Earlier this year, Matt Warnock ran a series of live sessions he called a camp. The subject was the art of listening — specifically, the art of listening to jazz. It was a timely reminder that listening is not a passive act. It is something you develop, something you practice, something you can get better at.

I’ve been thinking about that ever since.

This morning I was working away on guitar in my room. The window was open. A chaffinch was singing in the garden, doing what chaffinches do, completely indifferent to what I was playing. Then for a moment, just a moment, it fitted perfectly. The bird’s phrase landed in a gap I hadn’t even noticed I’d left. It was one of those small, unrepeatable moments that stop you mid-phrase. It was perfect. Couldn’t have been more perfect.

My first instinct was to reach for a recorder. Capture it. Use it somehow.

Then I thought: use it for what, exactly? The moment was already gone. What made it perfect was precisely that it wasn’t arranged. The chaffinch wasn’t listening to me. I wasn’t listening for the chaffinch. We just happened to be in the same space at the same time, and something clicked.

That’s not something you can manufacture.

I’ve been turning this over in relation to how I work more broadly. I don’t catalogue my musical ideas. I don’t file licks under headings for later retrieval. I record a lot, and I drop material from one session into another — not systematically, but instinctively, the way a tape machine used to bleed ghost tracks through from previous sessions if you looked for a clean track on a well-used reel. The surprise encounter is part of the point. You can’t predict where something will fit, and the attempt to control that tends to kill the very quality you were trying to preserve.

Listening, real listening, might work the same way. Not hunting for something specific, but remaining open enough that what’s there can reach you.

The chaffinch didn’t study jazz. It didn’t attend a camp on the art of listening. It simply sang into the available space, without hesitation, without agenda.

I suspect it has something to do with the quality of attention you bring to a moment, rather than what you bring to it technically. Less acquisition, more presence.

The window is still open. The garden is quiet now.

But I’m listening differently than I was this morning.