I basically stopped writing here in September right after I jumped into the World of my band full time. Since then it has been every single day in this mess of the glorious struggle to carve a place of ourselves in the world of music. I guess i'm so inside it now that I don't know how to possibly relate it to the world. The other feeling is that writing about it is kind of betraying this world that I now live in non-stop, telling its secrets, exposing its struggles and triumphs.

Or maybe I feel like I should no longer be the one writing directly about it. There was a girl here for dinner the other night who is writing an article about us. Let her spread the legend.

The reality of our situation is that we are a group of people thrown together in our common desire to travel with music, brining with us all of our humour, talents and intelligence but also all of our neurotic tendancies, insecurities, flaws and anti-social tendencies.

There's no choice other than to grow in a situation like this.

But as for the stories. Nothing I want to write here right now.

Google translation of an article written in Romanian, I'm offering this without comment, cause I think it speaks for itself. -Erik:

"Worldly Savages: FOLK PUNK ENERGY contagious with Ethno Music spiciness." Broadly. In short: Music. Hopping. Freedom. They were born in 2008 in Serbia. Since then a (u) raised in Toronto and London, and maturity has come on the road, with every concert that I had around the world. With a musical style that is redefined with every concert, singing borderless, nomadic style with one thought: not to restrict never.

Now, have come to mature and Romania. My way. Thursday night. Clujana.

Red stairs, covered in marks, dust, all began to be lowered curious minutes after midnight. Foreign, 6 pairs of legs fast, they had to play barefoot, they let down when yet time gap between now and midnight. At 11:47 p.m. I lowered myself. Not just with two legs, but with a decision: do not forget! I entered the dance! A seemingly morning dance, if you skip count steps, but at night, if you managed to watch a language gaze. Steps that are arrhythmic because you look and feel and its looks. Close your eyes to feel among eyelids and eyelashes makeup: rhythm, resonance, 'soon I'm gonna move from the city and find my freedom! "Everyone dances to freedom. On stage, the bass, see bare feet, shod and talents would fetter. However, if it boots, put them curly hair, a Scottish accent and become a he, a Ben. After singing microphone. Sing in a soul that is released singing about total freedom. Behind him, the same red pants that were illegal in Tijuana bar in Belgrade. He is perhaps the most feral of wild wandered on. In the bulletin it simply says Erik. He also says Canadian now residing in Belgrade. The microphone has another appointment. When he gets tired before the calling too wild, Erik is changing so-called megaphone. Call breath intimidate him when the microphone. The result is a rhythm of clapping beat many pairs of hands that rise.

Behind accordion, comes from the eye, pull and flaps, pull well! Welcome! Before him, is a violin. And Ursula, the only daughter of,, singers savages ". She wearing a tight, colorful. Sing fingers, fingers that caress graceful but powerful violin strings. The Latin is worn with long hair, (a) caught and step lively. Long dress with leggings to keep up. It Ivo. His right arm, which replaced the leggings with a guitar, he says Britton. The audience tells him not to forget the way up magic, increased finger tips.

Every song has a story. Story that began it's the story continues. It's a story many stories that are regenerated every song. This is for all those who have no home-home. Now I understand! Paradoxically, you always home with you. A human snail.

Freedom dancing in circles ever wider, as the clock go through space for hours before. Before too. Through the crowd, eyes closed and steps crisper. And lively! People still knotted in their dance. A tie salt. Two jumping boots. A hat hangs up. I feel. They sing. Bisss.

Romania in one word for those of Wordly Savages ... That can not be! "Says Erik, looking at me with big eyes. I explained then that they already have feelings and memories of Romania, more. How many? As many as can be fulfilled in an opening of branches, fresh descended the stage. And his broad smile shows that enough. Back, waits a bunch of new friends and beer, that is, very cheap ". However, longer time. Until tomorrow, when the road will take them to Scotland.

How traveling? With a van. It's like a hippie van, says Ben, shoes on asphalt covered the early morning, before the club was left feral price that evening. ,, Maybe, with boots, we take the cases and uncertainty. You're free down (empty) on earth. "To be and that's just a thought."

England is a place on an island of North West Europe. I spent most of the last year on the South East of the North West of Europe, in a city called London. It's fucked. Island mentality totally. Separated from everything. The most outrageous thing is that they managed to create a whole part of one continent, called North America, which speaks their (this, my) language and lives on the rules established on that little Island on the fringes of Europe.

Perspective is like that. It's just a small fucking Island which managed to attain global dominance, which is pretty cool... And it's weird!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I lived there enough now though and now I'm again (like before) much happier living in South Eastern Europe, where the North Western bullshit does not apply in the same way. Everyone needs to explore the options that are there for their souls, but I just need something like fucking Belgrade to make me who I need to be. London was a step, but Belgrade keeps on proving to be step after step, but not everything. Life is complex, I don't know how to explain it.

