Running, planning, running
A new icon and some new words to live by
There’s a song I can’t stop playing at the moment.
It usually is this way — the lines of a chorus will hit and I won’t be able to stop listening to them on repeat until it’s so familiar to me that the whole song starts to either sound like shit, or otherworldly, like when you say your own name too many times and it takes on a whole other meaning.
It’s Running/Planning by CMAT.
CMAT (short for Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson) is a 29-year-old Irish country icon who professedly makes music for the “gays and the girls” and has made waves recently following her acclaimed Glastonbury set, where she got five-star reviews from basically everyone, which is, as you can imagine, almost unheard of.
I was reading about this on DJ and author Annie Macmanus’ Substack post on the festival, where she describes this overwhelming heartswell of a feeling, standing in the crowd and watching CMAT perform (Here’s a great video of her leading thousands of people in a two-step at Pyramid Stage). Then I heard NTS Morning host
(this episode of Digging with CMAT is great, too) play her during her show this week, after saying she cried when she heard this song live.I put it on my headphones immediately, straight after getting turned down for something I thought I wanted, consumed with a feeling like I wanted to scream into a very large canyon. The lyrics were exactly what I wanted to be saying, and exactly how I knew I needed to move on from that moment of disappointment:
I keep on running, planning
Running, planning, oh yeah
I keep on running, planning
Running, planning, oh yeah
I keep on running, planning
Running, planning, oh yeah
I keep on running, planning, yeah
CMAT had slipped below my radar after I’d seen her play at Kelorama Festival here in Lisbon a couple of years ago. It was my second night in the city after moving from New Zealand, and even though I was overwhelmed and on my own, I wanted to go out and feel part of the place I’d just transplanted myself into. I wanted to feel the opposite of how I was feeling back home, which was alive. So I waited for the repairman to finish fake-fixing the washing machine in my apartment, put on a short dress, wrote my address on a piece of paper in case my phone died, and walked across the highway to the park where she was playing.
I remember sitting on the hill in 35 degrees, in awe of the way this woman commanded the audience with an energy I’d never seen before. She was loud, and brash, and funny, and unrelenting, and honest. And whether you’re into folk music or not, or too cool for songs titled Take A Sexy Picture Of Me or The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station (adore) is so beside the point.
The point is that this woman had the lust for life I was chasing — the feeling we all want to feel — and all I wanted was to swallow those songs so they would live inside of me and materialise back out into my life when I needed them.
“She’s the only artist I’ve ever witnessed lead sixty thousand people in a choreographed line dance, do a synchronised stripper twirl with her ma and throw herself into the crowd in one gig. She is a fucking STAR.” -
The song details the anxieties of a woman pressing up against the pressure to live a linear life path, battling imposter syndrome, and struggling to maintain a sense of self within relationships. In her Under The Radar interview, she describes Running/Planning as “having to chase your own tail to be good enough to exist.” It’s angry and sharp and reminds me a bit of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill, which broke the record for the longest gap between Number 1 singles by an artist in UK chart history—37 years.
What is it about the five words of this chorus that strike so close to the bone? (I say chorus, because the verses are great, but very UK-centric. And it’s funny as an Antipodean writer, you’re always asked to strip out your references to home that no one understands, yet I often find it’s these specificities that make me connect more with an artist, even when I can’t precisely place them).
They’re such an opposite energy to our current state of nonchalance and malaise, of swiping, and clicking, and leaving a spoon on the spacebar so our boss thinks we’re still active on Slack.
The song is like, I’ve had a think about this, and I’m digging the fuck in, I'm going to do the big hard thing, I’m going to keep going. It says, I’ve got this idea, this thing I really wanna do. Let me see where it takes me, I have this feeling I have to believe in it. It says, I don’t care about the stakes. I’m tired of having to do this, but I’m going to fucking try anyway.
Of all the interviews I read by people I admire, artists, musicians, writers, women in general, it’s this level of defiance that elevates them in what they do. Their success is not really the point. It’s that they’re definitely doing what they’re trying to do, and unapologetically so. They know the cost of things. They know the stakes. They know the world’s on fire and they’re doing it anyway.
When people find out I’m from New Zealand and living in Portugal (and I mean this in the most non-self-referential way possible), they often ask, What are you running away from? But I always think it’s more, what are you running towards? It’s this feeling of being alive and constantly making it work, and being fucked off when normie trajectories of what success should be for you get in the way, and you have to cast them aside and make your own fucking plan.
This is a calming thought. Just making a plan. Making the smallest plan possible for the next step ahead of you. The next part of the story that changes what might happen next. Find something that can give you this level of defiance.
Wishes,
Bel
Xo
PS! This is my current song of the summer - another amazing female musician who I saw play in Albania and was bewitched by. Would j’adore to hear yours <3
I teared up reading this! It is exactly how this song has made me feel.