The origin of the name Art Schop

The simple explanation is that I’ve written a song about Arthur Schopenhauer. He was one of my favourite authors, I was reading a lot of this work at the time, and it just occurred to me to abbreviate his name, use it as my artist name and it would be appropriate to what I was doing at the time.

The more extensive explanation is that I was in the studio at the time, I was working on my first studio album under my own name, Martin Walker.

So I started writing songs and recording songs and applying some new ideas I was learning and just kind of making it my own way. And one of the songs I wrote was one which started with a really simple chord progression, just 3 chords. I thought:

Okay, that’s kinda cool, what am I going to sing?

And the line came:

”Wasn't always like this, and God would come down and bestow us his gifts or deprive us of life with the weight of his hand”.

I was like okay, that’s something, I didn’t really know where it came from, I didn’t really know where it was going, the words kinda came from the subconscious. I wasn’t setting out to write this song, it wasn’t an idea I had in mind, it just came and it fit, and into it came the idea of this kind of melancholy of a certain age, of realizing that you're getting older, as people do. And I was reading about Schopenhauer, and something about the melancholy of his writing and of his life, and this kind of tension in between what the expectations are in us, and the expectations of life, community, and this strikes a pose with these desires and urges that we have king of lowed into the music.

I was writing quickly, and the song just came out, and there was Arthur Schopenhauer in the middle of it. And what I realized was that those songs and the way of writing were bigger than me. This wasn’t just about me, wasn’t songs directly about my experiences, wasn’t necessarily. Songs about weird stuff. Stuff that it hadn’t even occurred to me that you could write songs about and I just went with it.