For those of you who have only ever lived in one country, it's probably best if you stay that way to avoid confusion!!!

Sometimes I'm surprised that the meaningness of life is not pondered by the general populace of the earth on a more daily basis. Or maybe it is, as an undercurrent. What I mean is the general lack of any sort of connecting theme or meaning in life. We're all out there for our experience. Yet the ego doesn't allow us to ponder it in a real way because we're always trying to stay focused on our little goals to make it happen. Little successes and little failures, that's all we concern ourselves with. Our nations, our jobs, our whatever. Most people are too busy to look at the big picture.

But well, it's grim if you do. We're all here and we're all getting old, getting our satisfaction any way that we can. There's a wall there of the limits of what we can all feel and perceive and most of us take it for granted. Then there's those of us who see the wall, know what's beyond and resent it. Using booze or drugs or anything that can make us feel like the wall has windows. We who can go to that edge become the artists. Whether through substances or not.

We're in Belgrade, which is a good edge for me always. Where I can explore myself vis-a-vis infinity.

I saw my friend Nikola play a show yesterday drunk on 2L of wine. It was epic. Then at the end of the night police started raiding the club and he started to sing drunken insults at them. Amazing! These things can go two ways. The drunken singer can be your portal into another world so profound and slippery in a meaningful way, or he can be an example of too far gone. I've been on both sides. A girl in Poland was so inspired by one of the drunken ecstatic episodes of worldly savages that she got a tattoo of a peacock. This frightens me and intruiges me. I don't have any tattoos. For me they seem like a frivilous and overly commital way of trying to cling to meaning in life in a permanent way. Meaning for me is fleeting and thus it just doesn't work. I want to be able to change, put on different masks and not railroad myself into any one moment or mode of being. Yet the experiences I have as a singer are always tattooed on my soul. I can change the costume and move on any time however.

It's a long road ahead. Gotta keep booking shows. Gotta keep pushing it and oh yes, writing songs.

The music is my only escape from meaningless. Oh yes, i have worked different jobs, but they left me totally half empty. Music is the one that leaves me energized and willing to deal with the mess of humanity.

-Erik Mut

OKAY.

Well I'm at the airport.

After 10 nights in Toronto.... The place where I grew up!

It looks different now that I've lived in London for a year. I've spent my time trying to not let the city wind me up, trying not to get angry at this wannabe World City, wannabe cultural capital... My only excuse to not get angry at it is that I really don't have to live here and I don't.

With that being said, I had a nice time. (Hi Milica [g raf detail])

What always strikes me about this place is how rich it is. How the average person has money to throw around in a way that in Europe they just don't. Either they don't have that money or they don't throw it around. Different places different things.

Everything is so expensive here these days. This is the Switzerland of North America. The same level of cleanliness, the same level of cultural and lifestyle limitation in order to ensure that everybody gets the promised and prescribed 'good life'.

I got so fucking sick of everything here. This was the case since I hit puberty when my father took me to Vienna, Prague, Bratislava when I was 13.

Not only am I from the Switzerland of North America, I'm from one of the most affluent neighbourhoods.... Surrounded by money.

And indeed I managed to clean up a bit while I was here. Old clients of my computer business. Money money money. So easy. But that's not everything in life. I could make so much money if I decided to stay in Toronto. I've got the class, the intelligence and the practical skills to make it happen. But it won't satisfy my soul. Hence Worldly Savages, hence what I'm doing now.

I've told people over the past few years that I like the way Toronto is going, it's just not fast enough. Surely I will never feel the feeling that I feel in Belgrade that I do in Toronto... Impossible! Surely even what I experienced this year in London cannot be found in Toronto. Every city is different.

But all in all I'm glad I grew up here. But now is time for me to 'make it' in the old world, the regions that my grandparents left, that's where I need to be.

So Europe here I come again!!!!

If you had asked me 5 years ago where the last fucking place I wanted to live was, it was London. The reason I would have said would "It has everything I hate about Toronto amplified"

Well, I still feel that way after I've been living here for 1 year. This city is toxic. But I'm glad that I spent my year here.

A year and a half ago I decided to move here. Things with my Worldly Savages lineup in Toronto were starting to stagnate and I didn't want to cling to any of it, I wanted to move on and keep going on the journey. I decided I needed a music centre. I decided I needed it to be in Europe. I decided that I need place where I could get a visa to work legally quite easily. I decided that I wanted to see what London was all about.

So I came here.

Immediately upon arriving, the stress of the place overwhelmed me. I had visited before always on my way to Europe. I was always noticing the toxic tense atmosphere, but this time it was something I had to let within me and deal with it.

