As some of this blog’s followers will know – especially those that follow my other blog – I have two careers: one in academia, and one in music writing. The two don’t often intersect, and that’s partly because I try to keep them separate. Having a Ph.D. and being a university professor doesn’t mean a lot in the music writing world, and being a music writer doesn’t mean a lot in the academic world. There might be some overlap if my degree was in a subject related to music, but although my area of study is very useful in helping me to understand how the music industry works, it’s not explicitly music-related.

This week marks the anniversary of the day I defended my doctoral dissertation – March 17, 1995. The defense comes after you’ve written your dissertation, which is an original piece of research, and your academic supervisor (supervisors, in my case) have signed off on it. You verbally present your research and your findings to a panel of professors, including an external assessor from another university. The panel members ask you questions about what you’ve done, and then you wait outside the room while the panel decides whether you’ve passed.

The defense is extremely nerve-wracking – you’re defending several years’ worth of work to a panel that has the power to say “no, not good enough, go back and try again”. However, I was exceptionally nervous about my defense. At an earlier step in my doctoral program, the progress of my dissertation was suddenly derailed because of interpersonal conflict among faculty members in my department. The  faculty members who caused the conflict were no longer involved with evaluating my work, but I was paranoid that something disastrous and unexpected was going to happen again.

To make things even more surreal, I was also in the second year of a contract as an assistant professor at a university that expected me to complete my Ph.D to be reappointed. However, I had been informed a few months earlier that my contract would not be renewed – a decision that was made because of internal department politics, and also a decision that I was appealing to the university administration. So I was in the very unusual situation of finishing a qualification for a job that, in a few months, I would no longer have.

What got me through this process was listening to a song: World Party’s Ship of Fools. Sometimes  a song just hits you hard at a specific place and time, and Ship of Fools was that for me.  I was what is now called a first-generation Ph.D. (no one else in my family has that degree), and a lot of the time studying for a Ph.D. felt very much like “setting sail to a place on the map from which no one has ever returned”.  I had already seen “using all the good people for your galley slaves” – as in, fellow students being treated unfairly, and people taking credit for other people’s work and ideas – and plenty of “avarice and greed” in the very hierarchical and competitive academic world.

Ship of Fools spoke to me, especially the night before I defended my dissertation. The chorus of “save me, save me from tomorrow/I don’t want to sail with this ship of fools” made me realize that this world I was about to formally enter was not okay in a lot of ways. But the song also told me that it was okay to be aware of the dangers, to name them and call them out when they appeared, and to be apprehensive about going into the unknown.

I don’t doubt that Karl Wallinger was thinking of other situations when he wrote Ship of Fools, but that song made a huge difference to me. So, near the anniversary of the day when I passed my dissertation defense and became a Ph.D., I was very, very sad to hear that Karl Wallinger had passed away. I’m very thankful that I got to see World Party live (in 2015 at the lovely Triple Door in Seattle) and I’m grateful that Ship of Fools found me when I needed to hear it. Sail on, Karl.