the reason I ‘keep at it’.

Making ‘it’ and getting ‘there’ aren’t the reason I do what I do and you might not want them to be the reasons why you do whatever it is that calls you either.

There are many reasons why since writing and performing my first song about the residents of a care home for a Christmas concert age 14, I haven’t really been able to stop. And while reasons don’t really matter (and might not particularly interest you) I’m going to throw a few out there.

I do what I do because it’s the strongest compulsion of my soul. It feels as if this is one of the main reasons why I’m here, where I am most being in my doing. It’s the feeling I get when singing and playing, a sense of presence and flow, of something beyond me coming through me. It’s that feeling in rehearsal when I’m locking in with my drummer, the bleary vocal warm up in the shower and lugging a red keyboard that might be twice my bodyweight into a Ford KA and driving off again. And again, and again.

It’s having another job and watching the orchestra parts write themselves while I’m doing it. It’s a captive audience. It’s the collaborators, the musicians like Emma Butterworth who stick with me. It’s that stranger making contact because my music has touched them. It’s those people growing in number. It has very little to do with me at all. It's you, for being bothered or interested enough to read this. It’s the love of it.

It burns.

And it’s not as if I don’t have wild dreams of gospel choirs, full string sections and stadiums, shaking up the world with love and magic, the word ‘multi-platinum’, a break from continually stretching minimal resources. They are visions I delight in and shoot for. I’ve arrived at never arriving. I’ve arrived at striving for a perfection that’s not of this earth.

I still slip up when I’m too distracted by the destination, or other people’s destinations that by rights will never truly be my own. My music career has been described as the ‘slowest burn’. It is (as is a lot about me) and today, for the countless time, I re-sacked myself as my manager.

I’m nothing exceptional, there are zillions of us. But I know I’m lucky. And I just want to put one thing straight: it’s never because one day I might make it.

It’s because it burns.

Jess plays Kensington Roof Gardens, Saturday, October 25. For tickets, visit ticketweb.co.uk
Visit jessgoyder.bandcamp.com/album/jess-goyder and jessgoyder.com