So I started on my journey. It was a rough start. There were good signs all the way, but it was a rough start. I didn't want to get a full time job (I thought I was allergic to them, still do). I did freelance computer repair work. The problem was there wasn't enough of it. I was subcontracting for 3 companies, but there wasn't enough work.

Finding band members took time. I found Ivo first. We resolved to make something happen. Then we tried a drummer, but he wasn't committed enough. We were just trying to figure out how the hell we could find a violin and accordion. 2 months of that. Not enough work, not enough band members.

Around the end of October, me and Ivo decided, we're doing this. We're booking a tour of Europe for April. We started working on it. Then by the end of November we found the people, Jonny, Yula & Seppi. We were ready to go! European booking confirmations were coming.

Then, I realized, after all the work to get the band together, I now had to find some way to stay in London financially. So I got this job doing IT support for a structural engineering firm. Yep, a boring office job, 37.5 hours a week. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaa the very thing I hated. I was to start January 3rd.

I took a quick trip to Canada at Christmas, which was emotionally rough, but now I see necessary to get me ready for what was to come.

I got back, partied for new years with Yula on a 3 day binge and then I started my job. It was hard to get used to.

The started playing live on Friday the 13th of January, Serbian New Year's eve in, YEP, Belgrade, Serbia. It was after only 8 days of work. That weekend with my new bandmates in Belgrade was so amazing, two gigs surrounded by great people. After the second gig we went straight to the airport and flew back to London. When I saw the British passport control I started crying at the fact I wasn't in Serbia and I had to go to the job the next day. It was horrible.

And so we powered on. Playing gigs almost every weekend in the UK. Britton Vincent arrived in March for 6 weeks. Taking 3 weeks in April off of work to do a playing every day tour of Europe. Things grew in a wonderful way. Still that part of me though knew that this lifestyle was ultra temporary. I wanted to live in Belgrade and I wanted to do it with this lineup. So I started pitching that idea. It worked.

SO now we're taking a short break, before coming back to London to practice for 3 days then play a gig, then traveling all over Europe to end up in Belgrade and spread out and make an album. It's great.

I'm sitting here right now. It's the last day of my job. I'm done in 2 hours.

I'm going back to Toronto tomorrow for 10 days, my friend John Hall, who I have known since I was 4 months old is getting married and I have to be there.

It's all going to be great. I'm building my ideal life, one step at a time.

All I know is I have to get away from London now. This was great, but it took as much from me as it gave me. Mission successful for sure. But this city is not a place where my soul can breathe for an extended time. It's stressful just being here.

But thank you London. See you soon, but only for visits.

There's something about being about to embark on a big change in my life that makes me feel really kind of fragile and slightly sorrowful.

In 2008 when I decided not to live in Toronto anymore and that I would sell all my stuff, I remember the feeling of my life collapsing in on itself. Liberating yet scary. Something about those last few days you spend living in your place when you know a big change is about to come and you know that things are never going to be the same ever again. It's kind of sad. I remember that time, the day of the evening I was supposed to get on a plane to Vienna I smoked some DMT and that was like a giant mental reboot and after that I was purely ready to go. A nice 10 minute psychadelic tune-up.

What a connection in life that was to catch. The serbianization of me.

Last year, I was in Toronto, had been there for 4 months and decided again that the city was not doing what I needed for my music career, was leaving band mates and everything. That was hard too. I remember sitting in my parents house (they were out of town) and listening to some really sad bosnian sevdah music. Drinking rakija , so excited dreaming of what moving to London would bring me. It had this same sort of feeling. Pure sorrow, excitement, longing for the life!

It's something to do with the combination of your acquired fondness for the life that you've built yourself in a place, the sadness of leaving it, the frustration with not being able to have everything you want your life, the resolve that you have made the choices and the plans to change your life and the anticipation for the life that lies ahead of you on the road.

Now here I am more than one year later, life in London is collapsing for me now. My room is being rented out. Someone else is working my job and I have one day left at work and I know that my brief affair with London as a full time place to live was very successful although short and it really has lead to this next thing.

It's kind of sad still. But so exciting.

The show on Saturday in Exeter at the old Firehouse was really fun! One of our best. I felt like I was throwing myself into the show with abandon, but with such a knowing and warm charisma that I was just drenching the whole room with my self directed celebration of the strangeness of my being. The whole exercise of being a singer is one of great narcissistic value and I freely admit to that. In the end my music is a celbration of my own humanity and on nights when it really works and touches people, theirs too.

I've sacrificed almost every stability I ever had in my life so that I can do this. It's not easy. But the nostalgia I feel for the future makes it all seem worth it.

