I listened to some of my old songs last week. They were pretty good.

Between the ages of 19 and 23 I recorded and produced five albums – three on my own, two with my cousin Alex – as well as working on a further album’s worth of material with my band, Silent Alliance. The production is bad, the singing is often suspect, and there are innumerable mistakes and ill-judged mixing decisions, but in general I feel this music has stood the test of time.

My goal was to try and make the sort of music that I would want to listen to. This sounds obvious, but there seem to be a huge number of artists out there that can’t bear to listen to their own stuff. I always found that incomprehensible. I enjoyed hearing my recordings because it was the sort of music that a person with my musical tastes ought to enjoy hearing. It still is. And it came so easily to me. Every spare moment would be spent with Alex’s digital 8-track. Songs would be dreamed up, fully realised and recorded in the space of hours – some of the best things I’ve ever written arrived that way.

Since that fruitful period came to an end, I have recorded and co-produced two Silent Alliance albums – 19 songs in total, some of which I don’t like. I have a smallish backlog of unreleased or unrecorded material, most of it developed almost a decade ago. My last true burst of songwriting creativity occurred in 2013; to date, just one of those tracks has made it out into the world. I haven’t penned, let alone recorded, a new song in at least two years, and the only remotely creative endeavour I’ve embarked on recently has been an acoustic reworking of Aqua’s ‘Dr Jones’, which is not necessarily something the world will ever need to hear.

So where did my creativity go?

I was once a prolific songwriter. Today I am a far more competent musician, a better singer, a more educated producer and a more thoughtful and worldly musical connoisseur (or at least, that’s what I tell myself). But any inclination towards songwriting appears to have deserted me.

Could it be that my comparatively ‘settled’ status in life has contributed to my creative decline? Possibly, except that I went through a total life/health/career collapse five years ago, without a doubt the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and that didn’t help to rekindle my powers. There’s still a tempest in my head – there always has been – but it doesn’t produce songs anymore.

In the early days of Silent Alliance, Philip (singer) and myself were eagerly awaiting our late 20s, on the assumption that this is when we would produce our best work. We aspired to follow in the footsteps of U2, Depeche Mode, New Order, The Cure and countless other examples of bands who reached their creative peak between ages 28-32. We called our first album ‘The Spirit of an Age to Come’ in part due to our colossal confidence about what lay ahead for the band. And yet, when we arrived in the Promised Land, we could not deliver. Our sophomore effort took almost five years to make and spanned the entirety of what we had assumed would be our ‘golden era’ of creativity.

I never thought that I would be the sort of talent that peaks early – perhaps no one does, because it would be an unbearable realisation to have to come to terms with so early in one’s musical career. But listening back to those early recordings and retracing the pathway of my creativity, it’s clear that this is when the real creative burst was. It’s not just about songwriting. I may be a better guitarist now, but the parts I came up with were better back then.

Where did my creativity go? And will it ever come back?

Maybe the answer, at least in part, lies in the fact that right now I’m writing these words, rather than singing those songs.