It's just days like this it's really hard not to cry about it all, just like I cried in January when I saw the British Passport control after the weekend in Belgrade which initiated the new lineup.

Eastern Europe, Western Europe, North America bam bam bam. Mix it all up and you've got characters like me. I feel like I didn't really have a choice in the matter, my genetics and upbringing kind of forced me towards becoming this monster that I am, at home nowhere taking aspects of each. I'd like to think I'm taking the best of each and putting it all together, but it's probably just as likely that I'm taking the worst parts, if you know what I mean.

All I want to do is create a unique cultural melange and make music about it.

Somehow I feel grateful that growing up in Canada gave me such a blank slate that I could do that, because if you're from a place with more of a full on culture, it's hard to find room for it, but Canada, no, you can find room for maintaining whatever culture you want, the problem is always keeping it fresh. You see, Toronto, where people grow up, people go there to settle, they don't just go in and go out like people do in London.... They go there to forget the old world, forget the history, forget the complicated stuff of the old world culture and live a simple, rational, convenient life.

I'm thankful that I was raised in a way that could never forget that. By grandparents who grew up in a city with three languages and are relics of an empire with a rich history of binding together multiple cultures. Being raised in that mentality, being taken by my father to Austria, Czech Republic and Slovakia when I was a kid and being told "These are our homelands"... Plural... Great...

Fortunate enough to inherit that cultural schizophrenia I've taken it to a whole new level. I am at home nowhere. It's all just fragments of belonging. No where can do it. Either this will destroy me or it will propel me to do something uniquely nomadic. So far it's a bit of both.

So the Worldly Savages, a musical chronicle of the aristopeasant mentality that wants to be refined and cosmopolitan at the same time being simple, primal and immediate.... It's disgusting and endearing.

And fuck you and fuck your culture, you are a lousy little slave to your boxed in mentality, you have no idea how small and narrow your cultural mentality is. You think you know everything, but you only know everything from one lens. You are a slave. Slave to culture. Can it be so? Can you accept that? Ok so let's party.

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. You need money. you gotta do what you gotta do to make it. Good for you.

But for those of us who dare to find a different way to be able to play that game and along the way find some method of scraping by at the same time as seeing the world, it looks different.

For all of us with mixed blood and contrast in their heritage and upbringing, we're the ones who feel that banging dissatisfaction which never relents, which pushes us to create.

This is my creation. I keep on developing it. I’m gonna keep on going! You can’t stop me. I fucked myself in the head so well that I will just keep going.



JUST GET ME BACK TO BELGRADE. I MISS THOSE PEOPLE. THEY'RE FUCKED LIKE I'M FUCKED.

Okay... Things are starting to shift and this term in London is coming to an end and I'm being launched into the new era of Erik in Belgrade with his band, touring as much as possible. It's exciting.

London has done good things for me. Really good things, I love it. It's also been miserable, stressful and made me a bit more of a cynical asshole, I must admit. But in the end, I think I will look back on this experience in this city as an important part of the journey.

To do the sort of thing that I'm doing, I have to go outside of my comfort zone, just like I did moving to Belgrade, the same was coming here, especially the experience of getting a full time job. I hate this lifesyle of working Monday to Friday all day........... It's not for me. A version of it is, and the discipline of it is for me, but the idea of having a job like this for more time than I have this year (8.5 months) is frightening. It's only all the wonderful stuff that's been happening in the band that keeps me going.

My advice to anyone who wants to do something with music, come to a place like London and whatever you have to do to scrape by. Just don't stop. The process will strengthen you and prepare you for the seriousness with which you need to take your artistic pursuits. After all I've been here, what I want is now clearly in focus and I'm ready to just go with it.

I've got a team of people who also share the vision and I have no doubt that we will work together and make it happen. There's no other way.

Belgrade will look different after this, rather than a place where I go to drink, fuck and talk bullshit, it will be a place where my dream will start to grow. Okay, well it has always been that sort of place, but this time it will be more so... Cause I'm closer to living the dream now!

On the recommendation of Bob Lefsetz in his newsletter, I listened to the interview with American talk show host Jay Leno on this site: http://www.jaymohr.com/mohr-stories.php

I'm not a huge fan of Jay Leno and his style of humour, but I found this interview completely fascinating, especially where he talked about what he went to in his quest to be a star........... most notably being homeless in LA, getting arrested for vagrancy, etc.

You look at a guy like him and it's hard to know what he went through to get where he is, but if you listen to this, you'll see. There is no easy path to become someone like that. It takes time and effort.

It just proves that those who do actually succeed in a business as tough as entertainment tend to be the ones who just have such an unstoppable quest for success that they are willing to do whatever it takes (even sleeping in alley ways) in a single minded quest to attain their goals.

It's inspiring. Really inspiring.